high summer preparation
HARDENING OFF
You would have planted out all the “all season” plants like lettuce and silverbeet in True Spring under cloches to keep them safe from snails, but now it’s time to plant out the warm weather crops. Here is Melbourne November doesn’t dip below 10C so it’s ideal for tomatoes.
Get as much as you can planted out now, it will be a frenzy, but worth it when your plants have grown large and lush enough to look after themselves when it gets really hot. In late December you want to be enjoying an ice cream on the beach, not worrying about your entire crop turning to ash.
HARDENING OFF
But just look at those little seedlings in your nursery, they’re spoilt aren’t they! Soft and delicate little things, they won’t be able to hack it in the real world, just one stiff breeze will send them crying to the ground!
Tough love time – they need to be hardened up!
But in all seriousness transplanting can be very traumatic for our delicate seedlings if not done right. The shock can stunt growth or cause your plant to bolt to seed prematurely. If you are really unlucky it will just flop over and die. A sudden change from a cosy nursery to an exposed spot in full sun or freezing rain is likely to be a shock it will never recover from.
“Hardening off” off means introducing them to their new home gently, over a week or two. Only for a few hours at first, let them get use to their new microclimate, but protect them from extremes. If in a greenhouse I begin by removing the lid. Then I like to pack everything going into the bed in a poly box for ease of transportation (a trick I learnt from my permaculture bible) and to offer a little insulation from said extremes. By the end of the week I just leave the seedling sitting where I will plant it.
Keep them well watered, drying them out before transplant is also a death wish and choose a nice mild morning or evening to do the deed. A drink an hour before planting out will help soil stick to the roots, a little bit of water in the hole they go into will make sure the soil is nice and moist. Morning is good in cooler weather as they have a day of sun to get use to their new spot, and evening in summer so they have the night to drink up water and settle before the hot day.
Do you have any special tricks when transplanting?
BUILDING AN EARTH OVEN PART 5 – LOOKS LIKE A COCONUT ROUGH
looks like a coconut rough
building an earth oven part 5
Forgive the delay between stage 4 and 5, it is oh so tempting to put your feet up once you’ve made a basic earth oven. You can cook a most mouthwatering pizza in it, so you can get lazy, putting off the insulation layer. But if you attempt to cook pizza for the masses, your first pizza and maybe your second will cook like a dream in under 5 minutes, but by the time you get to your fourth or fifth the oven cools and you start getting nasty doughy uncooked centres.
Time for the next stage! Let’s make an eski out of this mudpie!
STEP 11: MIX IT MAKE IT
Make a sludgy mix of equal parts clay and sawdust and add water until you get that nice mudpie consistency, use a shovel to chop up any clay lumps. Apply it just as you did in stage 3, no need to pack it down too hard, you want all those air pockets made by the sawdust to trap the heat inside.
STEP 12: FIRE IT BAKE IT
Then all that’s left is to light a fire to dry it out and once it’s hot enough, why not push the burning embers to side and cook a delicious wood fire pizza!? There is nothing like it! Although warning once you try it you might become a pizza snob and those second-rate takeaway ones will never do! Perhaps a good thing for the health and the hips!
STEP 13: DO IT DOOR IT
Of course if you want to get into sourdough bread baking you’ll need a door. Pizza’s cook merrily fast in a super hot oven with the door off, but bread needs too cook more slowly and evenly so you’ll need a door. The bright sparks among you would have made the door first and then built the oven around it so it fits like a dream, but that’s not how we roll here. We just grabbed some timber off-cuts and banged them together then carved it to fit. Hey, it does the job! The bread needs a cooler over so remove all the fire embers before you bake it, once the dough is in shut the door and return in 15 minutes for a mouth watering delight! But don’t be too greedy let it cool a bit first, it’s still cooking once you take it out!
tomato experiment.
is there really a right time and a right place?
Seasons accelerate by and before we know it, summer’s ripening fruit is just a memory. If we don’t take the time to consciously observe our actions in the garden and learn from them we can end up in a rut. Year after year speeding by with the same failures and our successes remaining a mysterious shrugs of fate. Books and charts can be useful, but if we blindly follow what works for that person in that location we might never find that a banana plant can flourish in that sunny corner of our Mebournian garden.
Little experiments can be fun (if not entirely scientific) ways of discovering what works for you.
My first garden experiment was in year 8 when I tried growing silverbeet with different levels of fertiliser for science class, are the foolishness of youth. As I remember I wasn’t really keen on eating the silverbeet either. This Tomato Experiment on the other hand involves no pesticides or chemical fertilisers. It’s a step-by-step way to test when to sow and plant out tomatoes in your local area for optimum results.
Won’t you join me in a little investigating? What experiments have you tried in your garden?
THE QUESTION?
If my little daliance in silverbeet trials taught me anything, it’s that the first step is working out what you want to find out.
When should I plant my tomatoes for optimum yields and minimum fuss?
This is my main burning question, staring daggers at a miserable winter’s day I looked to my sow what when chart. I was desperate to start planting the warm weather beauties and it suggested as early as August. But the gardening gurus (Jackie French and Co.) shook their heads sagely from the gardening pages, they warned with furrowed brows: don’t get too hasty child! Don’t sow seeds too early at the first whiff of spring, you’ll end up with inferior plants, more susceptible to disease and pests, weak and sappy with lower yields and lesser fruit. Bah hum bug I replied, I’ll see it when I believe it! So the experiment was born.
I would also like to know:
Does sowing seeds early equal earlier fruit or do later sowing catch up?
When is too late to plant out?
Do tomatoes sown in my Plastic Juice Bottle Greenhouses grow better than those planted in pots/trays?
Can polystyrene wicking beds work for tomatoes or are raised no dig beds better?
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Thinning the tomato seedlings and mulching around them with coco coir.
Burying stems to encourage roots
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THE TOMATO
I’d like to tell you that I chose the Periforme tomato because it is the most delicious cooked tomato I have ever had and that it was to challenge myself as I find larger tomatoes more difficult to grow than cherry tomatoes. But the truth… I accidentally ordered two packets of these and wanted an excuse to use them. The above are a happy coincidence. This is a late season tomato and ideally I would have preferred to try a mid season variety, but when the internet shopping gods send you a sign, you have to go with it.
What: Tomato Periforme Abruzzo
Why: Good slicing or cooking tomato
Where: Diggers Club Heirloom Seeds
When: Each month 3 seeds per container, 12 total (germination rate 86%). Once the first set of mature leaves appear I can then choose the strongest from each container thinning out the straglers. I then mulch around the remaining seedlings with coconut coir to retain moisture.
How: 4 Plastic Juice Bottle Greenhouses, placed in polystyrene boxes on north facing verandah. The polystyrene box helps insulate the seedlings against weather extremes. The mini juice bottle greenhouse provides enough room for the seedlings to grow until they are ready to plant out without requiring transplanting, which tomatoes really don’t enjoy.
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When they reach 20cm they are ready to plant out, but as I started sowing early it will still be too cold so I add another juice bottle layer and fill it with homemade potting mix up the first set of mature leaves, burying the baby leaves. Roots will form along the the buried stem.
TRUE SPRING RESULTSBottle greenhouse Germination: As the days got warmer the Periforme tomatoes germinated much faster. Comparison Germination: These tomatoes were sown in trays then transplanted into newspaper pots/milk cartons 7cm wide and 12cm deep. They were left uncovered on a north facing verandah. The August tomato was much slower to germinate, the others only a day behind. |
Although it would have been much more accurate to compare Periforme with Periforme, a girl’s got to have some variety!
End of October |
SOWING TOMATOES
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PERMACULTURE & GARDENING
BY THE DESERT ECHO
The what when and how of planting tomatoes in temperate climates.
The beauty of the crop rotation system is that it really forces you to unlock the secrets of each plant family. A delicious puzzle to solve to attain the next level. The humble tomatoes story unfolds, its original form was tiny golden orbs from Central and South America. Coined solanum lycopersicum “wolf peach” and imported to Europe as ornamental plants that people actually thought were poisonous! What a waste! These tomatoes would have been even more packed full of vitamin C, beta-carotene and antioxidants than their contemporary descendants!
HEIRLOOM SEEDSAnything that begins “Distorted and weird…” is a must have! By now we all know heirloom seeds are best. They are the juiciest, most colourful and delicious – the antithesis of the perfectly round, tastless supermarket variety! And when you read the packet they have the best descriptions and let’s not kid ourselves that the blurb is what gets us everytime. DETERMINATE OR INDETERMINATE?Will your tomato live out its days in a 35cm diameter pot or will it free range it in the garden? If the answer is a pot then a determinate variety is the way to go. They stop growing once they fruit so they are shorter, fruit earlier and are harvested all at once. If you have the space I’d encourage indeterminate varieties because they have higher yields. They will keep producing for months if the sun doesn’t fry them or frost kill them. These are the older and wilder varieties, they scramble, they climb, but if you train they upwards they won’t take over the whole garden. And if they do, then it’s really not such a bad thing. |
EARLY, MID OR LATE?If you have ever experience the frenzy of bottling that occurs when all your tomatoes fruit at once then you will know the importance of planning. Working out when your tomato varieties are likely to be ready for harvest means you will not become a slave to the tomato sauce production line and suffer the inevitable deflation of tomatoes giving up the ghost in unison. My little collection will keep me in a steady stream of tomatoes from High Summer through Early Winter with a single sowing in True Spring. If things look patchy I will just take some cutting in High Summer, but no more sowing is required. Days to harvest are taken from time of transplant. If you have only a short growing season where the days are consistently above 10C then consider only plant early-mid varieties. Sow 6-8 weeks before planting out, early planting is essential as later plantings will have less time to bear fruit and can often fry in the hot summer sun. I sow in September to plant out in November. |
DAYS TO HARVEST
Early: 45-65 days
galapagos, gold dust, kotlas, stupice, swift, whipper snapper
Early-Mid: 45-85 days
anna russian, break o day, eva purple ball, golden dust, gregon’s altai, indian river, jaune flamme, snow white, thai pink egg, tigerella, tiny tim, wild sweetie
Mid: 65-85 days
beam’s yellow pear, black cherry, broad ripple currant, brown berry, burley gem, camp joy, campbell, cherry roma, costoluto de marmarle, earl of edgecombe, earl’s faux, golden gourmet, golden sunrise, green zebra, harbringer, kellogg’s breakfast, livingston’s golden ball, manapal, mary italian, nebraska wedding, new big dwarf, olomovic, perron, pineapple, pink ping pong, principe borghese, purple russian, red pear, riesentraube, rose quartz multiflora, schimmeig creg, soldaki, stor gul, sutton white, taxi, tommy toe, tropic, valentine, wapsipinicon peach, white beauty, wonderlight, yellow perfection
Mid-Late: 65-105 days
amish paste, arkansas traveller, black krim, black russian, bull’s heart, cherokee purple, druzba, german johnson, green grape, grosse lisse, lemon drop, mortgage lifter, oxheart red, oxheart yellow, pink brandywine, ponderosa pink, red cloud, red russian, reisetomate, rouge de marmande, san marzano, verna orange
Late: 85-105 days
beefsteak, blue ridge mountain, debarao, german gold, granny’s throwing tomato, hillbilly, periforme, tasmanian yellow
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When seedlings grow their first set of true leaves it’s time to thin out the weaklings!
SAUCE, SALAD, SLICING OR STUFFED?
This is the final consideration and perhaps the most important. Choose a diverse selection of tomatoes so that you won’t get bored. I grew way too many stuffing tomatoes one year and just ended up using them in salads and whilst they had lovely robust skins to be filled full of delights they really didn’t stand up on the taste front.
Cherry
Wild Sweetie, Beam’s Yellow Pear, Riesentraube, Red Fig, Christmas Grapes, Brown Berry, Broad Ripple Yellow, Mexico Midet, Gold Rush, Sweet Pea, Sugarlump, Tiny Tommy, Yellow Pygmy, Lemon Drop, Cherry Roma
Salad
Tommy Toe, Tigerella, Black Russian, Wapsipinicon Peach, Purple Russian, Green Zebra, Speckled Roman, Jaune Flamme
Slicing
Black Krim, Grosse Lisse, Mortgage Lifter, Big Rainbow, Brandywine Pink, Costoluto Genovese, Periforme Abruzzese, Hungarian Heart
Sauces & Pastes
Amish Paste, San Marzano
Stuffing
Schimmeig Creg
Dwarf Tomatoes (Determinate)
Principe Borghese
Finally time to get dirty. We’ve chosen a selection of early, mid and late tomato seeds and worked out how many we need to plan, but how many do we need to sow? Formula for success:
Number Plants Required x (3 seeds x 2 milk cartons)
Number Plants Required x (3 seeds x 2 milk cartons)
THE NURSERYTomatoes don’t like transplanting, moving house too many times is jut too stressful! Milk cartons allow enough room for them to grow until they are ready for the garden bed and then all you have to do is pop out the bottom and plant. This saves you the hassle of pricking out delicate seedlings as well. You know I am all for minimising work and maximising dozing in the sun! You have provided them with food, water and warmth now it’ just about maintaining the balance. Place them in a spot that gets direct early morning sun, but as the days get hotter protect from midday and afternoon sun. You may need to move them into a sheltered spot if days are climbing towards 30C. Somewhere near a high thermal mass wall that gets morning to noon sun and then is sheltered is ideal as tomatoes need heat more than direct sunlight. |
SOWING STEPS1. Calculate number of pots/milk cartons required |
NOW UNTIL PLANTING OUT:
1. Keep water in container topped up
2. Adjust position for optimum warmth/minimum frying
3. Once they have germinated add a little mulch such as coconut coir around them to stop the soil drying out.
Once the first set of mature leaves appears thin each carton to the strongest plant, if you have ever saved tomato seeds you stop feeling so sentimental, one tomato will give you seeds enough for years to come. Simply pinch the tops off the lesser seedlings (no need to pull them out and disrupt the soil) Grow these on until they are ready to plant out (8-12 weeks) and choose the best specimen and give the lesser back-up away (shh..don’t tell they’re getting the runt of the litter).
PESTS
If snails are a problem drill small holes in the top bottle and put its screw top lid back on, but otherwise that’s most of the hard work done.
I needed 9 tomatoes for my raised garden bed. (2×9=18 cartons)
Galapagos – 45-50 – Cherry
Valentine – 70 – Cherry
Wild Sweetie – 70 – Cherry
Beam’s Yellow Pear – 70-80 – Cherry
Purple Russian – 70-80 – Salad
Schimmeig Creg – 70-85 – Stuffing
Amish Paste – 70-90 – Sauce
Mortgage Lifter – 80-90 – Slicing
Granny’s Throwing Tomato – 90-100 – Salad
Galapagos – 45-50 – Cherry
Valentine – 70 – Cherry
Wild Sweetie – 70 – Cherry
Beam’s Yellow Pear – 70-80 – Cherry
Purple Russian – 70-80 – Salad
Schimmeig Creg – 70-85 – Stuffing
Amish Paste – 70-90 – Sauce
Mortgage Lifter – 80-90 – Slicing
Granny’s Throwing Tomato – 90-100 – Salad
THE OTHER SOLANACEAE
And what of the other solanaceae? They seem to be getting ignored.
The key to crop rotation is that plants that share the same family often have very similar requirements. The tips for sowing tomatoes can be followed for both eggplants and capsicums. Chillies are perennial plants in our garden so left out of the crop rotation. Potatoes exudate something from their roots that stunts tomatoes growth and they in turn make potatoes more suseptible to blight so potatoes have been banished from the bed.
I sowed 4 cartons of mini sweet capsicums for 2 plants and 2 cartons of little finger eggplants and 2 of florida market for 2 plants.
Happy growing!