Tomato Supports

Here’s how to make an easy tomato support or an instant garden fence. Lash the poles together and either use string to train your tomatoes up or hang netting over the support for pole beans or morning glories (or any other climber you fancy growing) up the netting.

This easy system takes 5 minutes to construct and will easily last all summer. It does create quite a windbreak when the plants are fully grown so you may want to anchor it into the ground in a windy area. Last year, our bean support blew over in a windstorm (luckily at the end of the season).

Planting Tomatoes

It’s been so cold here that we’ve just planted our tomatoes and aren’t sure what’s going to happen with the yields. Here’s how I do it - nothing fancy but fast and easy.

Remember the cardinal rule and you’ll be fine - only leave 6 inches of stem showing above ground (more or less, it isn’t rocket science) and the stem will root.

And water thoroughly after you plant.

What else do you need to know? Oh yeah, I’ll be showing you other updates on tomato staking etc in future videos.

Number One in Vegetable Gardening

There’s a certain satisfaction reaching number one in any endeavor and it’s particularly satisfying when your book goes to the top of the sales charts. Here’s a screen shot of my book numbers on Amazon.ca today.

What you have to squint to see is

1 in Books > Home & Garden > Gardening & Horticulture > Regional > Canada
#3 in Books > Home & Garden > Gardening & Horticulture > Vegetables

#1 in Gardening in Canada and #3 in Overall Gardening>Vegetables.

Life seems sweeter some days.

Vegetable Gardening Because

There’s a media feeding frenzy developing over vegetable gardening. Who woulda thunk it? Only a few short years ago, vegetable gardening was the poor Cinderella who never got to go to the ball, had to leave early and was downtrodden at every turn.

Seems the Prince found both the magic slipper and the princess and we have vegetable gardening being deified every time you look around.

We get to read about the Obamas having a white house vegetable garden. Right. There’s the Prez and company out on the lawn making the garden - taking all that sod and developing a garden with rakes. Oh yeah, now’s there’s an idea. Let’s all go out and get rid of sod with a rake - that’s a great tool for the job. The report that after the photo-op a tiller and tractor loader was brought in to do the real work only makes sense.

Mind you, before this was reported, there was breathless prose about the entire affair and how good it is for the U.S. But we all know the involvement of the first family is symbolic anyway so what’s the big deal. Take a few minutes, go out for a photo-op, then back into running the known world. Take it with the grain of salt it demands.

As a non-American during this excitement, all I can wonder is “What took you folks so long?” Keeping your presidents occupied in the garden is probably a really good thing for the rest of the world - at least they can’t get the rest of us in trouble if they’re out there weeding. Speaking for the rest of Canada, a position I adopt reluctantly, we just want to get politely back to our gardens and tell you to get back to tending your back yards. And no, we have gardeners to take care of our important gardens. The actual leader of our country - the Governor-General - has a magnificent garden and the last time I visited it did indeed have a vegetable and herb section (haven’t been there recently so need a confirmation on that).

Then there’s the Victory Gardening folks. Some of these are good friends but really, what’s it a victory over? Some greedy bankers?

Victory Gardens operated during the First and Second World Wars in all the major warring nations: Germany, the U.K (where it goes back to the 1600’s), Canada, the Aussies (??? please confirm if so - couldn’t find a reference) and the U.S. and although the US didn’t enter the first world war until it was well underway (War starts officially on June 28, 1914 - the United States declared war with Germany on April 6, 1917, and on December 7, 1917, with Austria-Hungary while the Armistice Treaty was signed on Nov 11, 1918) your leaders thought Americans should be prepared for the rationing that was going on in other parts of the world - given the preponderance of US readers of this blog, here’s a link to the US Victory Garden history. http://knol.google.com/k/pamela-price/the-american-victory-garden-past-present/ywdp8×5jtr5l/2#

So if you’re looking to promote gardening, I guess you could call it a Victory Garden but as soon as peace is declared do folks stop vegetable gardening again?

Not only do we now have breathless prose for Victory Gardening, we also have the pundits arguing about how much it costs to actually have a vegetable garden. Good grief. Don’t these people have anything better to air-head about? It must be a slow day in the idea-department. Of course your garden is going to be expensive if you have to write off a brand new anythings against that single tomato plant. The last time this kind of “debate” raged was back in the 70’s when we all knew it was tongue-in-cheek to cost out the roto-tiller, the fencing, the nanny to watch over the kids, the 4×4 to haul the produce to market etc etc etc. And equally spurious is bragging about how much money you saved on your garden - how do you do the damnable accounting (all accounting is damnable - not just garden-accounting)?

I should tell you that at least Joe Lampl is having fun with the idea and is actually working with the idea of the $25/garden. Go Joe. In fact, go there and have fun trying to do the same thing.

Me? Nah, I’m still accounting my new John Deere against the cost of my garden.

I garden for myself - not for victory over bankers and politicians who decide that greed is acceptable. I garden because I love the taste of fresh food, not for the economics. I garden because it makes me feel good inside - not because it makes me patriotic. I garden because …well, just because.

I don’t need your Victory Garden, I don’t need your gardening jingoism. I just want my garden.

Vegetable Seeding Dates

This is the everything you ever wanted to know about vegetable seeding dates post. I get asked for this info on a regular basis so here it is in one spot, in one column for you to cut out and pin somewhere.

Let’s break the plants down into different families with the same kinds of needs. The first and easiest are the cole crops. These would include Brussels sprouts, cabbages, cauliflower and broccoli, To get nice transplants, sow indoors between February 15 until March 15. Any time now is fine for an indoor sowing. You can also sow cauliflower outside at the end of May for a late season crop. Cabbage seed can be planted outside from the middle of May until the middle of June for late crops. Broccoli can be planted outside from the middle of May to the middle of June.

Tomatoes, eggplant and peppers should both be started indoors if you want to get maximum yields and the time to this is from the beginning of March through to the beginning of April. The rough rule of thumb is that you count back 8 to 10 weeks from the time you want to plant them in the ground and that’s when you sow the seed indoors. Seeds planted a week or two after April 1 are not going to have enough time to grow and produce a good harvest in our area. Outdoor seeding is not recommended in our region for these plants. If you plant these seeds too early, they’ll get long and leggy and will require special handling in the spring.

There are some seeds that thrive on early plantings; for example, as soon as you can work your garden soil you want to start planting peas. Plan on sowing peas in mid-April and then again on August 1 for a fall harvest. Don’t plant later than the end of April as the oncoming heat will reduce harvests. The plants will grow well, they just won’t give you many peas when compared to earlier plantings.

Beets are another seed that thrive on mid-April planting but in this case, you can plant every 10 days until July if you really like beets.

Spinach and Swiss chard are two other plants that really want the early plantings so plan on getting them in the ground at the same time and stopping by mid-May. Both plants do not do well in summer heat so later plantings will tend to bolt and go to seed.

Contrary to what many folks believe, lettuce is also an early spring planting and it too can go into the ground in mid-April. The trick with this plant though is to plant a few seeds every week right through to July when the heat gets too intense for lettuce production. Stop for July and start again in late August for the cooler fall season.

Finally, if you’re not tucking a few seeds of radish here and there among the rest of the seedlings, you’re missing out. Do not grow an entire row of radish as they tend to get bitter very quickly. Grow a few here and there and harvest them as early as you can. Keep on sowing these right through the summer. Just don’t let them mature and expect to enjoy them.

Onions are one of the cool season crops as well and if you purchase sets, these can be planted along with the other cool season crops above. If you’re starting from seed, the seed can either be started indoors in mid-February to early March or it can be sown outside in mid-April. Transplanted seedlings can go into the ground in late April or early May through to mid-June.

On the other hand, beans can be sown outdoors (never indoors) from the long weekend onwards. Sow a new crop every 10 days until the end of July for an ongoing harvest all summer long. Sweet corn can also be planted from mid-May onwards until mid to late June.

Plants that want warmer soils include the squash family and melon family along with the cucurbit family. Putting these outside too early is a sentence of death rather than a gardening wish. So your giant pumpkins get started in mid-April and so do the watermelons.

Sow cucumber seed indoors from the middle of April to the beginning of May. They are both very fast growers and only require 3 to 4 weeks in their own small pot before you put them outside in the garden. You can plant them directly into the garden but do not do that until early June to give the soil a chance to warm up.

When it comes to the other salad plants, corn salad goes outdoors from mid-April until the beginning of May.

Endive is planted in mid-April and then again the first week of July for a fall crop.

Turnips can be used as either greens or roots and they’re planted in late May.

Collards start on June first and are planted weekly until early August.

Mesclun, which is simply a mix of lettuce and other greens, can be planted in mid-April and should be resown weekly until early July.

The small specialty root crops such as celeriac and kohlrabi are started early outdoors and can be resown every week until the end of June. Parsnips are an early to mid-May outdoor started seed.

I understand there’s a lot of information compressed into a few short words, but I hope it helps you sort out when you can plant for maximum harvest. Give the plant what it wants and you’ll both be happier.

Garden Planning and Crop Rotation

Garden Planning and Crop Rotation are important parts of getting (and keeping) a vegetable garden to give it’s best yields. Here’s a very simple and straightforward way of setting up a crop rotation system that you’ll find easy to remember.

Let me know what you think below.

Vegetable Garden Seminar Starting

The Vegetable Gardening Seminar is launching at the seminar site. If you’re interested in helping design your own course on growing veggies, this is the time to make your comments and requests.

I’m reading through all the requests and designing the course to get the most important things covered over the next month. Going to take the next few days to sort it all out and start putting some downloads and information together.

You can sign up to be part of the proceedings and receive the course materials.

Five Easy Vegetables

To continue the series on easy plants to grow in the garden, let me suggest you take a deep breath right now and consider the five vegetables you like to eat. Or will eat may be more to the point. I say this because many folks start gardening and decide they’re going to grow some of everything; a noble goal but only in the spring. By August, they’re bogged down, wondering why things aren’t growing, amazed at how many weeds there are out there and staggered by the amount of work it takes to actually grow food. Frankly, it’s no darn wonder that we have farms and we no longer do all this work ourselves. It can be hard. I have two things to say to this. First, the taste of fresh vegetables right out of your garden can’t be beaten by anything you can buy. And second, the first column in this series talked about labour saving techniques to help you reduce your work. Without further ado, I give you five easy veggies.

The most popular plant in the vegetable garden is the tomato. Man, we grow a lot of these; largely because they’re easy to grow and so useful in the kitchen. The first thing to understand is that this plant loves warm soil so the first week of May, you’re going to lay some clear plastic on the garden, weight down the edges and walk away. You’re going to turn this area into a mini-greenhouse to warm up the soil. You’re going to plant tomatoes the third or fourth week of May; but remove the plastic just before you do. If you don’t remove the plastic, the soil will get too hot and kill off the plants. Plant your transplants so that only the top 12-15 cm (6-inches) is showing, the rest can be buried and will form roots along the buried stem. Two points: if you have a mulched garden, pull the mulch back to lay down the plastic and then return the mulch after planting and plastic-removal and yes, can lay down compost without digging it in, simply toss it around the base of the plant. The rest of the summer is about making sure the plants have adequate water. I’ve written entire books about growing tomatoes but getting them started properly is the single most important thing you can do in our region to ensure a good yield.

Peas are one of the easiest vegetables to grow if you follow a few really simple rules. The first is to plant them in mid-April. This is perhaps the earliest seed to go into the ground and if you do this, you’ll get great crops. If you wait until the soil warms up and plant them along with the rest of your garden, you’re going to be very disappointed in the harvest. Do try some of the wonderful sugar snap style peas; being an edible podded pea, I dare you to not eat any as you harvest or walk to the kitchen. These tasted amazingly wonderful right from the vine. Plant them about 1 cm deep and keep damp until the new shoots start poking through the ground. We grow ours up a trellis to save garden space and make them easier to find. Do make the supports quite sturdy because this plant will develop quite a weight and will knock down a flimsy support. The advantage of growing peas is that while they’re giving you a crop to eat, they’re also producing nitrogen in the soil for the following crop. After the peas are finished, pull them out and plant some seeds in there for fall harvests.

Most folks like a good salad and growing several of the main ingredients will make your taste buds jump. Lettuce and spinach form the basis for many a salad and (mostly) take the same growing conditions so let’s deal with them in one section. Plant these early if you want to eat them. I’m talking getting both of these plants into the garden about the same time as peas. You want them early. Now, you can start them a few weeks beforehand in the house and transplant or simply plant the seeds. I prefer seeding because you get good germination, can eat the thinnings and it’s less work. You want to plant them early because a late planting will turn lettuce very bitter and spinach will grow and produce seeds in the heat. Try planting 1-2 metres of row every week so you’ll have multiple crops coming along. Harvest the outer leaves and when the temperatures start to rise, and the lettuce get bitter, switch to spinach salads. Stop planting through the heat of the summer but start again in mid to late-August when the nights start to cool again. You’ll have great fall crops of both of these easily grown plants.

The most easily grown squash is zuchini. Put this plant anywhere near the ground and you’ll have more summer squash than you know what to do with. Let me suggest however that you only grow one or maybe two plants. Anything more is overkill and you won’t be able to eat them. Trust me, your friends and neighbours don’t want them either as vegetable quickly becomes a glut on the market. The best two tips I can give you with this plant are to sow seeds (the seeds can be easily saved for several years) when the ground warms up (about the last week of May) and to harvest the squash when they are about 20-25 cm (8-inches or so) long. After the fruit reaches 30 cm or so, it starts to become woody and not good eating.

Those are the five easiest growing vegetables I can think of and those with the most use in the kitchen. Having said that, grow what you’ll eat and enjoy - that’s the most important gardening decision.

Vegetable Gardening Tips

The vegetable garden is giving us more and more of a harvest and I thought I’d pass along a few tips that will help you increase the yield of your basic crops. Think of it as a advanced vegetable gardening tips.

When you harvest cabbages, cut them off. This gives you a nice clean head of cabbage and it leaves the roots intact and still growing and producing energy. If you rip it out of the ground or twist it off, then these roots are disturbed. We want those roots to keep growing because we’re going to go for a second crop of cabbage. Yes, you can easily get a few more cabbages from the same plant if you use a knife to harvest the main head. After the head is cut off, make two cuts across the remaining stump. The cuts will be in the shape of a cross and leave four equal quadrants of the stump. The cut should be approximately one to two cm deep (1/2 inch) but don’t obsess over this - close counts.

By making four equal quadrants, you’re going to find the cabbage will scab over the original cut pretty quickly and then if you keep watering the plants (not that we need to water a lot lately) you’re going to find four baby cabbages growing; one on each quadrant. They won’t get as large as the main cabbage was but with a bit of luck, a bit of fish emulsion to boost growth and plant energy, you’ll get another crop of small cabbages for yet another salad.

You’re going to be doing almost the same thing of course with your broccoli. After you harvest that main head with a knife to leave the roots intact, you’re going to find the side shoots (every place there’s a leaf up and down the stem) are going to develop into smaller heads. You’ll get as much or more broccoli from these smaller heads as you will from the larger central one. You still have to give the plant a boost in feed to get a ton of these and you still have to pick the green cabbage worms that abound at this time of year but you’ll get a lot of green stuff off one plant if you’re careful.

Closely associated with the vegetable garden is the herb garden and you really want to be cutting and trimming plants right now. I saw our parsley plants trying to bolt (go to seed) this week and immediately whacked them back. I don’t want herbs to go to seed because they’ll lose some of their flavour and start slowing down on leaf production. So get out there and trim that basil and parsley and other annual herbs because even if you don’t want to use them right away, you’ll need to maintain them for when you do want the leaves.

Finally, we come to the tomatoes. There are several things you can do to really push your tomatoes along in the production sense. The first is to keep feeding them. Give them a dose of fish emulsion or compost tea every two weeks and you’re going to see amazing differences in the yields of this plant. While it should not be a problem this year with all the water we’re having, it is good to remember that a tomato fruit is over 95% water and any restriction on the water is going to reduce the size of the harvest. So do make sure the soil water is even with no ups and downs - from soaking to dry - this year. This might be a problem if we get to August, the rains slow down and we get some high heat days. The fruit will start to expand in the heat and because the plant has all the water it requires, the plant will grow quickly, too quickly. With sudden turns in high heat, we’re going to see cracking.

As soon as you see plants cracking, harvest the fruit you can. It’s still useable. Immediate harvesting will reduce the tempting fruit from wasps and slugs because once they get a sniff of the sugars, you’re going to find them all over your plant eating away and reducing the insides of the individual tomatoes to their own advantage. This is why if we do go to high heat, it is going to be really necessary to maintain the water levels in the plant. We want to maintain the plant’s growing abilities as best we can but do expect cracking this year.

If your tomatoes are staked, then let me suggest you do a fews simple things to increase your harvest. I know you’re taking off the suckers to concentrate the growth along the main growing stem. But as the fruit sets, you’re going to do an extra stage of pruning. A tomato ripens its fruit from the bottom upwards. So the lowest fruit ripens first. As soon as that lower fruit truss is ripe and harvested, you can remove the leaves on that main stem all the way to the second truss of fruit but not above it. This increases air circulation and sunlight onto the next fruit truss. You’ll find the plants will ripen the fruits a little faster if you do this pruning. Finally with staked tomatoes, you want to cut the top off the growing point sometime in the first week of September and prevent any sideshoots from developing as they will want to do. This increases the energy going into the fruit development giving you a chance to ripen those last few tomatoes before the killing frosts arrive.

So do those few things and you’ll see increased vegetables and herbs coming out of your garden from here to frost.

How to Sucker Tomatoes

Here’s a short clip on how to take the suckers off tomatoes. It’s not too late to go out and do this on any staked tomato (in fact you should). Leave the tomatoes you have growing on the ground or in cages alone.

As an added thought - you grow staked tomatoes if you’re trying to maximize the amount of fruit per square foot of garden. You let them flop if you’re trying to maximize the amount of fruit per plant.

Tomato Pruning

Yeah, I know you think you don’t need info on tomato pruning at this time of year but if you’re like me, sometimes you let things get out of hand. Here’s the remedy - serious pruning. Would I string you along? (You gotta watch the video to “get” that)

First Tomato

Well, it isn’t much but it is an early tomato. What can I say? The Princess and I split it so we’d each get some. I cut and she picked.

4th July and Watermelon and Viagara

I never in my wilder dreams figured I’d get to link all those topics into one blog post but just in time for a bit of celebrating on July 4th (with fireworks I hope) comes the news that watermelon contains a chemical called “citruline”. This is really good news because it helps relax the body’s blood vessels - exactly what Viagara does apparently.

Researchers are quick (very quick) to point out that watermelon isn’t “site specific” like Viagara and if you’re counting on serious assistance, you should see your physician.

About 60% of the citruline is found in the rind (let’s hear it for watermelon pickles - one of my favourites) and yellow flesh varieties have more than red-flesh ones.

Watermelon breeders have been notified, they’re quite excited about this news and with this increased attention, are standing a little straighter in their fields this morning.

photo credit: Ben Cumming

Vegetable Gardening Interest on the Rise?

Sometimes I stick my head in the sand and watch the world go by and this is turning out to be one of those weeks. A quick trip to Chicago on the weekend was great but man, that’s a long 12-hour drive. Both Mayo and I were happy to get back on our ferry and head over to the island.

Sticking my head in the sand means I can ignore the nature of the web statistics for another week (Tuesday is normally examine-the-stats-day). One of the interesting things that Judy Lowe reminded me of was the upsurge in growing vegetables. Earlier this spring, the Garden Writers ListServ was bubbling over with the impressions of increased reader questions and overflowing halls at veggie presentations during early spring garden seminars. I tend to take a wait and see approach to many of these things because I rely on my own Net stats and question levels to see what’s happening.

And yup, there was an upswing this past spring in searching for vegetable answers. It’s still not the number one gardening search term for sure but there is indeed more interest in this area. Judy’s article summed up the Yahoo news release much better than I ever could about what gardeners were searching for in the way of vegetables so I won’t repeat it here. If you want to know who’s looking for what - check out her article.

My take on all this is kinda predictable for someone who’s seen it before. Every time the media describes a recession, predicts a catastrophe looming or describes yet another doomsday scenario (for as long as I’ve been in the industry) we have another upsurge in vegetable production on the home scale. And then just as surely as worms love little green apples, these beginner gardeners get a reality check on the work involved and the surge in interest wanes.

What’s driving it this time?

Well, we have the U.S. economy tanking thanks to yet another war - I did see an estimate that this little action had cost the U.S. somewhere between 2-3 trillion dollars - with no end in sight. We can add the mortgage scandal to that tanking effect along with a deficit government spending policy that’s driving national debt ever higher. I’m no economist nor politician and I’m sure there’s arguments in favor of all sides but the net effect is increasing fuel and food pricing.

But those increased fuel prices are a killer for sure on holiday travel. And if you gotta stay home, then you might as well garden a bit.

Let’s hear it for increasing restrictions on travel in the U.S. It’s now officially a pain in the anatomy to travel by air. And when even the maintenance staff at highway areas are dressing up in uniforms with yellow-striped pants and military style shirts, you know the joy in moving around the country is being reduced. Big brother is now officially watching.

You can add in your own take on rising environmental awareness and an increased fear of food safety (can you say tomato scare?) and it’s no wonder that folks are looking to grow their own vegetables.

My take? Been there - seen that. The average North American is spoiled when it comes to food sources and supply. And gardening for enough food to feed a small family is hard work - much harder work than the average person is going to want to do given a choice. Yeah, sure we’ll grow a few tomatoes and a few sprigs of basil but when it comes down to doing all that freezing and canning - it just ain’t gonna happen for the average person. Not at the current pricing of food.

Oh I know the arguments that says we “should” do it because it’s good for the planet etc etc ad nauseum but my reality is that most folks are simply too lazy to do the work given an alternative. And here in North America we have an alternative in our food sources.

And yes, I’ve read other writers saying that the young people are more food conscious than the Boomers (thank goodness) and that will be better environmentalists (thank goodness) and that the tide of things is changing for the better. As I said earlier, I’ll reserve judgment on questions like that till I see the data.

Now the beauty of all this increased awareness is that there will be a few folks who will learn the joy of eating fresh vegetables and seeing their own food come to the table. There will be a few folks who decide it’s important to continue doing this; and they will become gardeners. In my experience, most will not want to do the work.

I well remember when we were able to sit down to a massive family meal on the farm and say that everything but the salt and sugar came from the farm and our own labor. I no longer milk cows, feed chickens or garden on a serious enough scale to feed six people. But Mayo and I will have a full vegetable garden by next year that will feed us year round with food to share with family. That’s because we value our food and our efforts to keep ourselves healthy.

But my take on this renewed interest in vegetable gardening - been there, seen that before. The only way this trend will continue is if conditions continue to deteriorate. In that case you had better invest in the canning jar company again and batten down the hatches.

Pumpkin Book Giveaway - We have a winner

Update with winner - Bev - #72 won the contest according the magic number delivered by a team of white-gloved accountants with secret locked envelopes.

She’s been notified.

Stay tuned, there are more books on my desk I need to give away.

For the record, there were 99 folks who entered that contest - best odds outside of bobbing for apples in a barrel.

R.I.P. Howard Dill

Howard Dill set a gardening record that hasn’t been beat to this day. Back in the 80’s he won the world champion pumpkin growing contest 4 times in a row. And he bred ‘Atlantic Giant’ the first of the really big pumpkins and one that is still commercially available today. Some would say that he created the entire large pumpkin growing craze.

I never met Howard Dill but I grew that pumpkin every year. I have pictures of my son sitting on one of them as it was taller than he was.

And I still remember my daughter’s grade 3 teacher when he said he needed a pumpkin for Halloween and I volunteered to bring him one. The look of astonishment when we wheeled that into his class (we needed a nursery cart that would handle several hundred pounds of pumpkin) was worth the several hours of loading and careful driving it took to get it there. As I recall, all he could say was, “Oh my gawd!”. Mind you, he was probably trying to figure out what to do with it afterwards but that wasn’t my problem.

Here’s his obit courtesy CTV

Brussels sprouts, my Brother and I

I’ve always said (well, sometimes said) that brussels sprouts were the reason I got so much bigger than my younger brother David. You see. He ate them and I don’t.

It turns out - like a lot of things - the older brother was right and the much shorter younger brother was wrong.

Research has shown that brussels sprouts secrete a chemical that makes the aphids that feed on them smaller than aphids feeding on nearby plants. Read more