Category: Gardening

To Every Thing There Is a Season

 

People enjoy their home grown tomatoes so much more than store bought that they try to extend the growing season and stretch out the harvest. The primary limiting factor is the weather, and secondarily the genetics of tomato varieties. Tomato plants prefer temperatures between 55 and 95 degrees, and in most of the continental United States that means they do their best between June and September. Summer is their season. Genetically, full-sized tomato plants, as opposed to dwarf or cherry tomato varieties, fall into two groups – determinate or indeterminate. Determinate plants grow to a certain point, set fruit, and then are done for the season. Indeterminate plants continue growing and setting fruit throughout the season.

 

There are conditions and variables to all these factors, and they play an important part in seeing that, hard as a gardener may try, most of their tomatoes will ripen over a shorter period than plant information tags would have them believe. Plant tags give maturation dates for the tomato varieties they describe. They are only rough guides, not to be taken at face value! Too many gardeners believe the tags and think that by planting tomato varieties with as wide a spread of maturation dates as possible they will be ensured a lengthy harvest season. Not necessarily! The weather plays the biggest part in dictating when you will get ripe tomatoes and over how long a period. The next most important factor is whether the plant is determinate or indeterminate, since determinate varieties will almost always be the first to fruit and the first to stop bearing. The maturation date on the plant tag is the least reliable factor and is nearly useless.

 

Lufa Farms Strawberry Tomatoes
Strawberry tomatoes at Lufa Farms, the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouses, in the Montreal, Canada, neighborhood of Ahuntsic-Cartierville; photo by Benoit Rochon.

Some gardeners think that by staggering the planting dates of their tomato plants they will stagger the harvest dates as well. Not necessarily! Again, the weather is the most important factor in how quickly or slowly your tomato plants grow. Plants started later in the spring will often catch up to ones planted earlier. Plants started too early in the spring will often sit there and do nothing until the weather warms up. You can’t fool Mother Nature!

The best way to lengthen the growing season, and therefore the harvest, is to make use of either a cold frame or a greenhouse, or both. Of the two, a greenhouse is the better option because it is ultimately more useful. A cold frame is useful mainly for starting plants, though it can also be used for low-growing vegetables and fruits like lettuce and strawberries. A greenhouse should be tall enough for fully grown tomato plants, even when they are in raised beds. A greenhouse is not a hothouse. A hothouse is, of course, heated. That would be stepping up another level in expense and trouble, which for a home gardener with a ten by twelve foot greenhouse would make every tomato unnecessarily expensive. No, a simple and inexpensive home greenhouse is primarily useful for extending the growing season from summer into spring at the front end, and autumn at the back end.

Roger Cook of This Old House helped this Mississippi homeowner build an inexpensive backyard greenhouse. At the end, Mr. Cook tells the homeowner he should be able to grow vegetables year round in the greenhouse. Since the greenhouse will be unheated, year round use would be possible in Mississippi, most of which is in winter hardiness zone 8a. Use in your location may be limited to three seasons.

There are home greenhouse kits on the market, and a gardener could spend over 1,000 dollars for a nicely appointed one. The very cheap ones are not worth even their low price, and will cause you more trouble than they’re worth. The greenhouse depicted in the This Old House video here is a solid, utilitarian model that should cost less than 500 dollars. It won’t win any awards for looks, but that would probably present an obstacle only for homeowners association members. One suggestion to improve upon the construction method in the video would involve using weather stripping or batting between the plastic and the staples to distribute the force of the plastic against the staples, reducing the chances of the plastic tearing loose in the wind. 1/2 inch staples would hold everything well, and to reduce frustration a quality staple gun is a must. As with a tarpaulin or any other lightweight material used outdoors, the plastic needs to be stretched tight to lessen its movement in the wind. After all that work and expense, you can look forward to a longer tomato harvest season, and to tomatoes that don’t cost a small fortune. You may even save a few dollars over the long haul, though it might be a stretch to say you could pay off your mortgage early, the way Radiator Charlie of West Virginia did with his ‘Mortgage Lifter’ tomatoes back in the 1940s.
― Izzy

 

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You Are What You Eat

 

The garden catalog dreambooks are starting to arrive in the mailboxes of home gardeners as 2016 ends and 2017 begins. Those gardeners who have ordered from online companies in the past and haven’t unsubscribed from their email list are receiving notices in their inboxes. Winter is the time to sit indoors in warmth and comfort and look over the seeds and plants on offer, either by scrolling through websites or paging through catalogs.

 

Some garden suppliers tout their seeds as being “not GE” or “non-GMO,” by which they mean the seeds are not Genetically Engineered or produced from Genetically Modified Organisms. Of course they’re not, since those kinds of seeds are available only to commercial growers, not to home gardeners. A different, though somewhat related, concern some gardeners have is whether the money they are spending on seeds will ultimately line the pockets of Monsanto and a few other large agribusinesses because those companies hold the patents on thousands of seed varieties.

PLANT A VICTORY GARDEN. OUR FOOD IS FIGHTING - NARA - 513818
World War II poster from the
Office for Emergency Management

Home gardeners can allay their concerns on both counts by doing a little research on their suppliers. The GMO concern is easier to dismiss than the one regarding the ultimate source of the seed. The best thing is to rely on suppliers of heirloom varieties or on open source suppliers who create and share new varieties without taking out a patent.

Deposit Seed Co Victory Garden Catalog 1944 - Flickr - USDAgov
Deposit Seed Co. Victory Garden Catalog 1944;
poster from the USDA National Agricultural Library

A much larger concern for everyone, gardeners and non-gardeners alike, is the prevalence of GMO foods in supermarkets and restaurants. Gardeners at least can sidestep that by growing as much of their own food as possible. Everyone else needs to watch what they buy in the stores, and that is where labels stating “not GE” or “non-GMO” are most helpful since agribusiness has successfully fought off attempts to label some foods as “GE” or “GMO.” Agribusiness executives apparently believe, not without reason, that as the general public becomes better informed about these products it might come to view such labels with the same alarm as a skull and crossbones. Not good for business.

 

To cite the most prominent example of GMO products, there are the Roundup Ready crops of corn, soybeans, and cotton, which today constitute upwards of 90% of the supply grown in the United States. No one eats cotton, though as Joseph Heller portrayed with the character of the amoral capitalist, Milo Minderbinder, in his marvelous satirical novel Catch-22, it is not too farfetched to think of someone like that trying to convince people to eat cotton if he senses a profit in it. For the corn and soybeans that we do eat, and in prodigious amounts if we eat a lot of processed foods, where they are ubiquitous, the federal government has mandated supposedly safe levels of Roundup. Frankenfoods, indeed.


Lastly, gardeners who care about the fertility of their soil as well as their own health and the health and vitality of the plants they grow for food would do well to avoid using herbicides in their home garden. No matter what, there will always be weeds wherever gardeners and farmers cultivate fertile conditions for favored plants. Scientists have not yet discovered any weeds growing in the sterility of the Moon.
– Izzy

 

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Careful with that Axe (at last)

There is no time of year when you absolutely should not prune trees and shrubs, particularly when it comes to pruning for the safety of people and property or for the health of the plant. There are better and worse times, however, to paraphrase Charles Dickens from the beginning of “A Tale of Two Cities.”

BLM Botany 03 (6871307185)
Photo by Flickr user Albert Herring

Late summer and early fall is the worst time to prune, and late winter and early spring is the best time. The reason for leaving trees and shrubs alone from August through October (the timing changes depending on the first frost date where you live) is that during frost-free weather pruning encourages new growth, yet the first frost is not far off. If the plant puts out tender new growth at this time of year, a frost may damage or kill the new growth, wasting the the energy the plant just put into top growth at a time when it should be drawing its energy toward its roots in preparation for winter dormancy.

For most trees and shrubs, February through April is the best time for pruning because the plant is dormant, yet it will break dormancy soon and the flush of energy to its top growth will help heal the pruning cuts and cover them. There are exceptions to this rule, and a maple tree is one. Any maple tree produces copious sap in late winter and early spring, not just the sugar maple from which we derive maple syrup. Wounding – and yes, a pruning cut can amount to just that – a maple at that time of year results in excessive bleeding of sap, weakening it. It is better to prune a maple in the summer, when the sap does not run as freely.

Proper pruning technique is necessary in allowing a tree or shrub to to heal a cut. Do not leave stubs! A plant cannot close over a stub, and the stub eventually dies yet remains on the living plant for an inordinate time. The stub then becomes a route for insects and fungi to the interior of the plant. Pruning to the branch collar on trees and to a bud on shrubs allows the plant to seal a cut much sooner, diminishing the opportunity for pests to infest live wood.

Boston Public Garden, Massachusetts (493480) (10791064435)
Boston Public Garden, Massachusetts; photo by Flickr user Robert Linsdell.

Shearing is a form of pruning that makes cuts willy-nilly as far as the plant is concerned, but which to people presents the plant at a uniform shape and size, the effect of which is a matter of personal taste and opinion. At no time is shearing a boon to a plant’s health, though some plants, such as boxwood and privet, are better able to tolerate it than others. The cumulative effects of this detrimental practice are evident after several years as the plant ends up with leaves growing on its outer shell only and no leaves growing inside of that, and the outer shell becomes stiff as the branches thicken. The interior clogs over time with leaves and twigs falling from the shears, allowing fungus to grow and eventually degrade the bark. The remedy for shearing is patience to make pruning cuts by hand in the proper place as far as the plant is concerned, rather than clipping it for the sake of neatness as if a living plant was inert like hair. But as always in our culture, patience is in short supply.

– Izzy 

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Mulch too Much

 

 

As summer fades into fall, gardeners consider tidying their flower beds and around their trees and shrubs. Putting down new mulch can be part of this process, and it raises the question: How much mulch? Mulching two to three inches in total depth is plenty, making sure to keep the mulch from touching plant stems, and not piling up volcanoes of the stuff around trees. Any “professional” landscaping outfit or individual who does otherwise is acting out of either ignorance or the desire to sell more mulch, perhaps both.



Garden gnome with wheelbarrow-20051026

Another consideration is whether to put down commercially produced mulch or wood chips. The term “mulch” can apply to organic or inorganic ground covers, such as pine bark, shredded hardwood, or stone. Wood chips are made from every part of a tree, and chips range in size from coarse chunks to finely ground pieces no larger than an inch. Gardeners should be careful to check the source of wood chips because they may have come from trees infested with beetles or borers, and if the chips have not been ground up finely enough or heat treated, then the insects may survive to cause further damage in new surroundings. Commercial wood mulch should not cause similar problems if the manufacturer has effectively screened it for pests, though gardeners should not apply it directly up to the foundation of a house, where it can serve as cover for termites already present in the soil.

 

A good rule of thumb to follow when applying mulch is not to apply it so thickly as to make it a heavy slog for the average happy garden gnome pushing a wheelbarrow.
– Izzy

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