“Only two things that money can’t buy/That’s true love and homegrown tomatoes”
— songwriter Guy Clark
It’s been a thrill for me to grow actual tomatoes this summer and eat so many I’m nearly sick of them. (But I don’t think I ever will be.)
I’ve been hummin’ that Guy Clark tune all summer. Tomatoes you grow in your garden are a hundred times better than anything you could possibly buy in a store.
To know my feeling of satisfaction, you must first know my failures.
I’ve tried twice before to grow tomatoes in pots with little to no yield. I probably spent a hundred dollars and a hundred hours, and maybe came up with three tiny edible tomatoes. Embarrassing.
Since I couldn’t have possibly found success on my own, I enlisted the help of a master gardener. Enter my friend Ian.
With Ian’s help, here’s what I did differently:
• Planted in the ground. Forget the pots, it worked much better for the plants’ root systems to go deep into the earth. I used a pitchfork to pull out the first layer of buried weeds, then a giant fork device called a “deep spader” to till even deeper. This was a lot of work and I can’t fully explain how sore I was after jerking around the deep spader all day. This was also the opportunity to really get my hands into the dirt and pull out weeds, sticks and roots from the five-by-five foot garden beds. Playing in the dirt made me feel like a kid again.
• Voodoo and crap. I dumped in a lot dried blood and bone (that you can get from a gardening store) and huge wheelbarrows of horse manure. If there would have been dead chickens around, I would have tossed those in, too. Voodoo stuff is a good thing when it comes to gardening, says Ian. He has tons of bags of steer manure and other types of manure around his garden. Mulch, compost, crap … getting all those nutrients into the soil really is a key. (And anyone who gardens is going, “well, duh!”)
• Cage it up. A big, round wire cage gave the tomatoes something to grow up on. Nearby cucumber plants also grew up the side. You’re looking for these babies to go real big, so use a big cage.
Cherokee chocolate.
So I’ve eaten hundreds of these little cherry tomatoes, and I’ve got crimson carmellos and these wonderful Cherokee chocolates that are just now coming in. It’s heaven.
I’ve also grown beans, eggplant, jalapeno, zucchini, basil and two kinds of cucumbers. For a novice like me, it’s been quite a wonderful concept — you plant stuff, you water it, it grows, you eat it.
Amazing.
Eggplant
Plus it’s a pretty long growing season here in Redding, so who knows how long these plants will be producing?
I guess this is one way to beat the recession.
