Tomatoes, Queens of the Garden

Sure, we gardeners are capable of growing everything from azuki beans to zucchini, but let’s not kid ourselves: the real reason for anyone to even think of growing anything in the first place is to possess, sometime in late summer, those succulent, sweet-tart, juicy tomatoes, whose flavor can’t be bought anywhere else. For my neighbor and me, tomatoes hold the central ground in our gardens. We baby them, carefully tending and transplanting the seedlings. We cage them and stake them and fertilize them lovingly. For their sake, we pick off large caterpillars—hornworms and corn ear borers—with our bare hands, and then smash their guts out on the ground.

It’s not just the taste, either. The tomato is a singularly rewarding plant. If it’s happy and well watered, it keeps growing until it makes a jungle of the gardener’s neat rows. It becomes heavy with fruit that balloons out in a satisfying way until it reaches the desired proportions. Then we have the satisfaction of watching the fruit ripen and become just a bit redder every day until it becomes as pleasingly fat and uniformly bright as a clown’s nose.

In a fit of experimentation (and not wanting to be outdone by the Man with the Perfect Lawn), I planted five varieties of tomatoes this year: Green Zebra, Sweet Pea Currant, Roma VFN, Early Girl, and Top Sirloin. The latter three had all been relatively successful last year, and represented three basic types I thought my garden should always have: the Italian tomato, so piquant in salsas; the early; and the big, muscular, highly impressive beefsteak. I mixed together my Romas and a Green Zebra with some cilantro, garlic, and an Anaheim pepper for a salsa that had more than the usual zing and tartness, so different from the vinegary flavor of the stuff sold in jars at the supermarket.

I chose not to plant Brandywines, deeming them too troublesome. After a long spell of hot, dry weather, followed by torrential rains, last year’s Brandywine tomatoes had all split down the middle, attracting those ugly, small insects that burrow into exposed vegetable flesh. The few Brandywines that ripened properly were mealy in texture. It might have been the weather that did it, but I felt that even an heirloom variety should prove hardier than that.

Instead, I tried the Green Zebras, just for fun. When ripe, they are yellow, with green striping and green flesh. Disappointingly, however, they tasted much like ordinary red tomatoes—perhaps just a little less sweet, but without enough difference to matter much. The plants also yielded little fruit, compared to the other varieties. I might plant them again, but like a blond news anchor who only knows enough to read the TelePrompter and crack silly jokes, they will be kept around primarily for their looks.

I grew the Sweet Pea Currant Tomatoes in planters, as they seemed too delicate for the main garden space. Their seeds were the size of grains of sand, so small that I wondered whether they could germinate successfully. But germinate they did, and the small, fine-leaved plants prospered after I put them in the big flowerpots. They soon started producing feathery yellow flowers that seemed too tiny to attract pollinators. Somehow, those flowers gave rise to hundreds of pearl-shaped tomatoes. When ripe, the tomatoes were thick-skinned but sweet—and something of a chore to pick, because there were so many of them. A hundred of them could fit into the palm of my hand.

But all these tomatoes, though lovely to behold, are also a cause of great anxiety as fall approaches. (Yes, it may seem like the seasons have shifted already, but technically, we have three more days of summer to enjoy, if you include today.) I am keeping careful track of nighttime low temperatures. The Man with the Perfect Lawn says that tomatoes lose their flavor when the temperature dips below 50 degrees. I haven’t found information to corroborate this, but I have read that it’s important to save them from frost. Also, according to this account by Carl Wilson of the Colorado State University Cooperative Extension, if a tomato is entirely green, it may not ripen at all. With that in mind, I have decided to leave my tomatoes on the vine as long as possible before the first frost is upon us.

We’ll see who is right. The gardener with the most tomatoes wins the race. Since my neighbor planted his several weeks earlier than I did mine, he has an advantage that is probably unbeatable. Still, I’ll do my best to catch up (pun intended!). I will give the tally when the last fruit rolls in.

Pride Has Its Downfall: The Demise of the Buttercup Squash

For the second year in a row, my squash vines have died. The first year, it was the squash bugs that killed them—those hard-shelled creatures that smelled sourly of spoiled cantaloupe when they were smashed. When I examined the corpses, squash bug eggs were everywhere on the undersides of the brittle, gray-brown leaves.

With squash bugs, once you know what you’re looking for, it’s very easy to find them in every stage of their lives. The adults are big, usually at least three-quarters of an inch long, with dull brown coloration. Their backs are shaped like flattened footballs, and their snouts come to a small point, the better to pierce the stems of unsuspecting squash plants and their near relatives, the cucumbers and melons. They try to keep a low profile, and will move to the opposite side of a stem or leaf if they see you looking for them. Often, they may be found at the base of the plant. Sometimes, an adult squash bug or two will emerge after a heavy watering, perhaps because they don’t like being soaked.

The nymphs can be as small as a pinhead, with milky, gray-green bodies and long, thin, spidery legs. Like the adults, they move quickly to the other side of a leaf if they know they’ve been spotted. They tend to cluster on the undersides of leaves, and they’re very easy to squish when young—the mere touch of a finger will do the trick. The eggs are laid in orderly clusters on the undersides of leaves—usually squash leaves, as the nymphs survive best on a squash plant, but sometimes they appear on the leaves of other cucurbit family plants. One squash bug in my garden must have been disoriented, because I recently found a clutch of squash bug eggs on a bean leaf. When ripe, the eggs are an easy-to-spot leathery red-brown; when freshly laid, they are gray. I used to remove an entire leaf if I found squash bug eggs on it, but I later found it just as easy to pinch off the eggs and flush them down an indoor drain.

This year, the squash bugs were fewer in number, and I managed to hunt down all their eggs and nymphs before they could cause much damage to the plants. But there was another enemy I hadn’t reckoned on: the dreaded squash vine borer. The moth that metamorphoses from this horrible larva is said to be an interesting-looking creature, very much like an orange-and-black wasp in appearance, although I have never seen its adult form except in photographs. One moth may lay many eggs, and because the eggs are laid singly, all over the plant, they are much harder to find than squash bug eggs, although they are only slightly smaller and have the same red-brown color.

I crushed many of these eggs between my fingers before I found out what they were; I merely assumed they were bad because they looked like bug eggs and they were on my plants. They appeared on the undersides of leaves, along the vines, on flowers, in the curves of tendrils—anywhere a tiny object could possibly be stuck. When I saw a wet, yellow powder dripping from the underside of a vine, I thought I might be in for some trouble, but I ignored the problem, not wanting to know the truth. In fact, that yellow powder was the frass that emerged from the larva, which is an entomologist’s fancy way of saying that it was caterpillar poop.

One thing I already knew from my reading was that the cure for squash vine borers sounds worse than the disease: you have to slit the vine open lengthwise with a sharp knife and pull the creature out. While I dallied, the larvae ate away at the plants’ vascular systems, destroying their ability to transport water and nutrients to their leaves. Soon, their presence was evident everywhere, as entire vines suddenly wilted, turning a wall of gorgeous, green leaves into a graveyard in a single afternoon. I went at the vines with the knife and pulled out the pulpy, soft-bodied, maggot-like culprits one by one, but it was too late. In the end, I found at least 40 of the creatures inside the vines, some of them almost an inch long and as fat as the vine itself. The vines, already weakened by the pests, could not recover from my hacking, so in the end, I had to take out two more plants by the root (in addition to the one that an early arrival among the larvae had killed more than a month ago) and throw them in the trash.

My biggest squash vine had time to put out one fair-sized fruit and two smaller ones. They are lying on my countertop now. If I’m lucky, the larger squash may prove edible when I cut it open. There is one survivor among the squash vines. It, too, hosted its share of vine borers, but so far, it has not suffered much from being cut open at the base. I haven’t much hope for getting anything out of that vine, however: all the fruits it has produced have been afflicted with blossom-end rot. The Man with the Perfect Lawn informs me that the garden center sells a product that I can spray on the leaves that will cure the problem by providing an instant calcium supplement, but I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble. After lying on my back and cutting out those horrible creatures one by one from the vines, I’m weary of the whole enterprise. Next year, if I decide to try again with this plant, I might have to use an insecticide. For me, that’s a serious acknowledgment of defeat.

The only bright spot in this affair may be that the squash has attracted these pests away from the cucumbers and melons, which have been quite happy (except for rabbit damage, in the case of the cantaloupe). Perhaps I should change the way I view the buttercup squash and use them as decoys instead of crop-bearing plants, much as I used the radishes that I sowed among the lettuce rows. The trouble is, I have a great liking for this type of winter squash, which gives me the greater motivation to try to keep it alive and producing. One day, I must learn how to evade the legions of pests that assail these lush vines, for when the weather turns cold, there are few foods as comforting as a lovely squash. When boiled, its deep-orange flesh turns soft and smooth; when battered and deep-fried, the slivers of squash melt delightfully as you chew them, reminding you with each sunny, sweet bite of the warmth of the summer that was.

Fertilizer: Grow, Damn You!

Considering how much effort we put into promoting their health and well-being, it’s no wonder some gardeners talk to their plants. I’ve caught myself now and again saying things like “Happy now?” or “Well, you look good today!” to a particularly robust specimen of vegetable life. I’ve also caught myself feeling resentful toward plants that seemingly refuse to grow at the desired rate. It’s much easier to shout “What’s wrong with you?” at the plant than to actually figure out what the plant is communicating with its stunted stem or yellowing leaves.

My lettuce, spinach, and radish seedlings gave me no end of frustration in their early weeks when they were stuck in the two-leaf stage for what seemed an inordinate length of time. I wondered if they would even survive. They had emerged vigorously, but then languished. So I went out to the garage for what remained of the bone meal and blood meal I had spread in the flowerbeds, and worked it into the top two inches of garden soil with my new cultivator.

Then I left on my week of vacation, feeling discouraged. I returned to find nearly mature radishes and lush rows of half-grown Bibb lettuce. Perhaps it was the watering technique that did it (the Man with the Perfect Lawn, who kindly watered the plants in my absence, favors deep-watering), or perhaps it was the organic fertilizer. I am inclined to favor the theory that the fertilizer contributed the most to the new growth, grateful though I am for my neighbor’s help.

The tomatoes, transplanted into the ground just before I left, had not grown much taller, but their stems were thick and strong. The Swiss chard seedlings had grown into fine plants with beautiful, arching leaves, and the onions looked—well, alive. One can never tell what those things are doing underground, even though their tops are at present unimpressive. I decided to let things alone for a while, pleased with my garden’s transition to what looked like actual viability.

Last weekend, though, I started noticing that the two buttercup squash plants on the side nearer to the house were yellowing. A few days later, while I was watering, I saw a plump squash bug climb to the top of a broad leaf to escape the downpour. It was this year’s first squash bug, an ill omen for its host. I promptly grabbed the brown bug and crunched it between my flip-flop and the garden frame. Last year, I had killed dozens of the juice-sucking insects, not including the hundred or so tiny, whitish-green squash bug nymphs I had squeezed between my fingers, all to no avail. They dried up the buttercup squash plants first before moving on to the zucchini, which lived through the summer but produced not a single fruit.

I looked for the leathery rows of squash bug eggs on the undersides of the leaves, but found none. Then I removed all the dead and withering leaves from the squash plants, to take away potential hiding places for the bugs and their nymphs. As I tugged at a yellowed leaf on the smaller of the two plants, the entire stem broke off, revealing an interior riddled with broad passageways. A squash vine borer had evaded my surveillance. The only thing to do was to dig up the second plant and discard the stem and root.

Edward G. Smith, author of The Gardener’s Bible, writes: “Once you have good soil for growing vegetables, you’ll get better yields and higher-quality vegetables if you don’t fertilize plants at all during the growing period.” I had decided to hold off on the liquid fertilizer in the hope that my organic amendments would prove adequate. But the episode with the broken-off squash plant convinced me that the squash would need all the help it could get to stave off infestation and disease. Last week, I finally hosed down the entire garden, including the flowerbeds, with a solution of 24-8-16 all-purpose inorganic plant food (that’s 24% nitrogen, 8% available phosphate, and 16% soluble potash).

For those without the blessing of pre-existing good soil, Ed recommends using fish or fish-and-seaweed emulsion or compost tea, but I hadn’t the funds to buy more organic fertilizer and I don’t have a compost pile. Last year’s artificial stuff would have to do. So I’m not an organic gardener, though I don’t douse my plants with insecticides as my neighbor does (he swears by Sevin, which he dusted liberally on his tomatoes, beans, and cucumbers). The inorganic stuff seems to have worked. Other than a couple of wilted leaves which I removed yesterday, the remaining squash plant on that side has shown no signs of weakness. It’s not quite as vigorous as the two plants on the opposite side of the garden, but its blossoms are large and profuse, and its vines are growing several inches a day. Even though the harvest is several months away, I’ll count that one (provisionally) a success.

Kill the Wabbit

“They don’t come out at night, do they?” said the Man with the Perfect Lawn to me, as we watched a half-grown Eastern cottontail rabbit lope around the corner of a picket fence in someone else’s yard. But alas, yes, they do. Judging by the damage I have found, they come out in droves after dark and don’t stop eating until dawn. Lawn Guy doesn’t have anything to worry about; his soil is fertile and his plants are large enough to withstand a sustained attack. Moreover, many of his plants are nightshades, whose poisonous leaves rabbits won’t touch.

Now I understand why Elmer Fudd hated Bugs Bunny so passionately. Bugs is the personification—or cartoonification, perhaps—of all that one imagines bunnies to be, after one discovers that they are chomping through one’s vegetable patch. His slyness and insouciance are calculated to irritate. Even his name connotes a certain pestiferous quality in the character, for it reminds the gardener of the insect pests that infest the growing plants.

My newly planted fence kept out the intruders for but one night. On the next night, the rabbit found its way in, beheading a couple of newly emerged bean plants and one of the two remaining pea plants. There was no sign of disturbance beneath the fence, but I doubted a small cottontail could make a 30-inch hop (including the 20 inches of fence that protruded above the garden and the 10-inch wooden sides of the raised bed). I surmised that the animal had gotten in underneath the fence, most likely at the corners, where there was a little space at the bottom.

Rocks, I thought, were my answer. In this land of gluey clay soil, there is no shortage of rocks. The shovel hits a large rock with every thrust. I took some of the rocks from the cairn I had made beneath the wooden deck, and I filled in all the gaps I could find at the corners of my garden. “Try and dig through that!” I thought. Such ideas tempt the jealous gods. I had no faith that my efforts would work. But when I next looked at the peas, the nasturtiums, and the emerging bean plants, there were no further signs of damage. Some of the peas were making a weak attempt at rallying, growing small leaves at the base of the stem.

Elsewhere in the backyard, my plants were not so lucky. A balloon flower plant I had stuck in the ground a few days ago is much smaller than it was, though it has not yet been completely razed. The rabbit cut down a foot-high aster plant to a height of 3 inches. A lupine plant that has been trying gamely since last year to raise itself a few inches above the ground has lost its pretty, palm-frond-shaped leaves time and time again. I have begun to cover some of these unfortunates with upturned plant pots at night.

Luckily, the rabbits haven’t shown any interest in the watermelon, cantaloupe, squash, and cucumber that have only recently grown their first true leaves. The rabbits either don’t like how they taste or find the leaves of these cucurbit plants too tough. So far, so good . . . I may not have any peas, but I will have melons, and I’ll be damned if I let a few chomped-down plants discourage me from planting more pole beans. Anything that comes from this garden will have the added flavor of victory, sharp and sweet.

Seedlings

The vegetable and flower seeds started appearing in February, arrayed on tall racks at Lowe’s and Target. Each packet showed off a picture of the ideal specimen of its variety, a picture that practically screamed, “Plant me now!”

It’s hard for a gardener to resist that siren song. Last year, I heard it clearly and felt I was getting a late start when I planted my seeds indoors in March. It was a choice I ended up regretting. Everything looked perfect at first. The tomato seedlings sprang up vigorously, the thyme ran riot, and the basil—ah, the basil!—grew into a verdant mass of scented leaves. But outside the house, the cold winds howled all through April.

By the time I was ready to transplant my tomato seedlings into the garden, they were tall, skinny, spindly things. I planted them deeply, knowing that tomato stems planted underground will produce roots, but the plants still poked too far above the soil. The next harsh wind weakened the plants. I kept the peppers, eggplant, and cucurbits (cucumbers, melons, and squash) inside for several more weeks, until the weather turned milder, and they tangled themselves into a jungle on the dining room table.

This year, I was determined to do things differently. I started buying the seeds early, but I stored them away. My next-door neighbor, The Man with the Perfect Lawn, started his seeds in late March. I decided to start mine in mid-April. When the time came, however, I was immersed in other activities, too busy to dibble in seed starter. I planted my seeds just last week—too late, perhaps, to get much of a head start on the growing season, but certainly not too early.

The tomatoes started coming up a few days ago, starting with the Early Girl tomato seeds I bought last year. Yesterday, the first eggplant seed sprouted. The Anaheim and Aurora peppers haven’t yet reared up any vestige of stem or leaf.

Each time a seed sends out its first stem into the sunlight, I wonder at how such a large mass of life can emerge so quickly from something so small. Some of the tomato seeds I planted—the seeds of tiny currant tomatoes—were no larger than a grain of sand, yet their seedlings are already one inch high. Still, after the first leaves have emerged, the seed’s most important job is done. It has given the plant embryo enough nutrition to meet the sunlight and send out roots to photosynthesize and absorb moisture on its own.

Underestimate the seedling’s powers of growth, and you might end up, as I did last spring, with a table full of young plants straining to break free from their peat pots.