Tomatoes

Tomatoes grown by the Gentleman Farmer, photo by Cadence Purdy

Pesto

Basil, pesto and photo all by Cadence Purdy

Tomato-Pesto Pizza

Tomato-Pesto Pizza, 2006 version. Photo by Cadence Purdy

Bordeaux spinach from Botanical Interests

We had a yummy spinach salad, and gave away the rest of this bowlful to two neighbors. I probably would not have done that if I didn’t know more was coming soon.

This seed was sown April 4th. That means it took 51 days from planting to harvest. And he probably could have harvested it sooner. If we weren’t having this heat wave, we wouldn’t need to be in such a hurry to harvest it. I think. On the other hand, it seems we are always complaining about how fast the spinach bolts. Margaret Roach sows her spinach the year before to avoid this problem. I remember reading that in her book and being astounded by the picture. I am not sure that would work here; our clay soil tends to induce rot. And we never seem to know the fall before where we want to plant everything for the following spring. But we will never know if it works for us until we try it. Experimentation is what makes you a more experienced gardener.

Purdyville Spinach Salad

24 cups washed, spun-dry, coarsely chopped (or torn) spinach
2 pounds thick-sliced bacon–fried, drained and crumbled
6 ounces mushrooms–sliced
12 hard boiled eggs–peeled or chopped

Wash spinach, spin dry, place in refrigerator to chill. Fry bacon until a combination of chewy and crunchy is achieved (about 10 minutes of medium-slow cooking). While bacon is cooking, clean mushrooms and thinly slice. Drain bacon on paper toweling and then crumble. Chop spinach into coarse pieces and toss spinach, bacon and mushrooms together. Top with chopped egg and serve with a sprinkle of paprika if you’re feeling fancy. Makes enough to serve 12.

That’s the basic idea, and each person adds the dressing of their choice. But last night was short notice for spinach salad, so I used only one pound of bacon and skipped the mushrooms (not sure who likes them besides me, anyway) and I threw in some sliced green onions because I needed to use them up.

How’s your spinach crop coming? And what’s your favorite way to eat it?

‘Bordeaux’ spinach seed provided by Botanical Interests

Friday the garden looked fine. Saturday we were gone, Sunday it rained. On Monday I asked my husband to dig up some new potatoes for our supper, and he discovered the garden was infected with Phytophthora infestans, commonly known as late blight.

The empty area is where he dug potatoes. You can see blackened leaves hanging from the surrounding plants.

Late Blight Factoids

• Ideal conditions for late blight are days in the 70sF (~20sC) and nights in the 50sF(~13C). (Those are ideal conditions for me, too.) Even better if there is moisture in the form of rain, fog, or heavy dew. “Four to five continual days of such weather are an open invitation for an outbreak.” It just so happens when it isn’t rainy, we usually have both fog and heavy dew, and we’ve had these conditions for weeks.
• Infection is spread by sporangia from moldy leaves. The sporangia can’t survive in dead plant debris or in the soil. It needs to winter over on potato tubers. This is why you are always admonished to use certified seed potatoes. One infected potato, given the right weather conditions, can take down your whole crop. However, “use of certified seed can reduce the amount of infestation from infected seed pieces, but it will not prevent foliar infection from other sources, such as neighboring fields.” And apparently a “neighboring” field can be up to 10 miles away.
• The sporangia come from oospores, which apparently can survive in soil. But the sporangia, not the oospores, are what cause the major outbreaks.
• “A rule of thumb: if rainfall or irrigation water exceeds 1.2 inches in a 10-day period, good conditions for late blight exist.” We had over 2 inches of rain earlier last week.

Tomatoes Can Also Get Late Blight

Tomato plants infected with late blight

Our very first tomatoes, picked August 3, 2009. They may be our only tomatoes.

What Can Be Done?

• “When late blight appears in isolated sections of fields, spread of the disease can be slowed considerably by quickly destroying infected plants. Killing the living potato tissue halts further spore production.” “Sanitation is the first line of defense against late blight.…Volunteer potatoes, solanaceous (potato family) weeds, and any infected plants should be destroyed as soon as they occur.” (What’s growing in your compost pile?)
• Potatoes infected with the fungus can start rotting before being harvested. They will continue to rot after being dug and can spread the fungus to good potatoes.


My husband dug these from the garden. The brown patches are infection. We trimmed off the brown parts, cooked, and ate them. The raw potatoes were very crisp, like the crispest apple.

• Storing potatoes in a cool, dry location will slow down the infection. Our basement is cool, but damp.
• The following varieties show some resistance: Kennebec, Elba, Onaway, Rosa, and Sebago. Kennebec is one of the 10 varieties we are growing.

One More Thing

Late blight stinks. Literally. The infected plants smell really bad. If infected potatoes get a secondary bacterial infection, they smell really bad, too.

Sources

I used these two sources for information and quotes. If you have more accurate or detailed information, I’d love to learn it.

• Late Blight of Potato and Tomato (conventional approach)
• Organic Alternatives for Late Blight Control in Potatoes

The End

He Won’t Brag, So I Will

Just one head of lettuce provides salad for twelve. Can your lettuce do that?

Shaded by the broccoli, the lettuce isn't bitter, even though it's pretty nigh bolted.

Low of 44F this morning. Yes, this is July. No, not Siberia, or Alaska. Tomatoes prefer 55F-75F at night. Peppers will not set fruit if temperatures drop into the low 40sF. And eggplants? Pollen production is curtailed when temps fall below 55F. But we can eat peas in July!

Peas in July! Yes, we are harvesting the last of our peas this week. When you garden in a cold climate, you may grow the same vegetables as those in warmer areas, but you don’t follow the same schedule. I thought I’d run through our pea time line to give you an idea of how it’s different here. And I just want to say that I don’t grow the vegetables around here. This is a compilation of the collective pea-growing wisdom of Purdyville.

When and How to Sow

The standard advice is to plant peas as soon as the soil can be “worked,” or prepared. That means it has to be completely thawed. However, pea seed will rot in “prolonged cold wet weather,” according to Johnny’s seed catalog and countless other sources. And our garden has clay soil and a tendency to drain poorly, not just because of the clay soil but also because the water table is quite high in places. So both soil temperature and soil moisture have to be taken into account. It’s a delicate balance: if you sow peas too early, they may rot, and if you wait until you’re sure the soil is dry, they may run into hot weather near harvest time and produce poorly or not at all.

Rot-Preventing Strategies

Some gardeners buy treated seed to guard against rotting in cold soils, but we prefer to use a combination of other strategies. We’ve learned over the course of several years’ observation, that when the peepers start peeping, it’s time to plant peas. This year, they didn’t start until April 15th, though in other years they have been earlier. (We usually make note of their first “song” in our garden journal.)

This area of the garden is always the last to dry out, so my husband created a raised bed to grow peas.

We soak our pea seed before planting it, but are careful not to soak it too much. This is 8 ounces of Lincoln seed and 8 ounces of Progress #9

Use Inoculant

After we drain the water from the soaked peas, but before we sow them, we treat them with inoculant. Inoculant is rhizobia bacteria that help the pea roots take up, or fix nitrogen, and according to Denckla, increases yields from 50% to 100%. It looks like black powder. You sprinkle it over the damp pea seed and toss to coat.

Types of Peas

There are two kinds of shell peas, that is, the kind of pea that you take out of the pod (shell) to eat: vine and bush. Supposedly you don’t need to provide a support for bush peas, just plant two rows close together and let them support each other. What we have found is that all this means is you will have to bend over more, so we provide support for bush peas.

Every year we cobble together some support for the pea plants. It varies depending on what we have on hand.

Here's a closeup of this year's pea support, brought to you by tomato cages and plastic pipe. Peas were in full flower by June 16th, two months after they were sown.

It is a good idea to grow more than one variety, whether you grow bush or vine, because one variety’s ideal weather could be another’s nemesis, or a certain variety may be more chewed up by insects. In other words, diversity protects you from catastrophe.

When to Harvest

Plants with pods at different stages of maturity on July 2nd, 78 days after seeds were sown.

By July 5th, our pea harvest was at its peak.

Peas taste best raw when they are slightly immature.

For eating raw, these peas are past their prime.

If the pods look pale green, they are really overmature, but you should pick them anyway. If you don’t, it will signal to the plant that it’s job is done, and it doesn’t need to make anymore flowers or pods. Eventually the heat will do that, but you don’t want it to happen any sooner than it has to. Because, you want to be eating peas in July!

Notes

*We actually have The Organic Gardener’s Home Reference: A Plant-By-Plant Guide to Growing Fresh, Healthy Food, which is the previous edition of this book.

Johnny’s Seeds has good seed starting and growing information for all their seeds. You have to click on a particular variety to see it, under the tab Growing Information.

Fedco Seeds has a chart summarizing the most pertinent seed starting and growing information.

DH sowed Fedco peas today: 8oz Lincoln and 8oz Progress#9. Soil still wet, so he made a raised bed first. It was wet because there is a natural seep there.

This is a lettuce seedling, not a tomato seedling. But at least it's a seedling. Photo 2007 by Talitha Purdy

I live in area between Syracuse and Ithaca… near Cortland. I have tomato seeds–many different varieties. When should I start the seedlings to grow in peat pots inside the house? Is it too early? While I am at it…what else should I be starting? Thanks a bunch.

My name’s Talitha, and I’ve been growing vegetables for our family for the past several years, so my mom asked me to answer your questions.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a very quick answer for your question, because it depends on so many different things. I know where Cortland is, generally speaking, but even knowing your general location really isn’t enough, because micro-climates can differ so much. For example—I normally get one last frost in the last week of May or the first week of June–but people just 1 1/2 miles away don’t get cold enough for this last frost! This is because we live in a deep valley, and the hills on either side of us really funnel the cold air right at us. People at the end of the of the street are out of the valley, and they don’t have such extreme cold.

The Standard Advice

So the standard advice is to start your tomatoes inside about 6 weeks before your last frost date. For me, that would be starting them around the last week of April. You will have to count back from whenever you think you get your last frost.

Because tomatoes dislike cold so much, it has been recommended not to plant them outside until 2-4 weeks after your last frost. If I did that, I wouldn’t be planting them out until the middle of June or the beginning of July!!

Pros and Cons of Wall o’ Waters

Wall o’ Waters work quite well for mitigating situations like this, and you may find it is a good solution for you. For me, my garden is on a hill, and Wall o’ Waters need level ground to keep from collapsing. Because my last frost date comes so late and my growing season is so short, I start my tomatoes around the first of April, and pot them on many times. By the time I plant them out, they’re in gallon sized containers and have thick stems and are quite bushy. I could, I suppose, plant them out and cover them for that last sneaky frost (there are often weeks before that last one where it doesn’t frost at all), but since tomatoes don’t like cold and I don’t like worrying about losing all my tomatoes, it doesn’t seem as good an option to me.

It really depends

So with tomatoes it really depends on your last frost date, your micro-climate, how many times you would like to pot them on, and how much season-extending you would like to do. On the year I used Wall o’ Waters (with much effort, as I had to level every single spot), I planted my tomato plants into the ground in the middle of April!!! The Wall o’ Waters were quite effective at keeping them alive, but I can’t say I really noticed a significantly earlier yield for all my trouble.

Using Wall o’ Waters

My guess is that your last frost date is typically in the middle of May. If you had level ground and the inclination to use them, I’d plant your tomatoes outside, with Wall ‘o Waters, at the beginning of May. I’d take the Wall o’ Waters off about 2 weeks after your last frost date (I’m guessing around the end of May), after the nights have moderated and don’t get so chilly. That would mean starting your tomatoes inside around the end of March.

Using Peat Pots

However, I also notice that you were planning on starting your tomatoes in peat pots. Peat pots are meant to allow the roots to grow through the pot; they are not meant for potting on. If you want to grow your tomatoes in peat pots instead of potting them on to bigger pots, I don’t think I would start the tomatoes any more than 3-4 weeks before the last frost date. Otherwise, your tomatoes will get too big for your pots.

Start these seeds first

As for your other seeds, the first ones to start would be broccoli, leeks and cabbage. Leeks can be started the very first of all, as you want them to be strong seedlings by the time you plant them out—so you can start them two months or more before your last frost date, maybe around early March (or even earlier). Broccoli and cabbage can be started 8-9 weeks before your last frost date. Those are cold weather crops, so if they have been properly hardened off, they can be planted out before the last frost.

Cold Weather Greens

The next batch of seedlings to be started are the cold weather greens, like lettuce, spinach and chard. These can also take light frost if properly hardened off, but they grow faster than broccoli and cabbage, so they can be started about four weeks before last frost date. These can also be sown straight into the ground as soon as it can be worked, but that doesn’t work as well for me. First of all, I have a better and more reliable germination rate starting inside, and can use a lot less seed. Second of all, although my ground might be technically unfrozen, it is still very, very sodden, and seeds that are kept too wet for too long rot instead of sprout. So I start my greens inside instead of out. Peas, however, I have always planted in the ground as soon as I possibly can, but I try to make sure they are in a well-drained or elevated area, especially if we are having a very rainy spring.

Heat loving vegetables

Squash and cucumbers need only be started a few weeks before last frost date, or if you please, straight into the ground after any chance of frost. Although they appreciate a long growing season, they grow so fast it is unfeasible to start them very much ahead of time.

I hope that helps. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask!

Even young children take gardening seriously and want to succeed. (Photo by Cadence Purdy)

I prefer to regard children as apprentice gardeners, gradually acquiring more skills as the years go by, working their way up (at their own pace and interest level) to journeyman and eventually master gardener. As much as possible, I like to let them choose their own projects, plan the execution of them, and solve their own problems. Here are three books, supposedly for adults, that do just that.

The Veggie Gardener’s Answer Book by Barbara J. Ellis serves apprentice gardeners well in several ways. It is small enough to be manageable in young hands, with a wipe-clean cover that can take visits to the garden without falling apart. The question-and-answer format makes it easy to zero in on a topic of burning interest or flip open to a random page and still grasp what’s being discussed. And it asks–and answers–lots of questions, everything from what are the easiest crops to grow to how can I make weeding go faster to how do I cope with a garden that got out of control? The first part of the book covers general gardening techniques and the second part gives advice on specific crops. There’s also a glossary, a bibliography, and a handy chart to help you determine how much to plant out of that generous seed packet. It truly is a “knowledegable gardening friend,” as the introduction suggests, a friend who doesn’t talk down to you, because the book was written for adults.

Wherever there’s plants, you know there’s going to be bugs, and Good Bug, Bad Bug by Jessica Walliser helps the novice garden determine friend from foe. The spiral-bound format of this book makes it easy to flip through, but it’s the index that makes it really useful. Look up the plant that has the bug on it, and it will give you all the pages that have bugs that frequent that plant. (By doing so I learned that sawflies were gobbling up my rose’s leaves.)

The bugs are easily identified by the photographs. Each bug gets a two-page spread that describes the damage it does and suggests preventive actions, live biological controls, organic product controls, and additional information when available. For example, adult cutworm moths are a favorite food of bats, so a good way to reduce cutworms in your garden is to encourage bats. Similar information is provided for the good bugs: who they control, and how to attract and keep them. All remedies are organic, but I especially like that the emphasis is placed on providing natural enemies of the pest and controlling environmental factors, before resorting to sprays and powders. If the bug in question isn’t in this book, it’s time to call in the grownups.

Don’t Throw It, Grow It!: 68 windowsill plants from kitchen scrapsby Deborah Peterson and Millicent Selsam is a good remedy for boredom all year round, but especially in the northern winters when outdoor gardening is impossible. This book goes way beyond avocado pits and carrot tops, teaching you how to grow not only familiar vegetables, fruits, and nuts, but also branching into herbs and spices, and produce from Latin American and Asian cuisines. You could get an education just finding some of these. Oops. Did I say education? Fortunately, since this is a book for grownups, there is none of that didactic, it’s good-for-you tone that ruins many a juvenile trade book.

Grow enough of these groceries, and you’ll learn many seed germination and plant propagation techniques–and have fun doing it. Did you know fenugreek was a legume? Did you ever consider growing beets for a holiday centerpiece? Peterson tells some funny stories on herself as well; her spirit of experimentation is contagious. I can’t think of a better way to relieve the winter doldrums than to go shopping in the supermarket for a plant to grow. As the author advises: “Always buy two of each–one to grow and one to eat.”

This is leek soup weather. Most of the trees have dropped their leaves, and the larch are enjoying their final glory before they drop their needles.

More northern gardeners should grow leeks. Leeks appreciate cool weather and are not intimidated by frost. As a matter of fact, their flavor is improved by frost, so there’s no rush to get them out of the ground. My husband dug our leeks earlier this week, well after we had several hard freezes (20F) and the leaves had dropped from most of the trees. And leeks are conducive to so many recipes that are best at this chilly time of year.

Most recipes advise using only the white part of the leek, but I usually trim them where the leaves start branching, as indicated by the dotted line.

Potato-Leek Chowder

3 large leeks
1 1/2 pounds potatoes — peeled and diced
1 1/2 tablespoons butter
3 cups chicken broth
pepper — to taste
salt — to taste
1 1/2 cups skim milk
3 tablespoons minced fresh parsley — (6 teaspoon dried)
3 ounces cheddar — grated

Cut the root end off the leeks. Cut the leaves off where they start to branch (see photo and caption). Slice lengthwise and then slice crosswise into 1/2″ pieces. Put these slices into a strainer or colander, and put the strainer into a large bowl. Fill the bowl with water. Lift the strainer up and down in the water to help clean the leeks. Leave them in the water while you peel the potatoes.

I use the French-fry cutting disk of my food processor to cut the potatoes instead of dicing them. It is much quicker, and the potatoes break down in the soup enough to fit on your spoon.

In non-stick large sauce pan, saute the potatoes and leeks in the butter for several minutes, stirring to prevent browning. Add broth, pepper and salt. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 20-30 min, till potatoes are tender.

Add milk gradually. Heat gently but do not allow to boil. Stir in parsley and cheese. I have to say it looks more appetizing if you use an orange cheese instead of a pale yellow one, but it will taste great in either case.

Recipe from Jane Brody’s Good Food Book, p. 322, with adaptations.

We liked this soup so much that we started growing leeks just so we could make it. Of course there are lots of classic leek recipes, such as Cock-a-Leekie and Vichyssoise.

How to grow leeks

Leeks are the first vegetable planted in the garden and the last one harvested. We (meaning someone in our family, but probably not me) start them indoors in the second half of February. For your own northern garden, figure two months before your last spring frost. We sow them in individual small cells. Once they sprout, make sure they get fertilized regularly with a weak solution of your favorite indoor plant fertilizer. You want them to grow both long and sturdy inside, so you can plant them deeply in the garden.

Plant them in your vegetable garden as soon as the soil can be worked. Note that this is not the same thing as as soon as the soil has thawed. You want the soil to have dried out enough so you’re not making mud pies. For us that winds up being early to mid-May, a couple of weeks before our last frost.

Your leek bed should be fully prepared before you plant, because you are not going to be messing with this bed again until harvest. Pull your weeds, incorporate organic matter, and make sure the soil is pleasantly moist, but not soggy or gummy. Now put two inches of hay on top of your prepared bed. (Straw would be even better, but we never have that. We can get old hay pretty easily.)

This is our dibble. It is about 10 inches long.

The leeks are pretty much ignored until it’s time to harvest them. As I said, it’s one of the last things we do. You don’t have to dig them all at once. Just dig as many leeks as you think you need for your recipe, being careful not to slice into them. (We use a garden fork.) You do want to dig them all before the ground freezes solid. One time we forgot, and had to just about chisel them out of the ground. They were kind of slimy on the outside when they thawed, too, though the centers were still good.

If you have a root cellar or a pretty darn cold basement (the kind where you have to take precautions to keep your pipes from freezing), consider digging them all up and storing them down there. It’s a heck of a lot more pleasant to go down to the basement than to trudge through two inches of snow and a biting wind to fork them out of close-to-freezing earth. See the resources below for details.

Leek Resources

Leeks | DoItYourself.com – good overview for the home grower, including southern growing methods
Stocking the Root Cellar – general principles on cold storage, but not much on leeks
Commercial Leek Production – precise growing and harvesting instructions
Planting Leeks at Beside the Stream – another cold climate gardener’s planting method
Foiled Again by the Elusive Leek – Anne Raver can’t grow leeks, but she talks to experts who can.
Leek Recipes – a big long list.