March 11th, 2011 by Marc Opperman
Just wanting to preserve this link from Field and Feast. A lot of great ideas about growing tomatoes in Central Texas – solving pest and disease problems, as well as general growing tips. I like the “Texas Pot” method, and am going to do that myself.
February 15th, 2011 by Marc Opperman
On Valentines Day I ordered a bunch of seed from Botanical Interests, and am attempting to be patient while it ships. I should probably have done this a couple weeks ago so I could start transplants, but perhaps better-late-than-never.
I ordered tomatoes and peppers, specifically:
Seems like a bargain for so much potential food and life.
Their stance on organic, non-genetically-modified seed appeals to me (especially since Monsanto appears poised to take over the world’s seed supply otherwise), and their status as a family-owned business is the icing on the cake. Support the underdog!
I’m hoping the cats, my wife, and Lukas don’t object to me setting up a few seed trays in our spare bedroom (a.k.a. Lukas’ future bedroom). I will use a clip lamp on a timer and a full-spectrum bulb to help ‘em start. I saw someone somewhere had used paper cups to hold small amounts of soil, so perhaps I’ll try that. I already have a nice wooden rack that will hold a plastic nursery flat.
So… just waiting for the postman!
July 4th, 2010 by Marc Opperman
My dad and I have email conversations about various garden topics all the time, and a recent one seemed to be full of a lot of good advice on the subject of tomatoes. I’ve taken a couple of his emails and combined them for posting here.
Tomatoes are the most planted garden vegetable (fruit). In Texas, it is important to plant them at the precise time the calendar says they should be planted. They must be big, strong and blooming before the very hot temperatures hit in June or they will not bear fruit. The grower’s job is to find the biggest, most healthy plants to plop in the ground as soon as hard frost warnings are over. Be prepared to cover them if a light frost comes along. After that, pour on the organic fertilizer and water to get them to grow as fast as possible. Seldom will the plants set many tomatoes after the first of June as it is too hot. So, we sit and wait watching every day to make sure some critter does not run off with or eat our prizes.
Every tomato plant starts declining as soon as the high heat arrives. Concentrate on protecting and harvesting what the plant sets. If a few leaves at the bottom start to die back, cut them off with a scissors or your finger nail and put them in the trash—not the compost. The plant will last and put on some new leaves and branches while it is setting fruit. After the last tomato has been harvested you might as well pull the whole thing out and put it in the trash, too. I have tried to save tomato plants through the summer and have never been successful. There may be sprays and all sorts of things to try to hold down the viruses and fungi, but if you want Fall tomatoes, a new plant is the best and cheapest solution. Tomatoes are very sensitive to not getting enough water, a so a plant grown in a container might suffer if the container is not big enough.
Fall tomatoes: In my estimation they are harder than Spring tomatoes. Again, the timing has to be just right. The nursery business does not cooperate. They usually do not have the plants until it is really too late to plant them. Proper time is about July 15th to July 31st. The problem then is daylight conditions decrease dramatically by mid September when the first cool front thinks of coming though which will allow the tomatoes to set fruit. Most tomatoes will not set unless the temperature at night is below 70 degrees. Small-fruit varieties and cherry tomatoes will sometimes set above that level. So, if they set around the middle to end of September, you then have to get the tomatoes to grow up and begin ripening before frost. With the shorter days and cooler nights, it is tough to get large tomatoes to ripen. Compared to Spring it is like slow motion. So, a smaller variety is better. Unless you start plants from seeds about the beginning of June—which for some reason I never do–you are at the mercy of what you find in the garden centers. I have had some success with Cherry, Donna, and Juliet. For a larger one, I usually try the Early Girl/Boy or Celebrity. I did have some test plants from the Extension Service one year called a 444, I think. It is a tennis ball sized tomato. It did well, but I have never seen it in a garden center. Of course the other challenge is tending and keeping the plants healthy and properly irrigated during the hot days of July and August. Sometimes they require a bit of improvised shade over them during the hottest part of the day at least until they get established.
One could say my dad has had a lifetime of experience in gardening, and these days helps a Houston-area public school maintain organic vegetable gardens he and the school established for the students to have some experience with growing food.
June 6th, 2010 by Marc Opperman
It’s been a few days since I posted, but it was because we went to Houston for a couple nights to see my parents for their 45th wedding anniversary (go Mom and Dad!!)
I was worried about the tomatoes while we were away as I assumed a flock of birds, a litter of raccoons or an army of worms would decimate the crops. Seems I was mostly wrong:
That was what the plants produced in two days, though two of those Celebrities (the large ones) I picked Friday night before we left as I assumed they’d be toast if I left them.
The only two issues were that, one, the stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs were having a FIELD DAY and I spent a miserable hour extricating them to the soapy swimming pool this evening. I say miserable because the mosquitoes were murderous and it was more humid than Houston out there. I dunked about 45 bugs, though some got away. I think this illustrates the benefit of inspecting the plants twice a day and dealing with bugs as they come up.
The second issue is one that I failed to grasp properly early on: these plants are vines. Healthy, hearty, robust vines with so much grow power in them they are taking over my area and the wimpy tomato cages I am using. So, along with bug extraction, I hammered some new bamboo poles in to give me something extra to tie off branches. Not perfect, and not pretty, but at least I can walk around the plants now.
I was also worried the hot weather would fry a lot of stuff, but I took care of that by setting the sprinkler system to run automatically at 4 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday for a bit each day.
All in all, I think the only things suffering now are my legs… need to wipe off the mosquito bodies and smears of blood. And dab them with some anti-itch goop.
June 1st, 2010 by Marc Opperman
I’ve used Safer soap in the past, and, for the most part, it works pretty well. But it’s also more expensive than it needs to be, and comes in more packaging than I want.
So I grabbed what I thought was Seventh Generation soap the other day, and mixed it about 4-to-1 with water and sprayed a bunch of leaf-footed bugs on my cherry tomato plant. It definitely did in many of the bugs, but it also turns out to have done in many of the leaves on the plant. Within a few days many of the leaflets turned brown and the compound leaf turned yellow. I suspect many will fall off.
Turns out it was not Seventh Generation, it was Palmolive “Pure + Caring” (whatever that means.) One of the warnings on the bottle says not to use with bleach products… which means it might contain ammonia of some form. There’s no ingredient list, so I had no idea. I looked it up online, and the stuff appears to be a regular chemistry lab. Not sure how they justify calling this stuff “pure”. Especially if it kills plants, too*.
So, I’m resorting to using a dunk-tank method of pest management right now. Stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs seem easy to trick into jumping down from their tomato, so placing a little soapy swimming pool below them usually does the trick. I’ve been hand-plucking worms of various sorts and dropping them in, too, if my little tupperware container of trouble is nearby. Otherwise, it’s the shoe for them. No more giving hornworms a fair shot at crawling back to the plant from a long distance. I’ve found one too many of them with their wormy asses hanging out of a half-eaten green tomato.
*To be fair, now that I think about it, any heavy soap would probably disrupt normal transpiration processes of plants since the detergents would damage or clog leaf pores, or break down the water resistance leaves would have to keep them from “drowning” when wet. I think the trick is proper dilution of soap and perhaps washing down the plants afterward.
May 27th, 2010 by Marc Opperman
Well, I did start this ‘blog with the partial intent that it would help me document what I learn in the course of gardening. So today I had to rewire a thing I understood about particular bugs I’ve seen in the yard. I’ve always noticed clusters of red-black bugs on various plants. And I’d assumed they were a form of assassin bug, a predatory bug that nabs other bugs and sucks the juices out of them. I think I got that impression because I do indeed have some assassin bugs, and they are red and black, and I have seen them with captured bees and whatnot.
So I didn’t think much about the cluster of red and black bugs on my cherry tomatoes. I assumed they were happily nabbing pests that dropped by. Little did I know they ARE the pests.
Fortunately (can I say that about this situation??) Carla of austinurbangardens.com fame has them and asked her people what they were. After boldly jumping in and naïvely asserting they were assassin bugs, I went back to read her other comments on the subject. And I had to agree… they are leaf-footed bugs, a form of stink bug that sucks not the life out of other bugs, but out of tomatoes… AND peppers AND passion vines AND a number of other things I have growing here.
I suppose these pests only really matter to me now that I have vegetables I will fight to protect like my own son. And that’s just what I did tonight. Armed with a spray bottle mixture of one part Seventh Generation dish soap to 4 or maybe more parts water, I doused as many of the buggers as I could find. I’d heard these bugs are hard to control with anything but insecticide, but most bugs can’t withstand soap since it breaks down the waxy layer that allows them to repel water and breathe. So, they drown.
Doing some reading, it appears my mixture was a little heavy on the soap side, and probably should have been a different type of soap, too. Like Dr. Bronners castile soap. I’m sure what I used won’t kill my plants – I ran the sprinkler over them to wash it off this evening – but I don’t want to take any chances.
There are lots of homebrew insecticidal soaps mentioned on the internet, but it seems the ideal recipe is 1-2 tablespoons of soap per quart of water. For a little extra oomph, the water can be used to boil some noxious (to bugs) herbs (cayenne or other hot peppers, ginger and garlic are all mentioned) before it is cooled and soap is added. The mixture can be sprayed on the leaves, undersides of leaves and stems where bugs hide. It is a contact poison to bugs, and kills them indiscriminately. Bees, beneficial bugs and spiders would all die from this mixture, too.
But it is non-toxic to humans, and safe for plants if it isn’t applied under full-sun. One site mentioned not using it more than once a week, but didn’t give a reason.
Tomorrow I’ll check to see what the mortality rate was with my soap mixture. Hopefully the count doesn’t include any of my plants.
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