Buying The Farm

Grafting heirloom tomato plants onto disease-resistant tomato plants. I need a closer-up view of the cuts that are needed, but holy cow this is a Very Cool Thing.

Grafting Greenhouse tomatoes.

I’m into the exciting phase of my first garden: Seeds are starting (or, in the case of the edamame, ready for high school already!) and the weather’s been beautiful. We’re getting closer to the actual planting!

The bag gardening method I’m adopting, while faddish, hasn’t developed as deep a literature for things like plant spacing. My research has involved a lot of bouncing between sites. Luckily, though, one result was this website.

The concept is to plant at least one container of vegetables, and they’ve very helpfully prepared short, illustrated cheat sheets for some commonly-grown plants. Not everything is on here, but for amateurs like myself, it’s an excellent primer.

http://www.onepotpledge.org/getgrowing.html

I’m investigating sharing a space with a local homeowner. She’s got a few fruit trees but most of the ground is in shade. I found this list of shade-happy plants which gives me some hope our potential crop won’t be entirely composed of microgreens.

**EDIT** Turns out she’s a he, and the shade isn’t as bad as I thought. Still, plenty of space to put shade-tolerant kale!

http://www.motherearthnews.com/shade-tolerant-vegetables-zm0z11zsto.aspx

My windowsill tomatoes are now three feet tall and settling down to fruit. This is the time the suckers – new shoots start to take root (or stem, if you will). Their growth requires the plant to work harder and divert sugars that should be used to nurture its fruit. Left untended, they produce thicker foliage but weak tomatoes, so traditional wisdom is to pinch them out.

I did this last year and (being a lazy gardener) left the clipped suckers in the soil beneath the parent, expecting them to break down into mulch. But I was surprised to note, a few days later, that the suckers were looking healthy, and had even grown. This year, I was prepared: A pot with earth, kept moist, was prepared next to the tomato “patch” on the sill. A few days ago, I pruned back all the suckers, and transplanted them into the pot. Checking in on them today, I’m delighted to report that virtually all are thriving. My next challenge will be bringing some of these to fruit, for a late-summer successive crop!

Gardening is thirsty work, and a little bit of work with an empty pop bottle can slake your thirsty garden.

I found this website at the tail end of my 2008 gardening experiment, and implemented it with a couple of plants to great success. Last year, I scrounged as many empty bottles as I could and finished with seven plants happily dipping their toes. This year, a soda-water-loving pal has been stockpiling his empties, and the promise of an almost fully self-watering container garden is upon me.

Some people argue that the end result is not very pretty, but to my eyes, the exposed earth is far more appealing than the branded plastic pots I’ve salvaged from the local garden centres. I would also argue that, once the plants get established, you’ll be so overrun with healthy foliage that the pots themselves will hardly be noticeable. Plus, you get the advantage of being able to see which plants need a top-up, and just being able to watch the development of the root system is worth the price of admission. My ground cherry from last year failed to fruit, but it wasn’t for lack of trying: The root ball spilled out from the neck of the bottle and took up nearly half of the reservoir.

The instructions given on the site offer good basics, but for anyone wishing to try it, I’d advise tweaking a few steps: First, the “poke holes through with hot nails” is both unacceptably dangerous and time-consuming. I successfully used an old, blunt Exacto knife, pushed from inside the cut bottle (so there’s no “wall” created to block drainage) just enough to create a hole, then twisted to enlarge it. Occasionally the knife would cut a slit in the plastic, but I didn’t observe this to be much of a deterrent to the plants. I also skipped the pierced-cap and string “vein” proposed on many other bottle-planter sites, and instead stuffed the necks with cotton batting. Lacking small rocks for drainage, I layered dried grape stems to good effect. For nitrogen-loving plants like my tomatoes, I threw a handful of seaweed in once I’d covered the cotton batting with a couple of inches of soil, then topped the rest off with potting mix and some worm castings.

You’ll need to top-water until the roots start to creep towards the neck, but once the plants are established, this is a very easy garden to maintain. Just insure that the reservoir is topped up every day, and the plants will thrive. I had excellent success last year with my tomatoes, parsley, basil, and even the taprooted avocado I coaxed to sprout in my worm bin. This year, I’m adding snap peas to the pots as well.

The onset of nice weather always encourages us Torontonians, groundhog-like, to crawl out of our holes and stand, blinking and wary, in the sunshine. The wariness comes, of course, from the fact that April weather is usually a fickle temptress: I was lured out for a walk last week in a tshirt, and wound up hot-footing (and cold-arming) it home when the temperature dropped 10°C in little more than a half-hour.

Properly equipped with a good jacket and a stowable umbrella, it is possible to get out and take advantage of the amenities our big city has to offer. The other week, I noticed an event listing at a library which, while not close by, was at least on my bus route, and was more than worth the distance traveled and fickle-weathered walk to and from the venue.

Ken Brown is a jovial speaker, and a backyard gardener par excellence. His talk that night was titled “Vertical Vegetables”, and that alone was enough to pique the interest of ones, like me, who have more garden space up than they have garden space out. Ken showed pictures of his garden that chronicle his failures and successes (there were far more of the latter) at getting things to grow.

Ken’s a practical type, and his eagerness to see what will work is inspiring, if initially surprising. A jerry-built “trellis” composed of an upright beam crowned with a circle of copper, from which trailed jute twine for plant support was aesthetically questionable in the early spring photo, but there was no debating its beauty in full summer, when his circle of pea plants and morning glories was in full, thick, lush bloom.

His story of a 10″ pot for fingerlings that put out 15KG of gourmet potatoes in the fall got me wondering if I could pull off such a feat in my tiny window garden. I’m chitting some supermarket fingerlings now to see if I can replicate Ken’s idea.

His website, Gardening Enjoyed isn’t quite as user-friendly as his talk, but like the 10″ pot, it is chock full of goodness for those willing to dig into its digital loam.

I’ve put aside readings and musings for doings of late: The weather has turned, so a-gardening I will go. The one huge benefit of living in an enclosed condo is the heat that builds up over the course of the day. Warm soil is what gives seeds a kick-start, and mine have demonstrated just how hot it can get in here: From planting to sprouts in 3 days!

I’m limited in space, so have restricted myself this year to planting things I think will bear fruit (in both the literal and figurative senses). I had great success last year with tomatoes – particularly the small varieties – so have started Sungolds, Matt’s Wilds, Dr. Carolyns, and Tiny Tims. Tomatillo seeds, scavenged from a single small fruit bought at the local market, are proving quite as robust as the tomatoes were, but if they’re anything like the ground cherries they so much resemble, I may have a repeat of last year’s bushy-but-barren plant upon which I lavished so much unrequited attention. My Serrano peppers have sprouted well, but it remains to be seen if I can get any to fruit – last year was similarly unsuccessful.

I’m growing chard and beetroot as greens (I don’t know if it was the heat or the confining pots, but all my previous attempts at beets and radishes have produced awful-tasting roots) and am crossing my fingers that I can get the mâche I love so much to grow continuously, rather than have it peter out quickly as it did last year.

Mustard greens, in the form of mizuna and a mix of yellow and brown mustards should grow fine, and even if they don’t I have a secret weapon for cheap sprouts. Digging through my seed packets, I found one from my first growing season from a local, expensive nursery that charged me $1.50 for a pittance of brown mustard seeds. Last year, for 27¢, I got ten times as many seeds from the bulk food store, and they proved just as viable as the foil-sealed packet!

My biggest experiment this year will be the Sugar Snap peas, already nearly six inches high and probing for a trellis. I’ve planted them in self-watering containers, so hopefully they’ll get as much water as they want, and have thrown some jute string around the curtain rod. If I can get even one edible pod off them, it’ll be worth the strange looks passersby are sure to give a 17th floor window filled with foliage.