Gardening
The fruits of our labor. We are deep in the tomato harvest. In fact, we've been picking and eating them for about a month now. It took so long for them to start ripening because of that cold and awful June we had. And then those green tomatoes just sat on the vine day after day, not turning. But finally, they did and now they are coming so fast that we can't eat them all and that means canning!
I've canned tomatoes in the past, but not my own homegrown ones. I'm hoping these come out well. I had to re-learn a few things like the necessity that the glass jar be piping hot already before you put the tomatoes in and put it in the boiling water. We lost a whole jar of tomatoes to that broken-glass lesson. But everything went smoothly afterward and now we have eight quarts of tomatoes put up.
I don't know if our plants have much more in them before the frost comes and the tomato blights catch up to them, but if they do we'll can those too. Of course, once we go apple picking, we're definitely putting up a whole bunch of applesauce this year too. Mmmm.
My last gardener’s notebook was over a month ago, but that’s mainly because there was nothing to report. We’ve just completed the coldest, wettest, darkest June ever and while everything is now green, there wasn’t much gardening to do in the dark and rain. In fact, I was getting worried that the tomatoes and peppers were getting too much watering. But not to worry. They’re going gangbusters now as you can see.
We still have most of the plants with us that we put into the ground. One or two died right off, but the rest are flourishing, including one tomato plant we put in a big container pot we had. The good news is that all of the tomatoes are sporting buds and a bunch already have small green tomatoes. Of the handful of jalapeño plants that survived, one so far has a big bud on it, but because of the rain and cold weather I think even the early-varieties are going to be quite late this year.
We’ve turned our attention now to weeding and trimming the plants. I’ve seen some advice sites which say that once the tomato plants are 3’ tall, you should trim all the branches from the bottom foot to put all the energy into the top fruit-growing branches. Meanwhile, despite the landscaping cover I put down under the soil of the beds, grass is managing to make its way up to the surface. However, I hope that means the tomato and pepper plants are getting their roots down past it. Now, I just have to teach Isabella that not all the small plants in the beds are weeds. She accidentally pulled up one of my pepper plants the other day, although it didn’t come all the way up and I’m hoping it will recover.
So for now, it’s weeding, watering, and waiting for the fruits of our labors to come in. I can’t wait. So any advice on how often I should water the plants now that’s it not raining every day?
Oops, it’s been nearly a month since my previous gardener’s notebook entry. So what’s happened since then? Well, I’ve nearly killed off all my plants and the rest are in the ground. But let me back up some.
The experts say you should harden off your plants before moving them outside by putting them out in the sun each day, but bringing them in at night. That seemed like it would be a hassle with 72 plants, but what the heck, in for a penny, in for a pound. And so one overcast, breezy day around the middle of May I moved most, but not all (thank God) all my plants outside. And when I’d come home that afternoon, they were nearly all dead! It wasn’t too cold that day but I guess the wind, as minimal as it was, just killed them. A few of the plants were salvageable and I brought them all in where they covered the dining room table.
Pots stacked for drying after being washed.
Happily, the most robust tomato plants were still in the house, on a bookshelf in the office, looking out the front window. For some reason they loved that spot and grew like crazy there. Spooked as I was by the disastrous hardening, I kept those plants inside and then waited, deciding only to bring them outside to transplant them.
The next step was to decide where exactly to place the garden boxes and what exactly to fill them with. I elected to move the boxes from where I’d originally placed them on one side of the backyard to the other because, as I saw the leaves come in on the trees, it seemed that what I thought was a good place was going to end up very shaded. Meanwhile, the other side, while shaded part of the day, got good morning and midday sun, only falling the shade in the mid-afternoon, when the sun would be the hottest in the summer. Over they went.
Now, as you may recall, I had started out following the philosophy found in the book “All New Square Foot Gardening”
Melanie ties the plants to stakes. Note the ersatz stake in the back left made from a driveway reflector.
In the end, I mixed together 6 cubic feet of topsoil, 2 cubic feet of vermiculite, 8 cubic feet of mulch, and 8 cubic feet of a manure/plant matter compost. It wasn’t too dense, but it had enough heft to give the plants something to hold onto. Underneath the boxes I put down some weed barrier, which blocks weeds from growing up through the soil, but doesn’t block air or moisture. (I was a bit saddened to think of that beautiful grass I was killing.) Then I laid out a big tarp and threw a third of each of the components into a pile in the middle. Using a combination of shoveling and rolling the tarp ends up, I gave it a good mix and then shoveled it into the first box. I then repeated for the other two boxes.
By this time, I was worn out and it had taken a lot longer than I’d expected. Melanie had been helping as much as a 8-month pregnant woman can, but I was hauling heavy bags back and forth, not to mention stopping to mow the lawn and spray insecticide on the ornamental bushes out front. (The rose bushes had been decimated by aphids already.) So I elected to put off the transplant yet another weekend.
Thus, this past Memorial Day weekend, we trooped outside with the remaining tomato plants as well as the pepper and tomato plants that had survived the “Great Hardening Disaster”. then a quick trip to Lowes for stakes to hold up the tomato plants (where I bought one too few somehow). And then we transplanted, with me shoving the stake in and digging the hole while Melanie planted them and tied them off. Isabella wanted to help, but I had to keep warding her off from digging in the boxes. For spacing, we put them somewhat closer than the square-foot gardening method would have us do, which would have meant only 4 tomato plants per box. Instead we put in 6 per box with room left over for 3 or 4 pepper plants each. In the end we had 17 tomato plants in the boxes, plus a couple week survivors in large container pots. (We also lost one in transplanting while another died soon after.)
It’s been a week now since we planted them, a week of rain and clouds and mild temperatures, down into the 50s at times. The plants look pretty sad at the moment, droopy and yellowish green. I’m hoping it’s the rain, cool temps, and lack of sun, but I’m afraid we might lose them all. That would be a bummer, having started off so well with 72 plants, but I went into this as a rank beginner with no expectations. I wasn’t sure a single seedling would make it into a bigger pot.
Meanwhile, I have some basil growing in a pot on the bookshelf next to a little cilantro. These seem to be doing well, so we’ve decided to start some indoor greens. We ordered seeds for kale, mustard greens, arugula, radishes, beets, purslane, and sorrel. We hope to harvest them as micro-greens so the radishes and beets don’t have to grow very big at all. These would be nice if we can sustain them.
(N.B. You’ll note I didn’t mention the six tomatillos. As expected these didn’t fare well. Only one scraggly plant is left, but I don’t know if it will last long.)
My sad-looking but still living plants.
So now we wait for the weather to turn decidedly warmer. We’ll water and weed and wait for the first tomato and pepper blossoms to appear. I note that many people I read about in the newspapers around here are just starting to put their gardens, although many I know just buy plants and transplant them. We have a little head start though. Will it mean early fruit or early heartbreak? Only time will tell.
Okay, so I meant to update my gardener’s journal more often than I did. On the other hand, nothing’s in the ground yet so I’m not too upset with myself. Here’s what’s happened since my last post in mid-March. When we last met, I had planted my seeds in the starter box and set them under the grow light. We’d chosen a mix of tomatoes, hot peppers, and tomatillos, 72 separate plants in all.
The seedlings popped quite promptly and by the end of March the tomatoes and tomatillos were 2- to 3-inches tall and the peppers were either still emerging from the soil or about an inch. It was about time to start transplanting the tomatoes into something with a little more room, but we encountered a problem. I could only find six-inch diameter pots at Home Depot, Lowe’s, and the local gardening center. And with 72 plants that’s a lot of pots. Nevertheless, we emptied the shelves of as many as we could find, bought some potting soil, and started transplanting.
That’s when we encountered our second obstacle: Where do we put all these pots? At 6-inches in diameter, 72 pots takes up a lot of space! More than our kitchen table can hold. We had two solutions. First, we cleared off the top of the bookcases in front of the window in the office and put as many as we could there, after first putting down a layer of wax paper to protect the surface. At two deep, we could fit exactly 18 pots perfectly. And back on the kitchen table we could fit 30 more pots under the grow lamp.
The second solution was to sacrifice some of the weaker plants. We’d already pruned out the extra seedlings in each module so that only one was growing, but with limited space we had to cull some more and thus the smallest of the plants of each type were pruned. I suppose the third option is to do nothing, which we did for some of the peppers, leaving them in the flats for a later transplant. Since hot peppers take so long to mature anyway, I didn’t think leaving them there for now would be a problem.
Now, at the beginning of May, I’m looking toward the next step, which is to actually plant these in a garden. I’ve consulted the charts and it looks like May 15 is a safe “last frost” date for our area and so that’s my target date for outside planting. I’ve already constructed my garden boxes. I bought 3 twelve-foot lengths of 2”x6”, cut them down into 4-foot lengths and then used decking screws to fasten the corners. I’ve also purchased weed-control matting to go underneath. Now, I’m buying my peat moss, vermiculite, compost, and top soil mix to fill them.
Then, into the ground the plants will go. I’m a little worried that strict adherence to spacing guidelines will mean I can only plant a maximum of 12. Maybe I’ll experiment and see if I can nudge them closer. So that’s where we stand as of the first weekend in May. Stay tuned.
Now that I finally have a yard to call my own, I can fulfill my dream of having a working vegetable garden. We had occasional gardens when I was a kid, elaborate affairs whose yields were mainly limited by the lack of attention to chores by us kids. But my true inspiration comes via my paternal grandfather, who was born in Sicily in the 1890s and worked as a professional fisherman until 1965 when he retired. He lived in Cambridge and his garden, about 30 foot by 20 foot, i.e. the entirety of the backyard, was the most prolific patch of dirt you’d ever seen. Every inch was exploding with tomatoes and cucumbers and squash and eggplant and Lord knows what else. When he died in 1976, my uncle Frank took over and maintained the garden until he couldn’t any longer.
So I would like to continue the tradition, although my plans are somewhat realistic. I’m going to start relatively small and expect to suffer setbacks as I learn my lessons the hard way. I also intend to keep a gardener’s journal here on the blog, recording what we’re doing and how it’s going and what I’ve learned. My successes and failures will be visible for all the world to see.
Among the resources I plan on using is the Learn2Grow site, which is geared to beginners and intermediate gardeners. I’m also going to become familiar with our local gardening center and try to get their advice. We’ve already purchased our seeds from Totally Tomato and I purchased a Burpee Growing System seed starting kit as well as a grow light.
The instruction on the seed packets say to start the tomato seeds 6-8 weeks before the last frost and the peppers 8-10 weeks before. And since the “safe date” for our area is May 15, that means that we planted the seeds today. I divided the 72-cell starter into 8 parts for each of the different kinds of seeds we got and we will hopefully have 9 plants per type. Here’s what we planted:
- Arkansas Traveler tomato (heirloom)
- Jetsonic tomato (hybrid)
- Yellow Pear tomato (heirloom)
- Cherry Grande tomato (hybrid)
- Volcano hot pepper
- Jalapa Hybrid hot pepper
- Early Jalapeño hot pepper
- Tomatillos
I chose a mix of heirloom and hybrid tomatoes, recognizing that heirloom tomatoes are reputed to be finicky growers. And like I said, I’m prepared to have to buy seedlings if my seeds don’t make it. Here’s my graph of how I planted the seeds in the starter tray.
Over the next eight weeks, I will begin to use the grow light until the seeds have reached the transplant stage. And then a couple of weeks before I intend to plant them, I will start hardening them, moving them outdoors for a couple of hours per day.
And then when it comes time to plant them outside, I will build a raised bed rather than worry about soil quality and drainage issues and having to till a chunk of my yard. This will be a fun experiment and I look forward to partaking literally of the fruits of my labor this summer if all goes well.
Note 1: I’ve also planted basil and cilantro in kitchen window pots. Those seedlings have sprouted, which is a good sign. I hope to keep them going year-round.
Note 2: I think that “All New Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew will also provide some good information and guidance.
