For Romanians in Connecticut only, please, I have some fresh lovage (leustean) available, as well as some red orache (loboda) seeds (but seeds only, not loboda leaves), all for free. You can pick up from my house in Milford with an appointment ahead of time. If interested, please email me at alexbratu@yahoo.com .

My new tomato gardening website

I've created a regular non-blog tomato gardening website where the navigation might be easier: www.tomatoguy.com .

Please drop by!

Composting

Now that the growing season is over, it's time to take down the garden and put dead plants to use. Make compost out of them!

Composting is the process of letting microbes work on organic matter like leaves, plants, vegetables, and fruits to turn this organic matter into a nutrient-rich addition to your garden soil. I do not let potato peels, apple peels, apple cores, dead tomato and pepper plants, rotting tomatoes, peanut shells, eggshells, and cucumber peels go to waste. I compost them along with grass clippings and leaves, then I use the compost to enrich my garden soil in the spring.

There are many excellent websites about composting, with this being the first one I found on a Google search: http://vegweb.com/composting/ . Go there, read up, and start putting those scraps to work!

Mulching

A good friend of mine who has been growing tomatoes for many years told me to do 3 things: "Mulch, mulch, mulch!"

Mulching means putting down a layer of "stuff" on the ground around your plants. This is done to keep your soil evenly moist by preventing evaporation, to keep the dirt from splashing on your plants during rain, and to keep weeds from growing in your garden. This "stuff" can be a variety of organic material like leaves, grass, hay, wood chips, and so on. I use grass because it's readily available every time I mow the lawn and at the end of the season I can just leave what remains of it on top of my beds (to keep weeds from growing and also to enrich the soil) and turn it over the following spring or throw it into the composter if there's too much left to turn over.

After the soil warms up with the heat in June I cover my raised beds with a layer of about 2-3 inches of cut grass, but I leave an unmulched area (about a 6-9 inch diameter) around the stems. I don't think it's a good idea to have the grass touching the stem, and leaving an unmulched area around the stem makes it much easier to water. Throughout the season, my mulch disintegrates little by little, so I may remulch once or twice a season.

If you decide to use grass to mulch your tomato plants, be aware that if you use freshly-cut grass you will have an interesting odor in your garden for a few days. One solution would be to dry the grass for a few days first, but the smell really doesn't bother me so I just go ahead and use it as I cut it.

Red Orache

This is not about tomatoes, but this is a good place to post this story.

My parents grew up in Romania, where as you can imagine the food is different from ours here in the good old USA. One of the foods they missed was a soup made out of a plant in the spinach family. In Romanian it's called "loboda", and the soup is called "bors de loboda". They hadn't had this soup in about 40 years, and they longed for it. But the plant was nowhere to be found in the USA; they had not ever seen it here. I decided to find this plant and grow it for them as a surprise.

In the world of the internet, I was able to find out that the English name is red orache, but finding seeds to buy a couple of years ago was very difficult. I found some seeds in the UK, but I thought they would not go through customs. Finally I found a lady in the midwest who had many types of seeds to trade, not to buy. I got in touch with her and made deal (for which I was very grateful) and got the seeds. I planted them in the spring according to her directions, and they came up pretty well.

One day I took my parents out for lunch and swung by my house to show them something. My father sat in the car while I brought my mother out to the garden, and as soon as she saw the plants she knew what they were. In the car she told my father about the find, and they got all excited looking forward to eating "bors de loboda".

This is what it looked like:



But here is the reason I'm telling this story... The red orache produces a lot of seeds, and I saved quite a few of them. For other poor people who are looking for loboda, I'm willing to give seeds away. This offer is good only while my supply lasts, and I'll only mail to a USA address. If you want some loboda seeds, leave your name and address in a reply to this posting, but please don't ask for any if you just want something for free. Ask for some if you have been looking for this seed and couldn't find it anywhere.

Tomato cages

You could plant your tomato seedlings and then just let them grow as they please, sprawling on the ground, but that's not a good idea. When touching the ground, tomatoes tend to rot because they are almost always moist on the bottom. When on the ground, bugs can reach them very easily. For those reasons and more, most people grow tomato plants upright, supported either by stakes or cages.

I choose to support my plants with cages because they afford more protection to the plant, the stems are touched a lot less, and they seem better supported in cages than by stakes. I've also read that tomatoes produce better when caged. I use mostly 54 inch cages.

Since the cages tend to wobble from side to side, I use one stake per cage to steady it. I sink a stake at least a foot into the ground by hitting it with a rubber mallet, then I tie the cage to the stake with a 6" plastic cable tie. After snipping off the extra length of the tie, it looks like this:

When tied to the stakes, the cages are much more stable and will support the tomatoes better.

If you choose to stake them rather than cage them, just remember to tie the stems to the stake a little loosely and with material that will not dig into the stem of the plant. String is not a good idea; it will cut into the stem. A lot of people use strips of old pantyhose because they stretch and "give" a little. They are also gentle on the stem. Some people use a stretchy green plastic tape sold in garden centers. I use that myself, especially when staking Pixie branches that have overflowed their cages. Pixie branches grow heavy with tomatoes because the plant puts them all out at the same time, and if the branches are not supported they will at best bend and at worst break. So caging my Pixies is not enough; I need to stake the branches later in the season and for that I use the green plastic tape.

How to plant tomatoes

Planting tomato plants is fairly easy. It's best not to do it during midday on a sunny day because the full sun tends to be too strong for seedlings to take right away. Try to plant on a cloudy day or in late afternoon. I've planted during full sun and the plants tend to droop pretty quickly. They need to absorb water before the sun hits them with full force.

Water your plants before putting them in the ground. Space tomato seedlings about 2 feet apart in rows 3 feet apart. With a shovel or a trowel, dig your hole. Make it deep enough so that no more than 4 or 5 inches of the plant will be above ground. The more of the plant is above ground, the more it sways in the breeze and the more danger there is of the stem bending or breaking. Loosening the dirt around the future location of the plant is a good idea too, so that the roots have loose soil to dig into rather than packed soil to dig into. If your plant has branches that would be below ground, pinch them off first. If your plant is tall and thin (referred to as "leggy") and you can't dig a hole deep enough to put the plant in vertically, you can dig a horizontal trench, lay the plant down on its side, and GENTLY turn just the top of the plant up so it will be sticking out of the ground. Roots will form all along a buried tomato stem, helping the plant draw in moisture and nutrients.

I use pelleted fertilizer that goes into the hole before I plant, so I don't worry about fertilizing after the plant is in the ground. The brand I use is Osmocote but now Miracle-Gro has also come out with pelleted fertilizer. So if you decide to use these pellets, put those in first according to the directions on the package, swish them around with your trowel or your hand so that they are not all clumped together in one part of the hole, and then put the tomato plant in. As the roots grow they will go down beneath the pellets of fertilizer and every time your plants are watered and the fertilizer dissolves a tiny bit, the pellets will feed the roots little by little.

Once you have put the plant in the hole, fill the rest of the hole with the dirt you got from digging the hole, and pack the soil a little bit around the plant so it will not move when it's watered because loose soil tends to shift when wet. To firm the soil, I use both hands and just give the soil around the seedling a push down into the ground to sort of "set" it. It's hard to describe just how much pressure to use, but use your judgment and don't pound on the darn thing!

If you are worried about cutworms, you need to take some precautions here. A cutworm travels just under the surface of the soil and will chop your seedlings off at the base, much like a lumberjack cuts down a tree. I've had a cutworm chop one of my plants and it's not a pretty sight. To protect against cutworms, all you have to do is to put up some kind of barrier around your seedlings for about an inch into the ground. Cutworms will not dig deeper than that. Some people put a ring of newspaper around their plants, because it's easy, cheap, and the newspaper will decompose eventually. After tomato plants have been in the ground for 2 or 3 weeks, the stems are probably too strong for a cutworm to chew through, so the cutworm protection really only has to last for 2 or 3 weeks.

As cutworm protection I use plastic pots with the bottoms cut out of them. The bottom needs to be removed so the roots can grow down into the soil. I position the cut-out pot so that about an inch is below ground and about an inch or two is above ground. The added benefit to this type of cutworm protection is that the top of the pot makes a nice funnel when watering. I water from the bottom, meaning I water the soil and not the leaves. That's a story for another day... When watering from the bottom, not only do I water around the cut-out pot but I make sure to fill the funnel a couple of times and I know the roots will get watered well. And these cut-out pots are reusable year after year.

I scoop out a "bowl" around my plants so that when I water the water pools up near the plant and is sure to go down to where the roots are. It does no good to water 2 feet away from the roots! Then you're just watering weeds. Later, when mulch is applied (that's for another posting) the bowls remain uncovered.

After planting, water right away to settle the dirt and to give the plant enough moisture to withstand the elements.