The Tower of Tomatoes

For months I had been looking forward to this day. I passed many cold January and February hours reading books and blogs for inspiration and solutions, sprouting seeds, and working my compost pile while dreaming about picking fresh produce from my backyard garden. After many wintry days spent thinking about my garden and what will go in it and how I can make it produce more, I had quite a few ideas to implement this spring. 

The most important ( but let's be honest, not quite the most exciting) endeavor was prepping the soil. This process actually started about 7 months ago, with a trip to the ranch and a truckload of horse poop.  My Sweet Cowboy helped me shovel, transport, and till it into the fall garden beds last October (that’s how I knew he was the one for me!).  When I started digging into the soil this spring I found earthworm metropolis, and thus, I am taking it the horse manure was a hit.  

I have never seen so many earthworms in my garden as I have this year.  Big ones, small ones, it's like a fishing bait shop exploded in my garden. I am pumped!

Yet, consider the manure of last fall as merely poop: round one.  And now for the double deuce. I got a pretty great deal on some "llama doo" at my favorite tomato farm, The Tomato Man's Daughter and so each new planting this year got a whopping scoop of fresh manure goodness.  Oh yea, if I ever needed any confirmation that My Sweet (borderline OCD clean-freak) Cowboy is head-over-boots in love with me, it is that he let me put 20 lbs. of llama doo into the back of his car. That's true love, baby!

The most significant soil project this year has less to do with putting nutrients in the soil, as it does with controlling the nutrient thieving of greedy weeds. *fist shaking!* After years of “whatever grows is cool” attitude and lazy weed control efforts, I am fighting back. I have been reading some good things about lasagna mulching, and trying my hand at a version of it.  I put down a layer of paper grocery bags that have been multiplying in my pantry, by opening the bottoms, and flatting them out and laying them like tile across my garden bed.  On top of this I placed a thick layer of grass and leaf clippings several inches deep.  I actually planted my vegetables directly into this, by cutting a whole into the bag, dropping in my llama doo, planting the plant and then pushing the mulch up around the base of the plant.   For extra measure, I spread a very light layer of wood mulch over the top.  I paid extra attention to the edge of my garden where grass loves to shoot up under the edging and attempt to convert my garden into a mini Tall Grass Prairie.  I am hoping that this multiple step approach will help stop weeds before they have taken over my garden.

You can see the grocery bags lined up with leaf and grass clippings piled on top and ready for plants.

However, the biggest under taking of the day was constructing two six foot trellises that will give tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, and maybe peas or green beans (if I get them planted soon), a lovely space for sun seeking.  I am thinking of adding some nasturtiums too for some pretty, but also edible, floral action.  The idea came from my desire to grow more of my own food with the space and resources available to me. Vertical Gardening by Derek Fell inspired the trellis construction. The book really has empowered me to just think more creatively about using vertical space instead of horizontal space. I decided that I wanted to try a Skyscraper Garden trellis and see if it really would increase my harvest.  If nothing else the vision of towering tomatoes just looks so cool in my mind that it is worth a shot.

The Cowboy very sweetly assisted in the design and provided the majority of the manpower necessary to complete this project.  Only two Band-Aid- required-accidents and no fights- in-the-middle-of-two-trips-to-Lowes later, we had two six foot trellises.  

I am not sure if there is much more attractive than a man working with his hands to make something for you

Oreo supervises trellis construction

The completed trellis frame, ready to go into the garden

We had to improvise on a few of our materials, and the Cowboy only had to walk away from the scene to regain his cool once after the second trellis fell apart during installation. I didn’t mind one bit, I was just impressed that something I had thought up in my head was becoming a reality. The Cowboy called the project “pre-marital counseling”.  I think I would take building things with my man any day of the week over talking about budgets or chore charts.

You see 2x4's and chicken wire, I see pico de gallo.  And Oreo sees a stick pile feast (gotta get some cayenne pepper sprinkled on that soon!)

At the end of the day we had built our two trellises out of 2x4x8s and chicken wire and a few stakes and dug two foot holes to secure the structures in the ground. We were well under budget for what we could have bought similar structures for at the hardware store and we got to bond over manual labor.  WIN.  We celebrated with an awesome celebration meal and then fell asleep on the couch.

Whole wheat pasta with grilled chicken and asparagus with lemon herb goat cheese sauce.

The night we finished building the trellis a huge line of tornadoes and thunderstorms swept through Oklahoma.   So while I should have been worrying about my own safety, I was mostly stressed over whether or not the trellises would hold up to some feisty Oklahoma spring weather. And they did! Hooray! 

This German Johnson tomato plant is ready to climb this trellis, I like to grow these tomatoes in honor of my Grandma Johnson whose started this garden. This heirloom tomato was also parent of the "Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter" tomato and my Grandpa was called Charlie, so this is one way that I honor them.

So, what new projects do you have schemed up for your garden this year?  I'd love to hear what you are doing, and maybe borrow some ideas for my own little urban prairie homestead.

Garden Goal: Save More Seeds

My whole initial gardening desire was born out of a heart connection to my grandmother. As long as I knew my grandma she had a garden, and it was not uncommon to find seeds from all kinds of fruits and vegetables wrapped in paper towels or towed in jars all over.  In fact it was one of the little comical quirks she had that made her so lovely.  She passed away in the spring of 2007 and as a way to honor her I wanted to cultivate her garden.  In a way, her garden itself is a family heirloom.

But, I will just be really honest with you, I am a bad gardener.  Really bad.  Like I am only successful if I grow plants that flourish when neglected kind of bad.  When anything I plant grows at all I am pretty ecstatic and don’t get too upset when things don’t work out because I, say, forgot to water them for three weeks during 115 degree summer.  I really love the idea of gardening, but the actual work of weeding and remembering to water and all of that cultivation stuff is hard for me.  But for a wide and ever evolving set of reasons, I continue to go at it. I have had a lot of failures, and it is a blessing that in spite of whatever hopes I have to one day be able to grow all my own food, I have not had to rely on my own garden to sustain me.  My grandmother’s generation pioneered the victory garden, and I have pioneered the failure garden.

I first really became interested in heirloom plants after that first gardening year without my grandmother when I planted and fell in love with a pepper and a tomato.  Love at first bite. The pepper, chili de agua, had an intensity somewhere between a poblano and a jalepeno, and the black cherry tomato, a sweet, dark, mellow fruit that I searched for at farmer’s market stands for years after.  Maybe it was the fact that this chili was absolutely perfect filleted on a summer burger, or that this tomato was different than the standard red cherry tomato you can buy in the store that caused me to want to seek out these particular varieties.  After a couple years of searching, I finally discovered the heirloom tomato farm from which I had originally encountered these plants at a garden fair and planted almost my entire garden full of tomatoes, peppers, and some herbs.  I would have been swimming in salsa if it had not been the hottest driest summer in Oklahoma in decades.

This year I really wanted to save seeds and ensure I never was without my beloved chili pepper and tomato plants so I began to research heirlooms.  The more I learned, the more I felt like it was something I wanted to support beyond just my tomato obsession. It is true; you can’t walk into a grocery store and find these particular varieties of vegetable and fruit.  In fact, where I live, the selection of produce is so ordinary that trying to eat healthy can get really boring.  There is something in my spirit that says, it is good to grow these plants because they are different.  It is important to grow these plants because that means that they will continue to be enjoyed. And so, soap boxes about our nation’s food systems aside, I just want to continue to enjoy these plants, and that has led me to where I am today, learning about heirloom seed saving.

According to seedsave.org, vegetables that produce seed the same season as planted and are mostly self-pollinating are the ideal varieties for beginner seed saving gardeners to try.  Beans, lettuce, peas, peppers, and tomatoes are all excellent types to try if you are just starting out.  I actually happen to be trying to grow all of these veggies this year. YAY!

I took my Cowboy and we went to the store looking for heirloom seeds and much to my dismay no packages said “we are heirlooms”.  My sweet supportive Cowboy helped me pour over seed racks in a variety of stores checking the backs of packages and trying to figure out which of these seeds would satisfy me. Talk about an obstacle, all I wanted to do was grow some heirlooms and I couldn’t even find the dang seeds. After driving all over town, and feeling quite discouraged, I consulted the internet for some knowledge (which if I had done in the first place would have saved me a lot of trouble, I know, but that is not how impulsive go-getters do their gettin’).

I discovered several key facts:

• If it does not say “FI Hybrid” it’s open pollinated.
• ALL Heirlooms are open pollinated. Not all open pollinated seeds are Heirlooms.

Ok, that cleared up a LOT of questions in my mind when I was standing in the seed aisle of Home Depot, but regardless of the Hybrid versus Open Pollinated seeds; I still had a big question of how to acquire open pollinated heirloom seeds.  Oh thank Internet for being oh-so-made for these types of dilemmas.

And very importantly, I also confirmed that the seeds that I thought were heirlooms that I got from Seed Savers Exchange at Whole Foods ARE heirlooms! seedsavers.org This was the best news of all, since I already had some of these seeds, and I could easily get more.

In this process I also learned that for my small backyard garden, heirloom tomato seed saving might not be practical since I intend to plant several varieties of plants in a small space.  The seeds I “save” and am growing this year I actually saved from some tomatoes I bought at Whole Foods on sale to eat because the drought last summer was so rough on my tomato crop that I barely got any fruit.  However, I did come across a great resource, seedsave.org  which had a ton of practical and well organized information and instructions for saving the seeds of different types of vegetables. Book marked!  A book that I came across during my research called Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth is going to go on my wish list so that I can really educate myself on this stuff.  Seed saving has been like most things in my life where I just follow my gut first and then learn for to actually do it later.

After all this internet reading, my conclusion is that if I want to do this, I need to focus on choosing heirloom seeds to grow, collecting heirloom seeds for the future from reputable sources, and when I am only growing one variety of a plant that won’t cross pollinate, then saving the seeds.  So this unfortunately rules out saving my tomato seeds (and tomatillos because they are similar to tomatoes), because I intend to grow several varieties.  However, I am planning on a couple of other plants for which I will only plant one type and for those I can save the seeds. 

Plants with seeds I want to save:

• Pepper, chili de agua
• Pepper, green bell (I am growing this on the other side of the yard, so I think it will be ok)
• Peas
• Beans (apparently beans are super difficult to cross pollinate because of the way the flower is formed, I did not know!)
• Squash
• Okra
• Nasturtium
• Marigold
• Garlic (garlic grows basically wild in my garden, thanks to my awesome grandmother, so I put it on this list but it does not require much work from me)

My bench mark for success in this goal will be met if I save even just a handful more seeds this year, plant them next spring, and I start to educate myself about the science of seed saving and cultivation of heirloom plants.  Seriously, success will taste like putting that first chili pepper on my burger this summer and thinking about how it came from a seed from a pepper I grew last year. I might even do the awesome dance.