The Tomatoes Are In!

And with any luck at all we'll have our first harvest in June!   This is our second attempt to create a summer garden that we can (hopefully) live on.  We did LOTS of off-season research and I placed a special emphasis on tomatoes...because I love them so much.

I'll tell you about the other stuff we've got cooking later.  For now, here are some things I learned in the off-season about tomatoes that plenty of people already knew...

• Plant your seedlings deep.  Leave just the tippy-tops showing and get those roots wayyy down there.  Tomatoes need deep roots!
• Create a deep-root watering system.  Using up-ended Crystal Geyser water bottles (the same ones I used for the home-made cloche)  I buried them deep in the ground next to the seedlings, leaving about the top inch of the bottle showing.  Just fill that empty bottle with water and it will deposit the water deep in the soil, forcing the roots to work for it! 
• How to make a tomato teepee.  I got my directions from a Sunset Magazine Special Edition but here's a great home gardener's blog post with some helpful tips.
• Pull off those early flowers!
• Topsy-Turvy Tomato Planter?  You bet!  I got one for a present so we're giving it a shot.  But if you're more DIY then that you make one! 
• For the most concise rundown on how to grow tomatoes just click here.  If you don't know Margaret Roach's site you should check it out.  She used to be a big-wig at OmniMedia and has spent the past few years building her own little gardening empire.  Even though she's based in upstate NY and on a completely different growing cycle than us I find her info solid and she's available to answer questions, just send her an email.

In another post I'll give a rundown of the 15 varieties of tomatoes we've got in the ground. 

tomatoes!

I was browsing garden websites this morning and discovered it's tomato time in Southern California!! As I clicked around from site to site I learned our last frost was 2/11 which means we can put our tomatoes in the ground! So if your favorite spring / summer harvest is the tomato I'll share with you the best guide I've found for all things tomato. My favorite starting place for garden questions is Margaret Roach's website Away to Garden. She used to be a big cheese at Martha Stewart's OmniMedia and the website has that same practical, handy-dandy, friendly sensibility. In the meantime, I'm going to get some tomato plants in the ground ASAP!

The Big Bust of Fall 2009

Just because we haven't posted doesn't mean we haven't been gardening.

The Fall 2009 garden was a bit of a bust. The area that produced such a prolific spring / summer garden last year seems to completely suck as a home for a fall /winter garden. As you can see in the photo nothing really took off. It all kind of got halfway there. The seeds for the beets & turnips were sooooo slow to sprout. The first batch of beets - planted in the middle of September - are just showing their shoulders. We'll probably pull on in the next few days to see if it's ready. Our broccoli plants have like one bite of broccoli on each stalk. The cauliflower is a decent size but has no flowers. And the brussell sprouts never matured. Our greens - Red Romaine, French Market Mix, Spinach, Iceberg Lettuce -- never thrived. And the mix of seeds I planted to replenish the greens just never sprouted. Seeds for salad greens are supposed to be like weeds. Supposedly, you toss them in the garden, give them a light dusting of dirt and they take care of the rest. Not so for us. Apparently, we have LOTS to learn about lettuces & greens. Perhaps the first lesson is that we should have used the sunny spot in the front of the house that we cleared & prepped.

The one bright spot was our arugula, which we grew from a small plant in a container. It thrived. We've been eating off of that like crazy.

Oh, those plastic Crystal Geyser bottles are not an odd choice for a garden decoration. They're homemade cloches. We read about them in the handy-dandy "You Grow Girl" gardening book we were given for Christmas. We put them over our struggling spinach plants and it actually helped. The bottles create a mini-greenhouse for your plant. Just be sure to remove the bottle cap otherwise you'll suffocate your plant.

Launching the Fall Garden

We've mostly neglected the garden for the last month. The most attention we've paid to our little plot has been to eat everything it harvests and battle unsuccessfully with those danged sow bugs that are ravaging the squash plants. While we've managed to harvest 10 or so squash (a first for us) our track record of being able to kill squash plants remains. We lost 4 seemingly healthy plants, are coaxing the two on life support to flower, and continue to get vegetables from our Early Prolific.

Today is the day that we begin sowing our seeds for the fall garden. According to our CA Garden Calendar here's what our fall garden will look like...assuming the Gods of the Green Thumbs are kind to us...

• arugula
• beets
  
• broccoli
• brussell sprouts
• celery
  
• endive
• leaf lettuces
  
• kale
  
• onions (bunching)
• pak choy
  
• peas
  
• radishes
• rutabagas
  
• spinach
  
• swiss chard
• turnips

My plan to create the Sunset Magazine lettuce garden has morphed and is (at this very moment) being re-envisioned. Hopefully, I will post pretty photos in a few weeks...

Salad Greens - This Weekend's Project

I was browsing through the current issue of Sunset Magazine this morning over coffee and came across a gorgeous picture of a small but prodigious salad garden (above). It inspired me. This weekend, I'm going to use the create the perfect little raised bed in the front yard for our salad greens. And I'm even going to use our first batch of homemade compost!

Everything I've been reading suggests that I can sow the seeds now for our winter greens. I know greens don't do well in the heat and it tends to be very hot in September and October in Los Angeles. I'm concerned I'm launching it all too early but, hey, I learn best from my mistakes!!

Do you have any advice for a novice gardener?

What to Compost?

I came across an article on PlanetGreen.Discovery.com called "75 Things You Can Compost, But Thought You Couldn't". It's a fantastic list. Here are some of the things I didn't know about (and there are alot of them!):

FROM THE KITCHEN:

• Used paper napkins
• Pizza boxes, ripped into smaller pieces
• Paper bags, either ripped or balled up
• Paper towel rolls
• Used paper plates (as long as they don't have a waxy coating)
• Cellophane bags (be sure it's really Cellophane and not just clear plastic—there's a difference.)
• Nut shells (except for walnut shells, which can be toxic to plants)
• Pizza crusts
• Cereal boxes (tear them into smaller pieces first)
• Wine corks
• Moldy cheese
• Melted ice cream
• Old jelly, jam, or preserves
• Stale beer and wine
• Toothpicks
• Bamboo skewers
• Paper cupcake or muffin cups

FROM THE BATHROOM:

• Used facial tissues
• Hair from your hairbrush
• Toilet paper rolls
• Old loofahs
• Nail clippings
• Urine
• 100% Cotton cotton balls
• Cotton swabs made from 100% cotton and cardboard (not plastic) sticks
• Latex condoms
• Cardboard Tampon Applicators

Random Stuff:

• Dryer lint
• Old/stained cotton clothing—rip or cut it into smaller pieces
• Old wool clothing—rip or cut it into smaller pieces
• Pencil shavings
• Sticky notes
• Contents of your vacuum cleaner bag or canister
• Used matches
• Fur from the dog or cat brush
• Droppings and bedding from your rabbit/gerbil/hamsters, etc.
• Newspaper/droppings from the bottom of the bird cage
• Feathers
• Alfalfa hay or pellets (usually fed to rabbits)
• Rawhide dog chews
• Fish food
• Dry dog or cat food

Our pile is going to get so much bigger now!

Pill Bugs - An Update on the War

In an earlier post I talked about our pill bug/ sow bug / rollie-pollie / Charlie bug problem and how to get rid of them without using chemicals. Nearly two months later we are (obviously) through the seedling phase and still at battle with these little buggers. We have managed to find an equitable balance. Or at least I think so. They get to have a squash or two every few weeks and I toss them some tomatoes the birds have left behind.

Here's what helped us significantly reduce their population:

• Reducing the moisture in the garden.
  
• Setting the traps with wet rolled up newspaper and fruit (specifically using half a cantaloupe turned upside down in the garden).
• Protecting the seedlings by cutting the bottom off some plastic pots or old yogurt containers. We put the plastic containers around the seedlings, twisting them into the soil to dig them in. This helped to keep the bugs out.

Also, it seems they've found their way to my compost pile. I don't mind them being over there, happily working turning our old food and yard waste into soil. And I know I have to be prepared because they're over there, amassing, like an army, just waiting for the next planting season. My hope is I can keep them happily working over there, in the compost heap. But if they should get curious and wander over to the garden...I now have some handy tricks to employ!

The Tomatillo - This Year's Great Love

We rarely plant the same tomatoes every year. Despite our promises to ourselves at the end of summer that we will seek out the variety we relished from that year's harvest, by the following Spring we can barely remember our names let alone the tomato we so treasured months before. Every Spring there is an event here in Los Angeles called "Tomato Mania" - it is the Disneyland of tomatoes! There are over 200 varieties! The spectacle of it placates the amnesia and, giddy with the thought of the summer harvest, we end up choosing 7 or 8 random varieties of tomato seedlings.

We love our tomatoes. We relish our tomatoes. But our approach to growing them is a little more scattershot than most. A little more punk rock, if you will. We put them in our organically composted ground. We give them a proper support system. Too much water. And then watch them mature with the same eagerness and enthusiasm as our 6 year old daughters.

On this year's tomato adventure we discovered the Tomatillo. It is a gorgeous plant. It produces hundreds of beautiful green fruit wrapped in delicate husks. You know they are ripe when the husks begin to brown and peel away. The fruit is sweet and delicate and delicious sliced on its own.

But they are commonly and, I would argue, best used to make salsa verde. Here is a very simple recipe that is guaranteed to make you drool and impress your friends:

• Gather all the tomatillos you can and roast them in the broiler for about 5 minutes (until soft). They should be browned but not burnt. Cut large ones in half and place cut side down.
• You can also roast (2) jalepenos along with the tomatillos. Make sure they are stemmed and seeded. If you like it hot, leave in the seeds.
• 1/2 cup of chopped white onion
• Cilantro (maybe 1/2 cup, but you can add more or less)
• Salt to taste
• The juice from (1) small lime

Take all of the ingredients, while they are still hot, and put them in a blender . Pulse until pureed. Salt to taste. Cool in fridge (although I eat it warm out of the blender). After a day, this thickens up quite a bit. The salsa will keep for a week in the fridge, well covered.

How To Get Rid Of Pill Bugs - The Research

Our beautiful raised bed garden has turned into a sea of potato bugs / pill bugs / charlie bugs / rollly-pollies / sow bugs. See that beautiful photo of my beans? They ate that entire row of young bean plants in a night and then started on an Early Prolific Squash. I have never seen these docile cute little bugs swarm before. They are voracious.

Where did they come from? While we certainly have our share of all sorts of bugs we've never had this many sow bugs. As I did my internet research on how to be rid of them I learned they like to feast on decaying matter and young seedlings. I'm guessing they had a very cozy life inside the organic compost I used to start my garden. I don't mind sharing some of our garden with nature but this is nuts!

So, how to be rid of them? Since our goal is to raise vegetables and fruits without chemicals we are looking for a natural, "Little House on the Prairie" solution to this problem. Here's a variety of solutions we've learned thanks to a handy google search.

What you need to know about these fellers is they work at night. During the heat of the day they go dormant. They lounge in the shade of plant leaves, crowded together, hording moisture. At night, when the humidity rises, they go to work.

• Remove them by hand. Pick em up. Smoosh em. Or relocate them. This didn't work for us as there were just too many. At the height of it I could pick up trowels full of them.
  
• Reduce the moisture in the garden by watering in the mornings. These little buggers thrive on moisture. If you water in the mornings the moisture will soak in throughout the day and the top layer of soil will be dry by evening. In theory, without moisture the pill bugs will go elsewhere. This helped but would not have sufficed on its own.
  
• Once your plant is mature, try to raise the vegetation off the ground as they will eat a whole squash!
• Use Sluggo Pellets, which supposedly dissolve and add iron to your soil. I didn't try these as I didn't feel 100% sure about the "naturalness" of this product.
  
• Set a trap using over-ripe fruit. Place fruit in various spots of the garden. The sow bugs will make a meal of the fruit throughout the night. In the morning, pick up the fruit loaded with pill bugs. Toss it. This TOTALLY WORKS!!
  
• Set a trap using newspaper. Take tightly rolled newspaper and soak it with water. Put it in the garden at the end of the day. The rollie-pollies will feast on it all night. In the morning, you should find a paper loaded with pill bugs. Toss it. This TOTALLY WORKS!!
  
• A blogger from Australia says he uses cayenne pepper and/or curry powder as a deterent. He puts a mixture of cayenne pepper and curry powder in the soil around his tomato and potato plants and has found that to be an effective deterrent. I haven't tried this one yet but I have found that cinamon is an effective deterrent for ants...that'll be a whole other post.
  
• Use Diatomaceous Earth. Diatomaceous Earth eliminates the pill bugs by dryingthem out and can be harmful to worms. I love my garden worms so I haven't tried this solution.

Using Gray Water

California is in the midst of a horrible drought and so we've begun using the gray water from the girls' bath to water the garden and lawn. So far, it hasn't killed anything (they use small amounts of soap) and it's fun for us. I suspect our neighbors think we have some serious plumbing problems as they watch the four of us hauling buckets of water out the front door and dump them on the lawn.

I heard an interesting story on NPR today about people who are illegally using gray water from their washing machines to water their gardens. I'm going to investigate further but I wonder -- do you have any advice or experience with using gray water?