Twisty, Narrowed, Thickened Leaves and Other Weedkiller Damage

New growth on tomato made weird by persistent herbicide in manure.

Cabbage growth stunted and warped by persistent herbicide in manure.

There seems to be a lot of weedkiller damage in gardens this year. I've seen twisty, narrowed leaves on rose bushes (from two different yards) that were probably exposed to 2,4-D before the plants even leafed-out in spring; I've seen shortened, odd growth on hydrangeas (same cause); and I've seen vegetable plants whose growth has been stunted and made odd by a group of herbicides that persist in hay, grass clippings, and manures.

Spring Veggies to Harvest Now, or Soon, and Delayed Planting

We've been bringing in asparagus, green onions, and radishes, and there are little bits of lettuce to add to salads, but it will be a few more weeks before the beets and spring-planted carrots are big enough to add much mass to a meal.

The peas, though, will be ready sooner. The vines are in that covered-with-flowers-and-tiny-pea-pods stage, so I am pretty hopeful that we'll have some peas with our meals in ten days or less.

The Garden Keeps Rolling Along

The three-day weekend was reasonably busy in the garden. Joe helped with the biggest job, using the grub hoe to churn up the cleaned-up squash/melon bed, so I could spread on a layer of compost and then set in the little plants I've been growing in a flat. The plants include a couple of kinds of kale, cabbages, cauliflower, beets, more cilantro, and a couple of broccoli.

I also worked more on clearing the last of the older tomato plants. I'd like to be able to plant that bed soon with spinach, bok choy, and winter radishes.

The bed I've saved for carrots still needs to have the buckwheat cut down, and there is a little space where the tomatillos were that will be available for re-planting after I've dumped some compost on it. Otherwise, though, the planting for fall is nearly done.

The first lettuces have developed some true leaves; the first cilantro looks less frail; the peas are a couple of inches high; and the cilantro, collards, and kale that I planted in the garden as seed a couple of weeks ago are all looking like actual little plants.

Meanwhile, we are still bringing in peppers, okra, and tomatoes (the Principe Borghese that were planted last have just recently begun to ripen), and the late-planted green beans and cowpeas will begin contributing to our meals later this week.

I had planted seeds for pickling cucumbers several weeks ago, to find out whether a late-planted crop was a possibility, and those are beginning to make cucumbers; however, the leaves already are very damaged by mildew, so I'm thinking that the late cucumber crop is going to be tiny. The plants won't last long in the garden at the rate they are going downhill.

I also sprinkled some critter repellent around the perimeter of the sweet potato bed. The chipmunks have already been in there, eating my little crop. I'd like for the little rascals to leave me some this year, and I'm hoping the repellent works.
 

I totally forgot that this year's watermelons would be yellow inside.  PHOTO/Amy W.

A highlight of the weekend was eating watermelon from the garden. This year's melons stayed smaller than they should have, but they were sweet, with good flavor and texture. I had completely forgotten that they would be yellow inside, so I had a very brief "uh oh" moment as I sliced into the first one. It is great that the garden offers so many surprises! I am never bored.

Not Fall Yet, But Getting There

This weekend I made more progress on switching over to "the fall garden." Some of the summer plants are still doing really well, some are just now reaching their peak of production (peppers, okra), and some are nearly done.

Rutgers tomato plant, still green and productive.      PHOTO/Amy W.

Based on the percentage of browned leaves, I'd say that the Better Boy tomato plant is going to keel over soon, but the Rutgers plant is still covered up in green leaves and plenty of fruit.

This weekend, I pulled out one of the smaller-fruited tomato plants that looked pretty bad, and that should help the airflow around the Rutgers and Better Boy, hopefully helping to keep them alive and productive a little longer.

The Cherokee Purple is definitely done, the Pink Brandywine still has a few fruits, and the Amish tomato plant is somewhere in between. It has several green fruits that are nearing ripeness along with some smaller, newer fruits, but the foliage is yellowing and droopy. I think it has fusarium wilt, but I haven't sliced into a stem yet to check.

Fruits of a passionflower vine. This vine has at least 10 so far. PHOTO/Amy W.

Among my other experiments for the summer is a passionflower vine. The flowers are beautiful (I'll try to get a good picture up, soon), and I'm hoping that the fruits have enough pulp inside that I can make a little juice or jam.

Another crop that I haven't really mentioned yet this year is the greasy beans. Six slender vines (they are pole beans) are climbing up a little trellis, and they have been making small numbers of beans, but the production has been steady. When I bring in a handful, I pull off the strings then toss them up into a hanging basket to dry for leather britches. If I had lots of them, I'd do the traditional hanging-up-on-a-line-to-dry thing, but I don't.

Flat of seeds for cool-season crops.      PHOTO/Amy W.

I've started some more plants for the fall garden, too. While waiting for more of the summer crops to finish, it can help to have some of the cool-weather crops already started, for transplanting to the garden when the space is available.

Just behind the flat in the photo to the left is a box with some cabbage seedlings in it that I started a few weeks ago in peat pellets. Those were bumped up into a couple of old "6-packs" last week, and I'll be setting those plants out into the garden in the next week or so.

Butternut squash nearing maturity.          PHOTO/Amy W.

The husks on the popcorn have been turning brown and dry, and as I've noticed that change I've brought them in. If I leave them outside too long in damp weather, they tend to mold (it's happened before), so bringing them in on time can be important.

I finally brought in some dried Provider Bush Beans that I had left on the plants to mature, to replenish my seed supply for planting next year.

The wrinkled, tan pods were definitely ready to be pulled! The beans have been removed from the pods, and I've set them out to dry in a wide, flat basket.

I have some Joanie Beans growing in the yard, too. These bush beans from my friend Becky are part of her family history, and I plan to save seeds from those, too.

When the weather returns to being a little bit more dry (we've had a lot of cloudy and cool, with light rains mixed in), I'll start bringing in the butternut squash that began to turn to the mature tan color a few weeks ago.

This is a busy time in the garden, but so rewarding. I hope that all the other gardeners out there are enjoying this time in the gardening year as much as I am!

Cupped, Twisty, Weird Tomato Leaves: Herbicide Damage

I have seen, in the past couple of weeks, several examples of tomato and pepper plants that show signs of damage from weed killers. The leaves are variously cupped, twisty, fanned, excessively pointy, and otherwise just plain weird. The gardeners whose plants these are have not been using weed killer in their gardens, nor have they applied any manures (another source of herbicides), but they have used weed killers (or employed a lawn care company that used them) on their lawns.

K-State has a great little "Problem" page about accidental herbicide damage, and this sentence is especially eye-opening: "Some broadleaf herbicides such as 2,4-D are volatile, especially during hot weather, and may drift across the yard or even adjacent yards in concentrations sufficient to cause injury."

Twisty, weird tomato leaves with unusual vein pattern.

This means that even carefully applied lawn herbicides can cause unintended damage in the vegetable garden.

Those of us who have "freedom lawns" (random-weed-and-turf-grass mixes) rather than monoculture lawns typically don't suffer from herbicide damage, because we never use any, but there are plenty of gardeners in urban/suburban areas who live in neighborhoods that demand botanical uniformity in lawns. Vegetable gardeners in these neighborhoods may be stuck "between a rock and a hard place."

When to Harvest Vegetables in a Tough Gardening Year

One of the most wonderful aspects of growing food in your own yard is that you and your family get to eat vegetables (and fruits!) at the peak of their flavor.

UGA has a publication about when that flavor peak occurs for many of the garden crops; it's called (not too surprisingly) When to Harvest Vegetables.For those who are new to gardening, the information about how to tell by look, feel, and smell that it's time to harvest the veggies is very useful. Over time, though, most gardeners begin to develop their own ideas about when the Absolute Peak of flavor is.

One of my most favorite gardeners, Gene Logsden, a.k.a "The Contrary Farmer," has his own ideas about when to harvest. In his recent blog post "Defining Freshness," he wrote:

"With both corn and peas, freshness has another connotation. There is a peak time for flavor, at least for me, depending on how far along in development the vegetable is when picked. If allowed to mature too much, goodbye subtle nuances. Peas have to be picked when they have not yet filled the pod tightly, corn when the kernels are still just a tad on the green “pimply” side as we say."

When all goes well, we go with our own, inner taste guides. When all does not go well, we may be lucky to have a harvest to bring in at all!

For example, many gardeners grow tomatoes so they can experience the amazing flavor of truly vine-ripened tomatoes. This year, I am unlikely to have that experience. If the plant hasn't been attacked by roving bands of fungal spores, then a rogue chipmunk has swarmed up the stems and bitten each fruit before it can ripen fully, or an impatient bird has decided to puncture the side of each one for a taste of the (not fully ripened) insides.

This one should have been picked sooner, before the chipmunk found it. PHOTO.atlantaveggies.blogspot.com

I have taken to bringing in the fruits as they just begin to blush, not waiting for the approach of ripeness. In some cases, this drastic measure is meant to save the tomatoes from critter damage; in others, it was because the plant looked unhealthy enough that it needed to be pulled up.

Right now, there are almost ten pounds of tomatoes in various stages of ripening in my kitchen. None of these will have "vine-ripened" flavor, but they still will be home grown!

Tomato Problems Abound

The tomato-ripening has been slow to begin, but it finally is coming along at a faster clip. The Cherokee Purple tomatoes are big and beautiful; however, the plants on which they are growing look terrible. I wasn't able to get a good picture of the tops of the two plants, partly because the plants are so tall and partly because it keeps raining. Aiming up results in a wet camera lens!

Many of the leaves are bedraggled, and there is marked wilting of some individual stems, while other stems continue to look just fine. I sliced into one of the wilted stems and saw brown in the vascular tissue (located between the green skin and the white, central pith). Those indications, along with the fact that the tomatoes continue to look good, leads me to believe that the problem is one of the soil-borne wilts, probably Fusarium. That is a huge relief, because I have heard that Late Blight (a very bad tomato disease) has been "going around."

Great-looking Cherokee Purple tomato, finally ripening, on a very sad plant.  PHOTO/Amy W.

Ironically, the Costoluto Genovese tomatoes also look good, and also on a very raggedy-looking plant, but it has a completely different problem; it has a leaf-spot disease. I'm thinking that it is Early Blight, because the brown areas on the leaves continue to expand (slowly), and they get the typical concentric rings as they enlarge.

Costoluto Genovese tomatoes, on a plant with a leaf-spot-type fungus.  PHOTO/Amy W.

For the Cherokee Purple tomatoes, my current plan is to harvest all the big tomatoes and then pull up the plants. My next patch of bush beans will go in their place. I just need for it to stop raining long enough to manage the task!

The Costoluto Genovese tomatoes aren't quite as far along. I keep hoping for a dry day (notice a theme here?) on which I can go out and trim away all the "bad" leaves and then see if there is anything besides fruit left to salvage after I complete the pruning.

While I was in Texas, the rain gauge out in the garden accumulated more than five inches of rain. The tomato-disease problems aren't a big surprise, considering how wet it has been all spring and summer. However, they are annoying. Since the forecast is for more, and yet more rain, I am thinking that it is time to come up with a Plan B. Wish me luck?

Meanwhile, there is a little lesson here about these two varieties of tomatoes: Costoluto Genovese seems to resist Fusarium wilt, and Cherokee Purple seems to be resistant to Early Blight. In future years, that information might come in handy.

I hope that all the other gardens out there are having fewer tomato problems!

Crazy Busy Planting Weekend -- and I'm Still Not Done

No pictures yet, but I was able to get most of the rest of the garden planted in summer crops over the long weekend.

On Saturday morning, before working on our own yard, we went out to the farm on Dallas Highway where we usually volunteer, and we weeded (a lot) and planted a couple dozen tomato plants and a couple dozen pepper plants in some of the raised beds.

Then, just when we thought we were leaving for the day, our farmer friend (Charles) said, "when you come back after lunch you can plant the rest of the tomatoes down in the field." So we went back after lunch, and with the help of one other guy we planted two 150 foot rows of tomato plants. In other words, we started the planting-weekend with a bang.

I didn't really start on my own yard until the next day, because I was kind of wiped out after that, but  planting in my yard included:

Half of the sweet potatoes (Beauregard, Purple Delight), the parching corn (Supai Red), this year's round of the melon de-hybridization project (Amy's Kennesaw Sweet Canary), a few of the "dwarf" butternut squash that I planted last year, watermelon (Luscious Golden), cucumbers (Burpee's Picklebush, Straight Nine) to replace ones that didn't come up when they were planted before, one more tomato plant, and some flower seeds. I also started some flower seeds in Jiffy Pellets, because I will need a lot more flowers for our bees.

After the corn is up and  looking good, I plan to plant peanuts in the spaces between. I still have some sweet potato slips to plant (Nancy Hall, Porto Rican Gold), and I'm expecting to harvest the onions and garlic within the next two or three weeks, which means I'll be planting the Tarahumara Popping Sorghum soon, too. When the shallots come out, I'll be planting more zucchini in their space.

Joe and I also worked on the "foundation planting" area that had been destroyed last summer when the tree smashed the house. The soil there was VERY compacted clay; breaking that up and mixing in the compost and other amendments required some seriously hard work. At the sunnier end of that bed we planted the bay tree that has been growing in a pot for the past few years, three perennial, purple-flowered Salvia, and a couple of Coronation Gold Yarrow.

The hard work will all be rewarded later in the summer, when the flowers are beautiful and we are enjoying the harvest, but right now I am a mass of sore muscles. Of course, I am also very happy to have accomplished so much.

Hope all the other gardens out there are doing well!

Garden Update

Does anyone else have sore muscles today from all the garden-work yesterday? I amended and planted two and a half beds and set up the bird bath, and then I bumped up some of the remaining plants into larger pots.

The two completed beds are the two nearest the front door. Now, instead of weeds, the long curved bed has three eggplants, thirteen pepper plants, and some gladiolus bulbs to go with the bee balm that was already there, and the smaller bed shaped like a big slice of pie has six Swiss chard, seeds for zinnias and pickling cucumbers, and the birdbath. When Joe got back in the late afternoon from kayaking on the Etowah River, he was amazed at how different the front yard looked!

The "half" part of the two-and-a-half beds is one that is supposed to get tomatoes planted in it later in the summer, based on my newly-created rotation scheme, but it got a couple of Amish tomato plants early. I need for the Amish tomatoes to be separate from the rest to avoid any further cross-pollination.

Last year's Amish tomatoes looked pretty different from the tomatoes of the first couple of years, and I am hoping that the older seeds (saved from one of the earlier years with this variety) that I used this year will produce plants that are more similar to the original variety. Keeping them in a bed across the yard from the rest should lessen the cross pollination problem.

Other activities for the day included admiring our new bees and cleaning my bunnies' enclosures. My friend Cheryl stopped by to pick up some plastic nursery pots because she needed more of the 3-gallon size (I had plenty under the house) and she brought some bunny salad - which included some wheat plants - from her yard for Moonpie, Tiny, Burrito, and Holstein. They seemed to enjoy the different salad!

I'm expecting to plant most of the rest of the summer garden over the next couple of weeks, completing a little bit each evening after work. The sweet potatoes will be last, because they need reliably warm soil to do well.

Tomato Varieties Update

Since it's time to think about what to grow this year, I spent part of one evening this week going through my seeds, tossing the oldest packets and noting what I needed to find more of for this year's garden. I am still waiting on the Last Seed Catalogue, the one from my favorite seed source - Sand Hill Preservation Center - before submitting any seed orders, but I have just about worked out what I want to plant. When I have the varieties all chosen, I'll post those, but this post is about Tomatoes.

In April of 2010, I wrote a post that listed most of the tomato varieties I had tried in my garden, along with a note about each variety's relative success in my yard. Going through my stash of seeds reminded me that I should probably update the list.

These are the tomato varieties for which I found seed packets (some of which were empty) and that I have grown two or more plants of since the last tomato variety update:

Akers Plum - Large paste-type tomato that produced well and remained healthy in my yard.
Wuhib - My favorite paste/plum tomato. Amazing productivity and disease resistance.
Old Ferry Morse Beefsteak - Good flavor, reasonable productivity (only grown one year so far). Will grow it again this year to verify its hardiness.
Jaune Flammee - Orange-red tomato, medium size, not super productive in my yard, and its flavor, though pretty good, didn't beat the flavor of some of my favorites.
Yellow Out Red In - An heirloom long-keeper, but I liked Burpee's Winter Red Hybrid better.
Burpee's Long Keeper - Its name says it all, but I liked Burpee's Winter Red Hybrid better.
Burpee's Winter Red Hybrid - The one I will continue to include in my last planting of tomatoes in June, to provide tomatoes into November and beyond.
Rutgers - Reliable, productive, and good to eat.
Costoluto Genovese - I tried a packet from Cook's Garden, and it wasn't like the original I had tried many years ago. It may be that the entire strain has changed, but I might try to find yet another packet from another source..
Cherokee Purple - The seeds I got from Fedco weren't quite as hardy in my garden as seeds I had used previously (from Sand Hill Preservation, I think). I'm going to go back to a different (non-Maine) supplier.
Olivette Jaune - A cherry-sized, yellow, plum-looking tomato. Very tasty, but the plants don't survive beyond the end of August in my yard. I will probably be trying a different cherry-type this year. There are so many from which to choose!
Red Chinese - Died in my yard.
Yellow marble - A tart, yellow, cherry tomato. Hardy and productive, but I think I'm going to look for something a little sweeter to try. One very good thing about the yellow varieties is that the color confuses some potential competitors for the fruits - birds and children both seem to be looking for that red ripeness indicator!
Amish - These are seeds I saved, from plants given to me by a tomato-growing friend in Kennesaw. He has saved seeds for this variety for more than thirty years. The tomatoes are yellow with red swirls; they are large, meaty, and delicious, but they are not very productive. However, I will be growing them every year for the foreseeable future. Did I mention the amazing flavor?



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Pruning Tomatoes on a Blazing Hot Day

Gardeners can be a little bit crazy, working outside in weather that everyone else avoids by staying in the air-conditioned indoors, and my crazy-gardener streak was showing earlier today. This is the first officially hot day of the year, with a high around 92 degrees, and I "celebrated" by pruning tomatoes, after hoeing weeds out of several beds, at the garden/farm on Dallas Highway where I volunteer on Saturdays.

Here in Georgia, it is a good idea to prune away, while the tomato plants are still small, most of the growth (leaves and suckers/stems) below the first flower cluster, then when the plants are bigger to give them another trim, to open up the plant for improved air flow. This pruning helps reduce the risk of several diseases, so the effort is totally worthwhile. Out at the garden/farm, there are tomato plants in both stages of growth. I worked today on the littler plants.

You know you've done a good job when you look back at the row and every plant you see looks like something Charlie Brown would choose for use in the Christmas pageant. In fact, I thought I had pretty well massacred the 40-or-so plants that I'd worked on, but then one of the chief gardeners came along behind me and clipped a leaf here and there from some of the plants. Apparently, I am a fairly conservative pruner.

Are We Sure this is Spring?

It's hard to take spring seriously when it is already looking so much like summer out in the garden. The zucchini have begun to make good-sized squashes, some of which have already made it onto the stove:

The first green beans will be coming in tomorrow:

And the peppers are already beginning to form. These, I think, are Spanish Spice:

These are Feherezon:

Is that not crazy? Elsewhere in the garden, the patch of onions that I planted from dry sets (little dry bulbs) all sent up flowering stalks before the plants even had a chance to make bulbs, so the harvest from that patch is not going to be what I had hoped for. In addition, the few good bulbs in the patch will need to be eaten fairly soon since they've been split by those flowering stalks.

The onions I planted from a little bunch of slender green starts made smaller-than-usual bulbs and then threw in the towel a week ago; the tops turned brown and fell over. Onions usually don't call it quits until the end of June. Everything I've read indicates that the alternating warm and cold weather is behind the early maturity, and the early flowering, of the two crops.

The garlic is finishing early, and strangely, too. The leaves are beginning to yellow, so I pulled a couple of bulbs to check on how the crop is coming along. This is what I got:

It's hard to imagine that these two garlic bulbs were growing within two feet of each other in the bed, but they were. They are different varieties, but the two shouldn't be so very different in size! I am guessing that the rest of the garlic harvest is going to be equally strange; however, I am going to wait until the tops are absolutely brown before pulling any more from the ground. I'd like give any remaining tinies the opportunity to get bigger!

In the good news column, the Yellow Marble cherry tomato has been busy making little tomatoes. There are lots of these on the one plant of this variety:

Most of my other tomato plants, all started in the house in mid-March, are flowering, and a few have tiny tomatoes on them. Their timing is just about right, based on the usual unfolding of the gardening year.

Since the zucchini are being nicely productive right now, I went ahead and poured a little fish-emulsion fertilizer on them, to keep them going. It would be a shame to risk letting the plants slow down this early in the season!

Also today I turned under the pea vines. The harvest from the peas this year wasn't great, but that is my own fault. It turns out that bunnies really like pea vines in their "bunny salad," so I brought pieces of the plants in to Moonpie (our momma rabbit) and her babies most days while the plants were trying to make peas. I'm pretty sure I would have had more peas if I hadn't kept harvesting pieces of the vines.

By Friday or Saturday, the vines will have decomposed enough that I will be able to replant that space. At this point, it's hard to know what to put there. Some of my crops are running about a month ahead of their usual schedule. Considering the strangeness of this year's weather and its effects on the garden so far, what will June and July be like? The answer, probably, is "continued craziness."

Unwelcome Guest

Plenty of people have mentioned to me this year that their gardens had been host to one or more tomato hornworms, but my garden had managed to miss those quite large pests until, apparently, the last day or two. I didn't notice it until today, but here one is:

What's really funny is that I didn't even see the four-inch caterpillar at first. You'd think a critter this large would be totally obvious, but the way it's lined up with the stem, and exactly the same color as the stem, helps keep it hidden.

Instead, what I noticed first was the big black balls of frass on some leaves. Then, knowing there had to be a caterpillar around somewhere, I looked more closely at the plant and figured out that a whole lot of leaves had gone missing. It took another minute or two of searching to spot the big, squishy culprit.




So far, I think there's only this one tomato hornworm, so I am going to leave it alone for the rest of the day and wait to see what happens. If all goes well, a brachonid wasp will find it and lay eggs on it, and I won't have to do anything. When the baby wasps hatch out, they'll eat the caterpillar and that will be the end of that. If no wasp shows up soon, though, I'll remove the caterpillar to prevent the total demolition of my pepper-patch.

Elsewhere in the garden, things are chugging along just fine. The husks on some of the ears of popcorn have dried, which means those ears are pretty much done, so I've picked those. Other ears of corn are still very green, but in a couple of weeks they'll be ready to bring in, too. Last year, I waited to harvest the popcorn until almost all the ears were covered in brown husks (dry), but a few ears had begun to mold. I don't want that to happen - it's a very small crop - which is why I'm bringing the ears in as they seem ready.

This year's popcorn is supposed to be red, but not all of the ears are. Some are dark red, some are kind of orange, and one that I brought in is sunflower-yellow. It's a beautiful mix!



I'm beginning to work on the fall garden today, but I realized that it actually was begun a couple of months ago, when I planted the parsnips. It's hard to find room for these when all the summer crops are going into the garden, but in January, when I want to add variety to the roasted root veggies, I'll be glad that I did.

When 'Organic' Gardening Goes Horribly Wrong

I have a friend who's had some trouble with his tomatoes and peppers this year. I never seem to have a camera handy when I'm out at his garden/farm, but I can say that the leaves on most of the tomato and pepper plants in most parts of his garden are narrow and twisty with weird pointy parts.

At first, I thought the problem might be a virus (it definitely wasn't a fungal or bacterial infection), but it seemed that the problem might also be caused by herbicide residues in the soil. My friend uses horse manure, but he was a little doubtful when I said that I thought herbicide residues might be causing the problem. He ages that manure in huge piles for a full year, and he's never had this problem before (in more than 20 years of using manure as his main source of organic matter in the soil).

To find out for sure, I did the experiment described in various places online. I took some of his soil home with me, mixed it half & half with potting soil, then divided that into three pots. I did the same thing with soil from my own garden so I'd have a control to compare the results to.

Then I went to one of those big box stores and bought a four-pack of Big Boy tomatoes. I planted two in his pots, two in mine, and planted bean seeds (five each) in the other two pots.

In the bean pots, four germinated in my pot and only one in his, but they seemed to be mostly ok after coming up.

After three weeks, this is what the leaves on my tomato plants look like:



And these are the leaves on his tomato plants:




I'm pretty sure this means that herbicide residue is the problem, and it turns out that the problem showing up most often at the County Extension office this year is this exact problem -- damage from herbicide residues. In most instances, the damage is worse because people have used grass clippings from lawns sprayed within the last month or so right on their gardens as mulch. At least my friend's source of herbicides has sat around for a full year, giving it more time to break down and disappear.

The real frustration here is that people are trying to do the right thing -- using local amendments to improve their soil (my friend) or local mulches (others) to reduce evaporation from the soil, saving water, and to reduce the need for weeding. These uses also keep organic matter out of the landfill.

I brought my experiment to an organic gardening class I was co-teaching with the leader of the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, and it turned out that one person who showed up had already had the damage-from-grass-clipping problem.

Another had bought some hay to use as mulch in her garden that has always been managed using organic-approved practices and never had any big disease problems. She and her husband had brought leaves (thankfully in plastic bags, so spores weren't getting loose all over the place) from plants in her yard to show several disease problems that seemed to have arrived with the hay.

They had been told that the hayfield had never been sprayed, and I had a huge moment of doubt about that, but after more thought this seems totally possible. If the field hadn't been sprayed, it probably had a lot of weeds in it. Some of those weeds were probably in the same families as the now-infected garden plants (including the tomatoes). Weeds could easily be carriers of diseases that her garden had never before been exposed to.

This is all one big cautionary tale. I am now thinking about ways to get more organic matter into my garden without actually bringing it in from the outside, because the outside is looking pretty untrustworthy. I've grown winter cover-crops before. The vetch that I grew wasn't especially attractive, or all that easy to dig back into the soil in spring, but I am thinking about trying that again.

I've also read in Dick Raymond's "The Joy of Gardening" that in plots where he had experimented with growing two crops of edible legumes (beans, peas, not vetch) in the succession with other crops, the soil was great. He had dug in all the crop residues from the two legume crops. His method calls for growing a lot of peas.

Overgrown

My front yard is hilariously overgrown right now. The first cucumbers will be coming out soon because they're looking a little mildewed, and some of the herbs that are going to seed will be trimmed back and look a little less unruly, but the corn will be there for a while; it's popcorn that needs to stay on the stalk to dry for several weeks after maturing.



Right now, the sweet potatoes, just left/front of the corn in the photo below, are looking very healthy, and in another week or two, they are going to really sprawl all over the place. Their area will look less and less tidy as the summer progresses (but it will be glorious!).

My harvests are still heavily skewed toward cucumbers.


As a result, we've been eating a lot of a modified version of "Israeli salad," something I learned to make a long time ago, from a friend of a friend's grandmother.

The version I learned is approximately equal parts finely chopped cucumber and tomato, about a half part finely diced onion, the same for parsley, a little salt, then lemon juice and olive oil as dressing. This should sit for a few hours in the fridge before being served. I never wrote down exact proportions for all the ingredients because I watched it being made and figured out how to just "eyeball it."

However, for anyone interested in giving this a try, there is a more precise version of the recipe at MyJewishLearning.com.

The salads we've been making over the last few weeks have zero tomatoes because we've had so many cucumbers and so few (or zero!) tomatoes. I've been using lots of parsley, too, because the swallowtail butterflies haven't found my parsley yet. When they do, and their little caterpillars start to grow, it will be all over for my parsley.

Lately, I've been going light on the onion, partly because I've been taking it in my lunchbox to work, and partly because I'm running low on onions grown in my own yard. I find myself balking at the thought of actually buying onions before August.

Soon we'll have more tomato to add to the salad. My first-crop tomato plants are loaded with green fruits, and each plant has a few tomatoes that are beginning to show the pink blush that signals the beginning of ripening. It's been a long wait, but we are almost there . . .

A Day's Harvest

This is most of what I brought in from the garden yesterday. The cucumbers include both Straight Nine salad cukes and Littleleaf Pickling cukes. The squash is a trombocino. It will feature in more than one meal, because it is a lot of squash. (For reference, the veggies are in my biggest dough bowl; it is more than two feet long.) Surprisingly, we are still getting to pick blueberries. I am bringing in a quart or two each day. There were several birds out picking with me this morning, so that may end soon, but I am very happy to continue putting these into the freezer, the dehydrator, and our stomachs!



The Alabama Black pole beans have not been especially productive, but that may change as we have had cooler weather recently (low 90s rather than high 90s). I hope that's the case, because a rabbit ate all my bush bean plants down to the stems.
I picked the hot peppers, that Joe put in the smoker with a chicken, later in the day, so they didn't make it into the official Harvest Photograph. Smoking the hot peppers is one way to save them for the winter; we use them like chipotles (which, I guess, they are).



I am growing two kinds of little yellow tomatoes this year. The Yellow Marble are the size shape, and approximate flavor of regular cherry tomatoes. They started producing EARLY and show no signs of stopping. I have been taking these in my lunchbox to work every day, and I'm not tired of them yet.

The other little yellow tomato is Olivette Jeune (possibly misspelled). This is like a little Roma tomato: same shape, thick walls, low "juice" content. These were late in starting up production, but they are making up for it now. The plant (I have only one), pictured below, is covered with tomatoes. They've been especially good in salsa, but they have a surprisingly short "counter" life; they start to turn mushy within a few days after harvest, so they need to be eaten or processed as soon as possible.



The squash patch is still healthy and has several more smaller squash coming along. I've had to tear some patches of squash-bug-eggs from the leaves, but otherwise it is problem-free.



The lima beans are also still doing fine. The picture shows the funny flat pods.



The Jimmy Nardello peppers are finally starting to turn red. When they do, they become more sweet than any other pepper I've grown, so I have been just as patient as I can in letting them stay on the plants. However, I will get to harvest these, soon!

Beating Up the Tomatoes

A couple of people have asked me recently why their beautifully big, green, and healthy tomato plants have no flowers and fruits. It is perfectly understandable that they would be confused, because anyone would expect that a healthy plant would be a productive plant. Weirdly enough, it is possible for a plant to be too "green."

Usually, a plant (the kind from which we expect fruit) that is all lush green leaves and stems with no flowers and fruits is getting too much nitrogen.

I heard the N-P-K combination in commercial fertilizers explained once as Up-Down-All Around. The nitrogen (N) is for top growth (Up), the phosphorus (P) is for root growth (Down), and the potassium (K) is for "all around" growth. That is an over-simplification of what the nutrients do, but it gets the basic point across and is easy to remember. And what it helps us know is that, somehow, those lush tomato plants have had access to too much nitrogen.

There is no easy way to get those plants to make tomatoes that I am aware of. Eventually, given enough time, the nitrogen will become less abundant in the soil and the plants will flower. However, it could take many weeks of waiting, depending on how much fertilizer was accidentally used on the plants.

My step-dad Grandpa Bill, though, has said that such plants can be stressed to get them to flower. Grandpa Bill is in his 80s and has been gardening in Oklahoma for his entire life, so he knows quite a bit about gardening. He says that one way to stress those plants is to just "whump 'em." A hail storm can do this for you, and if you are in Oklahoma, hail storms are common enough that a gardener with too-lush tomato plants can just wait for one.

When no hail has been forecast, he has known farmers and gardeners to actually whack the plants with sticks, to get them bruised enough that they have to use up a bunch of nitrogen in tissue repair. In a week or two, the plants start to flower.

I have never had the problem of too-lush tomato plants, so I have not yet had the experience of beating up my tomato plants, but I would really like to see this personally.

Another, less weird way to stress the plants might be to do some pruning. The plants would then use up nitrogen in the new growth that they would put out to replace what was lost.

It's an interesting problem.

Tomato Update

We ate the first tomatoes of the season last night, with the first zucchini and peppers, but I think we might have cheated. One of the tomato plants that set a lot of early fruit had leaves that turned yellow and then wilted. A lot of leaves. Most of the leaves on the plant, in fact. So, I pulled up the plant and put it in the garbage and brought the green tomatoes into the house.

The two tomatoes in the picture above are from that plant, which was a Red Chinese. Apparently, this particular variety is NOT resistant to verticillium wilt. I have replaced that plant with a gift from a friend, a tomato of the variety Eva Purple Ball (thanks Susan!). However, there is another Red Chinese out in the garden, and it isn't looking as robustly healthy as its neighbors in the tomato bed. It will probably need to be replaced soon, too.

The good news is that it isn't too late to replace a tomato plant!

Other tomato news: the first two little tomatoes on the Yellow Marble tomato plant were ripe today, and we ate them. Last year, I grew this variety in a pot that was filled with MiracleGro potting soil, and the tomatoes were very tart. I wondered about the effect of the soil on flavor, so this year I planted one of these in the ground. This year the Yellow Marble tomatoes taste like cherry tomatoes, and they aren't too tart! This, to me, is an interesting finding.

A Too Wet Garden

At the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden (PAR) this morning, we had planned to plant the sweet potatoes. The ground was pretty wet, though, like it had been last week, so we decided, after forking up the soil a bit to try to get some air into it, that we would wait yet another week (the slips have been ready to plant for three weeks now).

We looked around at other parts of the garden, and some are doing really well. The summer squashes look good, some of beans (both pole and bush) look good, too, but other beans still haven't come up, and there are holes in the lines of okra where seeds haven't seemed to germinate. The melons haven't all come up, either, and it's been long enough that it is a safe bet they aren't going to.

Even worse, the tomatoes looked miserable. They had looked almost as bad last week, but this week more are dead. We decided to dig one up to try to figure out what was wrong. We started by lifting off one tomato cage and pulling the leaf mulch back from the plant, and this is what we saw:





It turns out that most of the tomato plants were drowning. Luckily, one of our gardeners had her camera handy, and she took pictures so we could show the gardeners who hadn't been able to come to the garden (thanks Gloria!).

The PAR garden has a new irrigation system, installed on Earth Day (for free!), but it apparently is doing too good of a job. Since it is a new system, even though it is miles better than what we relied on before, it is going to take a while to get the watering schedule just right. Before we left, we readjusted it to water less often. If the garden is still wet next week, we will tweak it again.

After discovering that the tomatoes were trying to grow in a marsh, we went back and looked at all the blank spaces in the rows of plantings, where seedlings had not emerged, and it looks as though all the blank spaces are in little depressions in the garden that were wetter than surrounding areas. The seeds probably rotted in the ground.

In an effort to save the remaining tomato plants, we dug them up and I brought them home to plant in a wooden flat filled with Miracle Gro potting soil. Hopefully, they will all recover so we can replant them in a week or two.

Tomato Varieties

Seedlings I've started in the house are doing well so far. Nothing looks too leggy and I haven't seen any critters on them yet (some years there is a whitefly problem). The tomatoes are taller than everything else, but that is normal.





Someone asked me this week what tomato varieties I grow. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t simple, because I grow some different varieties every year. However, I do grow Rutgers and/or Better Boy (usually both) every year alongside other varieties because I know they will do well in my yard, regardless of the weather.

They are both disease resistant and productive, and should be equally successful in other gardens in this area. I can’t say how they would do in other parts of the country, though, in different climate and soil conditions and with different disease pressures.

Anyone in this area (North Georgia) who is new to gardening and planning to buy just a few plants to get started should look for varieties that are disease resistant. Those will have the letters “VFN” and possibly more letters and numbers somewhere on the label. The VFN tag is very important, because the problems they stand for (Verticillium Wilt, Fusarium Wilt, and Root Knot Nematode) are commonly present in soils across the whole region. Using disease resistant plants improves the odds of garden success.

I have grown a lot of different varieties over the years, almost all starting from seed, with varied results. Here’s the list:

Brandywine—the tomato that so many people love, dies in my yard.
Mr. Stripey—dies in my yard.
Glacier—dies in my yard.
Dad’s Sunset—dies in my yard.
Riesentraube—survived in my yard the one year I grew it, but the tomatoes tasted like sugar water (I won’t grow it again).
Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter “VFN”—did well in the drought years, but keeled over, from Verticillium Wilt I think, in last year’s spring deluge (I won’t grow it again).
Heatwave—I planted this one year as part of the later batch that goes in where and when the onions and garlic come out. The Rutgers that I planted at the same time were more productive and tasted a LOT better (I won’t grow it again).
Rutgers—the determinate, meaty canning tomato that I plant almost every year; it is productive and tasty, but most of the tomatoes come at once, so it needs to be accompanied by a longer-producing indeterminate type to make sure tomatoes keep coming in all season.
Roma—widely available paste-type tomato that does well in my yard; I’ve grown it in many different years, but last year replaced it with another paste variety.
Wuhib—paste variety that I grew for the first time last year. It did well in the crazy rains, and I will be growing it again this year. More productive than Roma.
Cherokee Purple—I grew this for the first time last year; it produced well in the crazy rains and was incredibly flavorful. I am growing it again this year. Indeterminate type.
Amish—I grew this for the first time last year. It was not especially productive, but it survived in my yard, the fruits were attractive (yellow with pink swirls), and the flavor was incredible. I am growing it again this year. Indeterminate type.
Gardener’s Delight—a cherry type. This lived in my yard, but the tomatoes all cracked before they were fully ripe (I won’t grow it again).
Sweet 100 and its even more productive relatives—cherry type that has done well in my yard in many different years. Productive and tasty.
Better Boy—widely available indeterminate big tomato that has done well in my yard in many different years. I usually just buy one or two of these at a store instead of growing my own from seed.
Costoluto Genovese—the first few years I grew these, they were from one seed packet from a source that went out of business before I could order more, but I had loved these tomatoes. A few years later, I ordered some from another source, but they were not the same; the fruits were less flattened, less lobed and less tasty. I am trying again this year, with seed from a different source. Indeterminate.
Arkansas Traveler—pink tomato that does well in my yard. Indeterminate. I will be growing this again, but not this year.
Winter Red Hybrid (Burpee)—a long-keeper type that I usually plant in late June. Does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and performs well in my yard. However, this year I am trying a different (non-hybrid) long-keeper called ‘Yellow Out, Red In. ‘
Matt’s Wild Cherry—cherry type that produces a whole lot of very small red tomatoes on a very indeterminate plant; the branches reach about ten feet long by the end of the summer, so it isn’t the ideal plant for a small space, but the flavor of the little fruits is excellent.
Yellow Marble—cherry type that I tried for the first time last year (the seed packet was given to me for free); the fruits were too tart, but the plant was in a container, which could have affected the flavor, so this year I am going to put one in the ground to see how it does, both in terms of survival and flavor.

I’ve probably grown more varieties than are on this list, but these are the varieties for which I have records.

Other varieties grown with great success by friends in this area: Early Girl, Celebrity, and Park’s Whopper.

Tomatoes I am growing this year: Rutgers, Cherokee Purple, Amish, Costoluto Genovese, Chinese, Yellow Marble, Olivette (cherry type), and Yellow Out Red In.

If there is space left after these are planted, I will add one or two Better Boy plants.