SOWING TOMATOES

April 7, 2013 4 Comments

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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!

So which tomato seeds should you choose?

HEIRLOOM SEEDS

Anything 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

plastic-juice-bottle-greenhouse-propagation

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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)

THE NURSERY

Tomatoes 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 STEPS

1. Calculate number of pots/milk cartons required
2. Fill the folded cartons up to the top with homemade potting mix
3. Use a small square bottomed pot to firm it down to prevent sinking
4. Fill the space left with Seed Raising mix and firm this down too
5. Place 3 tomato seeds per carton in a triangle shape 30mm apart for ease of thinning later
6. Cover with seed raising mix to a depth of no more than 2 x seed size.
7. Firm this down gently
8. Water with cold chamomile tea to encourage germination and prevent dampening-off, gently sprinkle or mist to avoid washing seeds to corners of cartons
9. Place in a container filled with 20mm of water. This will wick up through the soil and keep seeds moist, no need for top watering
10. Place Plastic juice bottle with bottom cut off over the carton to keep heat and moisture constant

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.

Now’s your chance to indulge in some ruthless destruction!

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

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!

Garden

PRUNING & PLANNING

December 18, 2012 No Comments

True Spring Preparation – Temperate Climate – Southern Hemisphere: September & October – Northern Hemisphere: March & April

FEVERFEW – GOOD COMPANION PLANT FOR HERB BORDER – ENHANCES THE GROWTH OF PLANTS AROUND IT

The wind began to whirl, but it was delicious, it was warm. It carried flower petals, dandelion seeds and the promise of rain.

Spring has come, there is no time to catch your breath, the gardening marathon begins.

Like bright, juicy drops of rain raspberries start to slowly ripen, then in a matter of days become a deluge of fruit. Strawberries too are ripening and all at once everything that was quietly growing over the cool months bursts into flower, even those things you’d rather not like broccoli, coriander and celery, but the chickens are please for these sweet offerings.

We’re getting our first hot days, climbing towards 30 degrees and with the first appearances of the predator insects we know we are safe at least for a few months until the more annoying flies and mosquitoes start plaguing us.

It’s our last chance to get the garden bed ready before the tomatoes get planted out in High Summer. Mulching, weeding, pruning and after that planting out some companions to lend some shelter when it starts to get really hot.

weeding

If vegetable seeds are slow to germinate, so are the weed seeds. If you didn’t do it last month this is a great time to pull out those pesky grasses and nutrient hungry fiends and mulch heavily to prevent them from springing up again. Soon with added sunlight and water they can get out of control.

Some “weeds” I leave, like dandelions which are edible and are a good companion for tomatoes as they exude a little something that helps the fruit ripen. Clover is a nitrogen fixer, absorbing nitrogen from the air and putting it back into the soil. There is no use pulling out something that is useful and leaving bare soil for something nastier to take root, better to leave it until you have a seedling in hand to replace it with.

pruning

The herb border around my garden bed has really sprung into life this season. Mint has sent out runners like a web through the garden bed and the Feverfew has grown enormous. True Spring is a great time to take cuttings and divide up your herb border, keeping it under control and if you can’t use those new plants there will be enough time for them to get over the trauma to be gifted at Christmas.

pest control

Everything is sending out juicy, sweet shoots that snails can’t resist. It’s not hot enough for them to retreat and all it takes is a storm for them to pop up under every leaf. They must be controlled before you plant out your seedlings. A week of beer traps and night time torch hunts with your work boots on will; keep them in check.

A strong smelling herb border with spiky leaves will mean less placed for them to hide during the day, these include Winter Savory and Thyme. I have learnt to my horror that edible violas are about the worst thing to grow on your garden edge, the tender, multitudes of leaves and flowers beautifully cascading over the edges the perfect snail mansion and nursery. I am trimming and pulling these out straight away!

mulching

The weather is still quite variable hot and dry one day, freezing and rainy the next, a good thick layer of mulch around the base of all your plants will help keep a balance of warm and damp to prevent your plants going into shock.

Remember snails like to hide in mulch so keep it fine and check each night for the slimey sneaks. More about mulching in my next post!

These two months are when you should really try and sow EVERYTHING you want to occupy you garden until Spring comes again next year, even things like silverbeet that you can plant later can be planted now and kept going all year with dedicated picking, watering and mulching.

This is the time to get the seedlings well established as High Summer will

knock tiny plants to the ground with its sizzling sun and bruising winds.

By Christmas there should be no bare earth in your garden beds, your plants crowded with little soldiers selflessly shading their neighbour and being shaded in return.

Afterall this is not meek and mild Europe where things can flutter in gentle summer breezes, spaced out rows, kissed by fairies and the like. In Australia, if snails don’t go down the line chomping up your progeny then our unfiltered, ozone depleted rays of suns will finish off the job. Plus won’t it be so much more relaxing knowing that your garden can be left for a week or two over Christmas, planting finished and resilient enough to take a few 40C days. (Hopefully you have a nice neighbour check in every 10 days or so)

planning

It’s hard to not be overwhelmed after a long winter of lethargy. I like to organise the seeds I’m going to plant for the season into glass jars with seed tags made out of plastic milk bottles. Clear plastic is hard to read and cardboard crumples with water, so I’ve found milk bottles best. The glass jars make it easy to see the seed labels and keep them dry if left outside on the propagation table.

I use to be precious with my seeds, sowing only a few at a time, but with a shoebox full of expiring packets, I’ve learnt is far easy to sow an entire packet at a time and save the fresh seeds for the next year.

Garden

PRE-SPRING FRUITS – DAMPENING-OFF & PROPAGATION

October 14, 2012 2 Comments

Cold, wet and sickly – that’s no way to start life. Neither is wrenching for the light, dizzy with bleach fumes, roots clawing through lifeless soil.

Close up of a chamomile plant leaves and flowers

When you don’t believe in nuking soil to remove the bad bacteria and fungi or bleaching the hell out of your pots, you have to accept that whilst protecting the good guys in your soil you are also keeping the baddies. (I’ll be honest my decision is based as much around my own laziness as it is about the delicate ecosytems involves, really who can be bothered baking soil for an hour?!)

In the damp coolness of Pre-Spring you might despair as seeds fail to germinate, seedlings wither with yellowing leaves or worse a healthy green seedling suddenly rots at the base and topples over.

But it’s not your fault, it’s Dampening-Off! Wicked fungi that thrive in these conditions and rot your seeds and seedlings, before they have a chance. The solution is not sterilising with chemicals or blasting with heat (sterile and seeds just don’t make sense) The solution is as easy as making Chamomile Tea!

Watering your seed trays with diluted chamomile tea which has steeped overnight and again when the seedlings emerge can stop dampening off. It has natural anti-fungal properties and more importantly whilst it does not destroy all the fungi in the soil, it contains magnesium which not only aids germination by breaking down the natural enzyme inhibitors surrounding the seed, but also is integral to photosynthesis producing more resilient plants that are more resistant to disease.

Fresh leaves are meant to be better than flowers as they have more magnesium, so whilst tea bags will probably work if you can get a hold of a plant that would be best.

Chamomile tea brew in glass bottle

Chamomile tea brew sitting ourside in sun

Chamomile tea brew sitting in window sill

Sowing seeds for tomato experiment in plastic bottle greenhouse/pot

Tomato Experiment

As well as testing out my Plastic Juice Bottle Greenhouses my Tomato experiment is meant as a step-by-step way to test when to sow and plant out tomatoes in your local area for optimum results.

I want to test to see if tomatoes sown later really catch up to those planted later, and if adding beneficial bacteria to the soil really works!

I chose not to use cherry tomatoes in the experiment because really that would be too easy.

What: Tomato Periforme Abruzzo
Why: Good slicing or cooking tomato
Where: Heirloom seeds from Diggers Club, to be planted for The Tomato Experiment
When: Packet expires DEC 2012 so planted 4 seeds in each pot
How: Plastic Juice Bottle Greenhouses, placed in polystyrene boxes on north facing verandah

Sowing capsicum mini sweet and eggplant listada di gandia seeds in punnets

Sprawing solanaceae seed punnets with chamomile tea to prevent dampening-off, plastic bag covers tray to act as greenhouse

What: Eggplant Listada Di Gandia
Why: Early maturing extending the fruiting season. Small, delicious with pretty striped fruit
Where: Heirloom seeds from Diggers Club, to be planted in my Crop Rotation Plot
When: Packet expires OCT 2013
How: 6 seeds in a punnet sitting in a metal roasting tray with a plastic bag over the top to act as a greenhouse

What: Capsicum Mini Sweet Mix
Why: Had far more success with the mini varieties than their larger cousins. Produced through Winter!
Where: Heirloom seeds from Diggers Club, to be planted in my Crop Rotation Plot
When: Packet expires MAR 2014
How: 6 seeds in a punnet sitting in a metal roasting tray with a plastic bag over the top to act as a greenhouse

What: Chilli Joes Long Cayenne
Why: Packet expired, no luck in past, just threw them all in to see if they would germinate.
Where: Heirloom seeds from Diggers Club, to be planted in my Crop Rotation Plot
When: Packet expires OCT 2011
How: Seeds in a punnet sitting in a metal roasting tray with a plastic bag over the top to act as a greenhous

What: Tomato Purple Russian
Why: Early fruiting variety.
Where: Saved from the garden last year, between two paper serviettes, to be planted in my Crop Rotation Plot
When: Saved MAR 2012 from tomatoes sown last year from Diggers Club
How: Tray on north facing window sill with wet newspaper underneath to prevent drying out. Interesting to see how compares to tomatoes grown in juice bottle greenhouses.

For more information on dampening-off and natural remedies please check out Easy Organic Gardening by Lyn Bagnall it’s amazing!

Garden

THE TOMATO EXPERIMENT – HOW TO MAKE A PLASTIC BOTTLE GREENHOUSE

September 12, 2012 4 Comments

Watercolour design for a re-used plastic bottle greenhouse/pot for seedlings

It begins…

with your overflowing recycling bin and a sigh of shame that you are not doing enough to be sustainable. But be warned what begins as a wholesome notion to re-use can quickly escalate and before you know it you’re that crazy lady

looking at the neighbours’ bins with a twitching desire to rummage through them for treasures.
It’s best to dial it back a notch at this point and stick to finding alternate job descriptions for your own rubbish, we can’t all be Tiffany Sedaris.

And besides when you have five housemates you have plenty of material to keep you busy.
The youngest drinks at least one 3L plastic bottle of orange juice a week, two if there are no bottles of coke in the fridge, that’s over 52 binned a year!

They might be recycled into the latest in green bag technology or a jazzy promotional hat, but I’m sure that comes at a huge energy cost. It seemed like a waste, so I started thinking about what else I could do with them…

Plastic juice bottle pots with bottle water tray

Autumn came and it brought with it a slimy army of snowpea killers! I sliced the bottom off the juice bottle and dug it into the soil to became an impenetrable snail guard. The peas climbed upwards and their salvation became their prison as they clawed at the closed bottle lid. I set them free with a twist and the snails savaged them with a crunch.
I retaliated, slicing the top off the bottle as well and added another, then another bottle, stacking them to form a tower, the peas grew tall and strong and when they were released the snails turned up their nose at the strong tough stems and didn’t think to crawl upwards to the tender shoots.
The weather cooled and the bottles doubled as greenhouse to encourage young lettuces to be sweet while their unbottled neighbours grew world weary and bitter.
And now we come to the current day, the weather has mellowed and soon I will need to start planting my tomato seeds and I thought…

tomatoes despise being transplanted almost as much as they hate the cold, dry soil and wet feet!

Coupled with a general lazy attitude toward fiddly potting on, the bottle greenhouse was born!

Now we finally come to my experiment (Don’t you hate it when people take ages to get to the point? Ha!).

The “pot”

is a bottle with the top and bottom removed and is filled 3/4 with potting soil, then a piece of damp newspaper and 1/4 of seed raising mix. After this has settles the seeds are planted in the top in the more friable, low nutrient soil, when the roots are large enough to break through the thin paper they get a boost from the more nutrient rich potting soil.

A half bottle cut length wise is

the water “tray”

at the base. The “pot” is placed in the “tray” before it is filled which prevents the soil from falling out. Then from the top the soil is well watered until the water pools in the tray. While the seed settles the soil moisture levels will stabilise so it is neither too dry or too wet, if it is hot additional water may have to be added to the tray before planting. When the seeds go in the top should be gently misted and the tray filled with water.

The seeds won’t be washed away by overenthusiastic water spray and the water in the tray will slowly wick up through the soil to the developing seedling’s roots as it needs it.
Even it hotter weather the tray doesn’t have to be filled everyday so you are free to leave your nursery for a long weekend beach break without coming home to crispy reminders of what could have been. It will also encourage deep roots, which are preperable as shallow roots are more likely to dry out when planted in the garden.

A bottomless bottle acts as

the “greenhouse”

in cooler weather it keeps heat in and as it warms up it prevents too much moisture loss. Ventilation is important as the soil can get mouldy so the top can be left off. If pests are a problem the lid can be left on and small ventilation holes pierced around the bottle neck, too small for a slug.
When it comes time to transplant the “pot” can be gently buried, the roots undisturbed grow out the bottom into the soil with no transplant shock. The tomato experiment? More about that soon…

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