[Tomatoes for G, Healthy tomatoes, Pea problems]
My daughter Genevieve does not like to garden but does like good-tasting vegetables, especially tomatoes. So when she recently moved to the third floor of a rented house with access to some backyard space, I, of course, offered her some special tomato plants and help in planting them. No, this wasn’t necessarily going to be a garden, but 9 tomato plants bearing fruits of minimal labor.
The plants — the varieties Anna Russian, Amish Paste, Sungold, Carmello, and Valencia — went into the ground at the end of May. I brought along, besides the 9 plants, some building paper (“rosin paper”), bamboo stakes, a small sledge hammer, compost, and soybean meal (for nitrogen fertilizer).
To plant, we first knocked down some of the existing weeds sprouting along the south border of the narrow, thankfully sunny, city yard. A sprinkling of soybean meal at each planting site was topped with an 18 inch by 18 inch square of the paper slit to its center, into which we cut a planting hole just big enough to accommodate a plant’s root ball. Each plant went into a root-ball-sized hole poked into the ground beneath the opening in the paper. We covered each paper square with an inch or so of compost, hammered a bamboo stake into the ground next to each plant, and the tomato planting was complete.
Genevieve’s job was to water the plants for a few days to get them established, to keep the plants to a single stem by pruning off suckers, and to tie the plants to the stakes, as needed.
I’ve started whole gardens with a more refined version of this paper/compost method, so this week’s visit to the “garden,” possibly Philadelphia’s most low-maintenance “garden,” brought no surprises. The plants were growing and tomatoes were on their way. I couldn’t restrain myself from whacking back weeds that had grown up beyond the paper barriers to shade some of the plants. I stopped my whacking every few minutes to move the end of a hose from one plant to the next to thoroughly soak the ground beneath each plant.
Great-tasting tomatoes are scheduled to begin about the third week in July.
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Tomato plants in my own garden also require little care from me now, basically nothing more than periodic tying to their stakes and occasional weeding.
In contrast to last year’s summer of late blight, plants this year look lusty and fruitful. Late blight has already been reported this year in isolated pockets in in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and on Long Island. My plant’s healthy look comes from a thorough cleanup and composting of diseased residues last year, moving this year’s tomatoes to a new location in the garden, and starting my own planting from seed. All these measures also go a long way to thwarting the other leaf spot diseases (septoria leaf spot and early blight) that more commonly attack tomatoes around here.
The hot, sunny weather also helps a lot, ultraviolet rays and heat stopping late blight dead in its tracks.
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Back in March I wrote of my pea problems. In brief, every year for the past few years, my peas have begun bearing pods and then too soon afterwards have begun to yellow and die. I thought I narrowed down the cause to one or two root diseases of peas, fusarium and aphanomyces, both of which live for a long, long time in the soil, making crop rotation of limited utility in their control.
To keep these diseases in check, I planted the fusarium resistant variety Little Marvel and, because aphanomyces likes wet soil, kept the pea beds on the dry side. I also made one planting in an area that’s never been home to peas.
The only peas still thriving are the ones planted in a previously pea-less home. Pulling up yellowing vines from the other beds did not, unfortunately, yield tell tale symptoms of few branch roots (aphanomyces) or reddish roots (fusarium), so I’m still in a quandary.
[, rain]
June 17, 2010
a gardener’s notebook
by Lee Reich
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Last summer’s incessant rains and the late blight of tomato that the rains helped spread make this spring’s dry weather especially welcome.
Dry weather does, of course, mean that watering is needed. The vegetables are under the care of battery operated timers and drip irrigation lines. Water drips out the lines for a total of 20 minutes each day, spread over intervals during daylight hours. That might seem like lots of water, but it’s not; at each watering, water drips very slowly, at the rate of 1/2 gallon per hour, from emitters spaced 6” along the line running down each bed. Spreading the watering throughout the day replenishes soil moisture as plants use it up.
Beyond the vegetable garden, plants are on their own for water — except for newly planted trees, shrubs, and flowers. All these plants get off to a good start with some hand watering which, depending on plant size, may be once after planting or once a week the whole season. Hand watering can become tedious, but the plants love it and it’s crucial to getting them established.
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A couple of cloudbursts last week got my gardening friends excited. Not to be a stick in the mud, but the rainfall was actually paltry. Yes, it did feel torrential at times, an effect heightened by the rumbling of thunder and dark skies.
A rain gauge tells all, though. In fact, only about a third of an inch of rain fell (0.39 inch, to be exact, at my house). Through summer, a garden needs, on the average, about an inch of rain per week. An inch of rain wets the soil to the depth of about a foot, which is where most plant roots reside. So that third of an inch of rainfall, following on the heels of weeks of dry weather, didn’t go far.
Then again, it’s still early in the season. New roots haven’t yet filled the soil to suck up all the soil moisture, and young plants and annuals haven’t grown enough new stems and leaves to pump that moisture back into the air. The soil is still a reservoir for last winter’s rain and snow. I planted some new berry plants in my berry patch yesterday and the soil there was still plenty moist. That’s because the ground there lies beneath a permanent blanket of wood chip and/or leafy mulch. Expect the soil to be drier beneath bare ground or lawn.
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Rose de Rescht, basking in all that sunlight, is in spot where I haven’t yet mulched the ground. This is one old-fashioned rose that is supposed to blossom all summer long, but the blossoming has tapered. Perhaps Rose de Rescht is just taking a short rest from its burst of spring blooms. Perhaps soil is too dry. I’m going to water it by hand, then mulch. A gallon of water sprinkled slowly around the base of the plant is equivalent to an inch depth of rainfall (over a square foot), enough for another week of dry weather.
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Nix on that watering; two-thirds an inch of rain fell in the hours since writing above. Let’s hope for sunny weather for a week, then another inch, total, of rainfall.
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Any gardening questions? Email them to me at garden@leereich.com and I’ll try answering them directly or in this column. Check out my garden’s blog at www.leereich.blogspot.com.
[first strawberries, chickens fenced out]
This year’s berry season officially began, on May 22nd, with the first harvest of strawberries. As with everything else in this year’s garden, the strawberries are early. Looking over my records, I see that in years past, I had to wait until early or even the middle of June to pluck the first glistening, red orbs of the season.
Those first berries are particularly welcome. First of all, they are the first fresh fruit from the garden. (Not that I haven’t been eating berries: We still have plenty of blueberries, still frozen and, when thawed, still delectable, from last summer.)
The first strawberries of the season also are particularly welcome because they are always the biggest. Every strawberry stem ends in a single flower, which is the first one to open. About thirty days after opening, if all goes well, that flower has been transformed into a ripe strawberry.
Every strawberry stem also has two branches and each of these also terminates in a flower. Secondary flowers open after the first flower. Those secondary stems likewise each has two branches terminating by a flower, opening even later. There might even be a fourth set of branches, with flowers, on these last stems.
If you were to dissect strawberry flowers under a microscope, you’d find that that there are most female flower parts, which are what swell to comprise each juicy berry, in that first flower, fewer in the two secondary flowers, and so forth, so the berries generally get smaller as the season progresses.
Opening first, the biggest flower is also most susceptible to late frost injury. Fortunately, I remembered to throw a blanket over the strawberry bed to protect the flowers during the two frosty nights earlier in May.
Now it’s time to throw a net over the bed to fend off birds. Those metal hoops that covered some vegetable beds to support clear plastic for cold protection also work well as supports for netting. That first harvest of the 22nd was only two strawberries. Just a few days later, we were, and are, picking bowlfuls of berries, which the birds won’t want to share.
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I’ve previously praised backyard chickens for their eggs, for their patrolling of the grounds to keep insect pests in check, and for their decorative effect on the landscape. Benefits aside, I do spend some effort corralling them into or keeping them out of parts of the yard.
Chickens scratch for food, in so doing generally messing up planted ground, even damaging some plants as they keep scratching soil away from their bases. Hence, chickens are never allowed in my vegetable gardens, something they seem to appreciate even though they could easily fly over the 3-foot-high fence around one of the gardens. The chicken’s scratchings are also limited by their being “bantam chickens,” never taller than a foot or so and thus limited in their scratchabilities.
All unfenced ground beyond the vegetable gardens – it’s chicken’s delight. Flower beds, berry beds, mixed beds with herbs, berries, and flowers. The chickens enjoy scratching around in the loose soil and mulch of those beds. In their scratching, they even toss some of the soil and mulch outside beds, so I have to every once in a while rake soil and mulch back into the beds. “Ah, fresh, loose soil and mulch,” no doubt think the chickens, who go back right into the beds to scratch around again, and again toss out some soil and mulch.
Just a little fencing dissuades chickens – my chickens, at least – from entering an area. Bamboo stakes (another use for my bamboo) three inches apart and sticking a foot-and-a-half out of the ground decoratively and effectively have kept the birds out of one portion of the garden for years. This fencing only lasts a couple of years and becomes tedious to replace over a large area, though.
I’ve upgrading chicken fencing now to “welded wire” fencing with 2 by 4 inch openings. I cut a 36 inch wide roll in half for 18 inch high fencing, which I support with a bamboo stake every few feet. So far, after a few weeks, the chickens have only gazed longingly within but never hopped over it. Over the past couple of weeks, 7 baby chicks have hatched. The chicks have no trouble strolling right through the openings of this new fencing. Their scratchings are inconsequential.
