Your Small Kitchen Garden is for people who grow--or who want to grow--their own food, though in limited space. We explore how to grow vegetables and fruit with emphasis on expending little effort and energy. Please come share with us in our lazy garden.
In late spring or early summer, a starburst flower explodes on the top of an onion plant’s center stalk.
I hope you’re growing onions in your small kitchen garden. Onions provide a rather poor return on your gardening investment: if you don’t have much space for a garden, you’d do well to consider other plants that produce more food per square inch. However, onions put on an impressive display.
Most gardeners start with sets which are essentially tiny onions. Once planted, a set sprouts fleshy green shoots that grow a foot-and-a-half long and longer. Then, a ball starts to form with its top showing just above the soil’s surface. Through the growing season, that ball grows larger as the plant produces a starburst flower on its tallest stalk.
By the time the onion flowers, a ball has probably started to form between the stalk and the roots.
The flower eventually fades, leaving new onion plants ready to go in the soil. Finally, the fleshy green stalks wither, leaving only the onion itself stuck partway into the soil.
Life-Changing Onion Folklore
When I was a kid, my grandmother demonstrated a characteristic of onions that I’ve seen presented nowhere else. To impress upon you the full impact of this life-changing onion lore, I prepared a short video of the presentation she gave me those many years ago.
Please take two minutes to learn about this remarkable characteristic of onions so you can apply the knowledge in your own small kitchen garden:
Two distinct flavors cook together into a sweet, tart, sticky filling for a classic, uniquely American dessert: strawberry-rhubarb pie. The three vidoes in this post explain how you can make your own.
In hardiness zone 5, rhubarb is among the first spring crops a small kitchen garden might produce. With that crop alone, you can make curiously sweet and tart pies that would please most diners. However, around mid June, the first real fruit crop of a kitchen garden ripens: strawberries. It’s then that you can create the uniquely American strawberry-rhubarb pie.
The idea of mixing strawberries with rhubarb is that the sweetness of the strawberries balances with the tartness of the rhubarb. Generally you add a lot of sugar to the fruit of a fruit pie, so it’s hard to distinguish the sweet components from the tart ones. What’s more, the flavors of the strawberries and rhubarb intermingle as the pie bakes, resulting in a new flavor that doesn’t naturally occur; a terrific flavor that should appeal to any fruit-lover’s sweet tooth.
Make your own Pie
I made strawberry-rhubarb pies the other day. Usually, I make two pies at once because it makes just as much mess as making one pie. I bake one, and put the second in the freezer to bake during the off season; you can put a frozen pie in a 300F degree oven for about 20 minutes, then kick the temperature up to 375 or 400 degrees and cook it for another 40 minutes to an hour… it comes out of the oven as though you made it fresh that day.
When I’m going to freeze a pie, I make it in a “disposable” aluminum pie pan; if I’m going to bake it and eat it right away, I prefer a glass pie plate. In any case, when I made my strawberry rhubarb pies, I took a lot of photos and videos. I’ve embedded the videos in this blog post.
The first (6 minutes 20 seconds) demonstrates how to make a bottom crust for a fruit pie: the ingredients, mixing, rolling out dough, and lining the pie plate. The second video (4 minutes 20 seconds) explains how I made the strawberry-rhubarb filling for two pies… and provides insight into how to make pie filling using nearly any fruit. The third video (5 minutes) demonstrates how to make a lattice crust for a pie: mixing dough, rolling it out, and forming the lattice crust.
If you’ve never made pie, watching all three videos in order will get you through. If you know how to make pie crusts but have never made strawberry-rhubarb pie, the second video provides enough information for you to make your first.
When you’re ready to bake your pie, put it in a 400F degree oven on a jelly roll pan or a round pizza pan for 45- to 60-minutes. Check on it after 30 minutes, and if the crust is getting dark, decrease the oven’s temperature to 350F degrees. The pie is ready when the crust is gold brown and the filling is bubly and thick.
When you’ve made your first strawberry-rhubarb pie, please visit Your Small Kitchen Garden blog and leave a comment about your experience. Finally, if you prefer written instructions rather than video, visit my sister blog, Your Home Kitchen Garden. There I’ve presented step-by-step instructions along with plenty of photos.
Who knew? Carrots grow extensive networks of thin roots before they grow the tap roots of which Bugs Bunny is so fond.
When I decided to experiment with growing a small kitchen garden in ultra-cheap planters, I hoped to come up with a few space-saving ideas that would be easy on my budget. I had no idea I’d learn something cool about carrots along the way: carrots make a lot of roots!
On May 1, I described how I modified a two-liter soda bottle, filled it with soil, and planted eleven carrot seeds in it. Seven weeks later, the carrot plants are growing well; their tops are beautifully lacy-green. You can read about it here: Small Kitchen Garden Carrots in Containers.
What’s Going Down?
In my fortyish years of growing carrots in a garden, to me these plants have always been green fluffy greens that grow atop orange shoulders just showing above the soil. At harvest, I’ve found smooth orange tap roots of various lengths, tapers, and diameters. One season, I left carrots in the ground well into winter. Along the way, flowers emerged much like those of Queen Anne’s Lace (carrots and Queen Anne’s Lace are closely related), and the plants put up a second wave of foliage. When I excavated these very mature carrots, I found many small roots growing from the plants’ tap roots. These mature carrots looked hairy, and somehow much less appetizing than younger, smooth-skinned carrots.
But you know what’s cool? Before a tap root forms, a carrot plant puts out a huge network of tiny roots. Who knew? You can see these roots through the clear side of the soda bottle planter in which my carrots are growing. The roots have been visible for about four weeks, and orange carrot shoulders have yet to appear at the bases of the foliage.
This upside down tomato plant supports the observation that roots want to grow down. When I planted the seedling, its root ball topped out about two-thirds of the way up inside the planter. A week later, though many roots are visible through the plastic, none appear above the root ball.
Of course, it makes perfect sense that the plant would need roots to get established before it built up its winter food supply in a tap root. Still, I’d never thought of this, so creating my silly soda bottle planter led to the pleasant surprise.
About Upside Down Tomatoes
When I wrote about growing tomatoes in upside down planters I predicted that roots would immediately start growing down from the root ball of the newly-planted seedling. Eventually, I guessed, an upside down tomato plant would become pot-bound even if there were many inches of soil available above the root ball in the container.
I don’t know whether I’m right about this, but I can report that all the root growth in the first week has been downward. How do I know? I followed instructions at http://ohcripes.com (once you’re on the site, look in the left margin for the link to IPlanter Modified) for creating an upside down planter in a three-liter soda bottle. I set a tomato seedling in my planter and hung it up last week. Already, new roots have grown from the root ball out to the sides of the planter, and then down along the sides. No visible roots have grown upward. This may change as the plant becomes pot-bound, but I don’t expect it to.
In late spring, most of the tomato seedlings at garden stores and nurseries have become leggy: they’ve been stuck too long in tiny pots or in the cells of starter flats. The roots of these seedlings are choking themselves silly; the seedlings haven’t gotten enough nutrition and they’re stretching in hopes of finding healthier environments. If the stems could find soil, they’d put down roots to improve access to water and nutrition.
If your small kitchen garden is ridiculously space-challenged, you must consider hanging some plants. In the past two weeks, I started some tomatoes in containers… specifically in upside down planters that I made myself at bargain prices. This forced me to do a lot of thinking about upside down planters, and I have a few thoughts to share. Along the way, I’ll explain how to make upside down planters at less than a tenth the cost of commercial upside down planters.
Upside Down Planters
Between television infomercials, Internet blog posts, and new products showing up in garden stores and department stores, you’d think Topsy Turvy is the most awesome gardening device invented in the past 50 years. This device is a fabric bag with a hole in the bottom. You stuff a tomato seedling’s root ball into the bag through the hole in the bottom, fill the bag with soil, hang the bag, and add water regularly.
I’ve unpotted hundreds of root-bound tomato plants over the years. Not one had grown roots above the soil. I’m just guessing, but I suspect if the root ball starts at the bottom in an upside down planter, the tomato plant becomes pot bound when the roots spread sideways looking for ways to grow down. If I’m right, the best candidates for upside down planters are long-stemmed “leggy” seedlings.
According to the Topsy Turvy web site, you’ll harvest as many as 30 pounds of tomatoes from the plant. The folks who market this upside down planter claim, among other things, that tomatoes grow better in the planters because gravity pulls water down from the roots to the foliage. They also claim that sun hitting the bag warms the soil and roots so they grow more vigorously.
Yeah, right.
Actual Real Benefits of an Upside Down Tomato Planter
Here are claims about an upside down planter that are reasonable to believe:
1. It keeps the tomato plant away from soil-borne pests and diseases.
2. It keeps the tomato plant away from ground-dwelling rodents who might chew on tomatoes.
3. It keeps your tomatoes off of the soil without staking and pruning.
4. It provides a way for you to grow tomatoes on a deck, a porch, a patio, a balcony, or in nearly any situation where traditional gardening isn’t possible.
I’m all for these things… so the upside down planter has some appeal. And, I confess that I like the look of the tomato plants that Topsy Turvy shows in their advertisements.
A reusable shopping bag makes a decent hanging planter without modification. To make it an upside down planter, I cut a two-inch slit in the middle of the bottom and smear hot glue along the edges of the slit. To do this, I ran a bead of hot glue, then spread it with the metal handle of my utility knife. The material of the bag doesn’t look as though it will fray, but I added the glue as insurance. I slit the rigid bottom insert and made a thumb-wide hole in the middle, figuring the insert would keep soil from falling out of the hole and reduce sag in the hanging planter.
Really Cheap Upside Down Planters
I decided to add some upside down planters to my own small kitchen garden. Mostly, I wanted to test this idea so I could share my findings with my readers. But my garden budget is way too low to spend $15 or more for what looks like a cloth bag.
When I Googled upside down tomato planters, I found a blog entry that explaines how to make such planters from two-liter or three-liter soda bottles. It’s a cool idea, but a three-liter bottle is less than a fifth the size recommended for a tomato planter. Still, somewhere along the way to that blog post, I read a comment that suggested using a reusable shopping bag as an upside down planter. This I could afford!
The photos in this post reveal how I turned a reusable grocery bag into an upside down planter. The bag cost 99 cents at the grocery store, and is strong enough to carry three or four gallons of milk or orange juice. I measured and calculated and determined that this bag can hold about five gallons; gardeners recommend five-gallon containers as the appropriate size for a single tomato plant.
The biggest hassle in all of this is planting a tomato seedling in the hanging planter. It might help to hang the planter off the back of a chair, but I was able to wrestle it together while holding it. I actually worked the leaves and stem of the plant through the slit in the bag from the inside. As I added soil, I held the root ball up so just a few inches of stem and leaves protruded beneath the bag. Eventually, I half-filled the bag, figuring to add more soil as the plant grows. I looped the bag’s handles over boards on the kids’ play set; the bag hangs on the outside of the set with full southern exposure.
The Early Verdict
Making the upside down planter was simple. Planting a tomato seedling in it was a minor bother—but honestly less work than preparing a spot in the garden and planting one there. Still, all the time I was planting and hanging this thing, my brain was rolling its eyes:
Phototropism—this is the tendency of plants to grow toward light. A tomato plant pointing down out of a planter must want to turn and grow upward. Actually, there must be some geotropism involved in this urge as well (see below). For a seedling, this will be a hassle because the planter will be in the way. As the plant grows larger, it won’t be able to support its own weight anyway, so the hanging part isn’t bad thing… but why start it upside down?
Only a day after hanging, the tomato seedling is bending upward toward light… and, perhaps, against gravity (I believe a light-seeking plant grows up even in the absence of light). It would be silly to assume the roots haven’t noticed that they’ve changed orientation relative to “down.” I’m sure they’ve started growing toward the Earth’s core.
Geotropism—this is the tendency of plant roots to grow downward (and for foliage in darkness to grow upward as it searches for light). Any sane tomato root wants to be geotropic. While planting my seedlings, I wished they were “leggy” meaning they had spent too long in a small pot and had grown tall without growing thick. Then I could put the root balls deep into the bag—or close to the surface of the soil, and they’d be able to grow down to take advantage of the large space. If the root ball starts near the bottom of the bag, I expect roots will grow down, hit the bottom of the bag, and try to grow horizontally, looking for places they can grown down some more. Eventually, I think, the plants will become root-bound without having used the full bag of soil above them. I won’t know if I’m right until I dig into the bag when the tomato plant dies in the fall.
Gravity flow from roots to leaves—give me a break. If gravity helped move water and nutrition through plants, I imagine we’d see a lot of plants capitalize on this free assist. Even bromeliads that root in trees grow upward. If gravity helps, then evolution should have favored bromeliads that droop, and these would be the dominant species. For that matter, why aren’t there more plants that grow downhill on hillsides and mountainsides? Do your tomato plants a favor and make it easy for them to grow the way they want to.
Small Kitchen Garden Planters
So, I’ve installed some upside down planters, and will enjoy the experiment. However, in the interest of exploring best practices, I offer this: a reusable shopping bag is easy to hang, and you could let a tomato plant grow out of the top. My fear with that is that the weight a mature plant will strain and quite likely crush the stem where it curves over the top of the bag and hangs downward.
More Container Gardening
Visit my friend Kerry Michaels’ blog to learn what she has done with reusable grocery bags and to read a lot more about small kitchen gardens in containers:Container Gardening
I suggest, and am about to create, a hanging planter where the root ball of the tomato seedling goes into the side of the bag just a few inches below the soil line. The stem and leaves of the plant should angle downward diagonally out of the hole in the bag. With this scheme, the roots start near the top of the soil and have all five gallons to fill before they start growing sidewise. The plant begins serious growth with the stem pointing along the path it would eventually follow anyway. As the stem thickens, the weight of the growing plant will bend it downward less abruptly, so it’s less likely to crimp or crack.
I’ll put one together like this, and post a photo soon. In the meantime, check out those reusable shopping bags. They make terrific planters whether you hang them, or just set them on your deck, patio, balcony, rooftop, walkway, play set…
These tomato seedlings are about two months old. In March, I planted seeds indoors from tomatoes a neighbor gave me last autumn. The plants should produce large, pepper-shaped tomatoes that are mostly meat; I found only about 40 seeds in each of them. I’ll cook these tomatoes into sauce.
If you think of planting a small kitchen garden as a horse race, then most of us are on the home stretch. Despite the unusually cold spring, our cool weather crops are maturing, and we’ve been setting out seedlings of vegetables that thrive in summer heat. For many in hardiness zone 5, planting tomatoes in April or May led to some aggravation this season: frost hit well into May, and we were out in our small kitchen gardens repeatedly, covering our plants with tarps, bed sheets, buckets, flower pots, cloches, or mulch to protect them from the cold. If you were cautious, you might not yet have planted summer crops. That’s OK. There is still plenty of good growing season to come, and now is a great time to finish up your planting.
Plant Tomatoes Now
If you haven’t planted tomatoes, do it as soon as you possibly can. Many varieties of tomatoes require as many as 100 days to mature—from the time you set seedlings in the garden. But I am talking about seedlings. By this I mean plants that are growing in small pots or flats, that are about four to six weeks old, and that haven’t started to flower or grow suckers.
In preparation for planting, I used a “low-till” approach: I removed weeds across a two-foot swath of the planting bed, stretched some yarn to mark the row, and set my potted plants along the row where I intended to plant them. I explained the steps I use to prepare soil in a post titled Small Kitchen Garden Soil-Preparation - 2… but in reviewing that post just now I realize I exaggerated: When planting seedlings, I don’t turn over all the soil in a row; I remove the weeds, then dig individual holes for the seedlings. I turn all the soil in a row only if I’m planting seeds. Crazily, I set seedlings one foot apart in this row - I’ve never planted tomatoes so close, but I’ve seen it done. I hope it doesn’t cause problems.
If you follow planting instructions that come with your plants and seeds, you need to measure two-foot, three-foot, and 18-inch gaps constantly. You can mess with a tape measure, mark up the handles of your gardening tools, use your body parts as guides, or follow my mom’s lead and carve a measuring stick. This is a three-foot-long apple branch. I carved rings in the bark a foot from each end and at the center, making it easy to measure standard plant and row spacings.
In late spring, nurseries might offer older, more developed plants that may be flowering or setting fruit. You can start these in the garden and expect production many weeks earlier than you’ll see with seedlings. I wrote about these concerns in my preceding post How to Plant Tomatoes in Raised Beds. Please look it over for more thoughts about what to look for when shopping for tomato seedlings.
My tomato seedlings are about eight inches tall and the root balls add another three inches. I don’t want to dig foot-deep holes, so I plant my seedlings on their sides. I dig each hole about eight inches deep, and, perhaps, a foot or two across.
Tomato-Planting Tips
If you’re buying seedlings, select ones with short, thick stems. In late spring, your only choices may have skinny, tall stems, but don’t be discouraged; you can compensate for the “legginess.”
This late in the spring (unless you have very long summers), select varieties that mature quickly. Many varieties list 65 or 75 days to maturity; they’ll have more days to provide fruit than varieties needing 100 or more days to mature.
You can plant a seedling still packed in its peat pot, but don’t. Roots wrap around inside the pot and only slowly grow through the peat. To remove a pot - peat or plastic - gently squeeze the pot repeatedly from all sides. Then grasp the tomato plant’s stem and pull the root ball out. If the plant doesn’t leave a peat pot easily, moisten the pot and then tear it off of the root ball. If the roots are cramped, use your thumbs to separate them a smidge; you might tear some, but loosening them will help them adapt quickly to their new home in the garden. Note that I’m adding a scoop of compost to half-fill the hole before I set the seedling in it.
Have you selected determinate or indeterminate varieties? The answer may influence whether you stake your plants, use cages, or let your plants free-range (grow along the ground as they choose). If the tag that comes with the tomato plant doesn’t identify it as determinate or indeterminate, the person selling it should be able to tell you. See the box, What’s Determinate? for an explanation of the differences.
Lay the root ball at one side of the hole and angle the plant’s stem across the bottom of the hole. Bend the stem up so the top three leaves of the plant will be above ground when you fill the hole with soil. Don’t fill the hole even with the level of the garden bed; leave it a smidge low so water will pool around the plant during rain or when you water the garden. Immediately after you plant a seedling this way, it may look unhappy, but it should pep up very quickly.
Consider how you’ll manage your plants. If they’ll grow “free-range,” they’ll need a lot of ground space; a tomato plant might stretch eight or nine feet along the ground, and spread four-to-eight feet from side-to-side. Indeterminate tomatoes lend themselves well to staking. Determinate varieties might do best in cages. Will you tie them to stakes? Will you support them with strings that dangle from overhead wires, pipes, or other trellises? Will you surround them with cages? Read more about managing tomato plants in my post, Are You a Sucker-Plucker?
Let your tomatoes free-range only as a last resort. A free-range tomato plant requires virtually no attention to do well. However, fruits on free-range plants are especially vulnerable. In dry summers, rodents may snack on tomatoes that are close to the ground. And, a tomato resting on the ground invites insects and disease; you’ll get much healthier fruit if you stake or cage your plants to keep the fruits off the ground. I let only my cherry tomatoes and my “volunteers” (plants that grow from seed left in random places by last year’s crop) free-range.
Though planted less than 24 hours earlier with its crown lying on the ground, this tomato seedling has already picked itself up and pointed toward the sky. If I’m staking my tomato plants, I like to get the stakes planted within a week of planting the seedlings. I pound eight-foot stakes about a foot deep, and indeterminate plants always outgrow them.
Tomato plants are a lot like weeds: it’s very hard to destroy them by accident. I once accidentally bent a young tomato stem so it broke about half way through. I tied the plant against a tomato stake, and it grew to maturity, matching its neighboring uninjured plants.
Tomato plants root easily at any point along their stems. So, if your plant hangs down onto the soil, it may put down roots. More importantly: if a seedling is “leggy” you can get it under control by planting most of its stem underground. When you plant younger seedlings, leave only the top three leaves above the surface. The photos in the post demonstrate how to plant a leggy tomato plant without having to dig a deep hole.
Tomato plants are heavy drinkers. They shouldn’t live in soaking wet soil, but they welcome daily deep watering.
Tomato plants do not require daily deep watering. In fact, they grow very well even in arid situations. However, when tomatoes are developing, they’ll come out best when your plants receive regular watering: daily, every other day, every third day… whatever you can handle as long as it’s consistent.
What’s Determinate?
Many varieties of tomatoes continue to grow until an outside influence kills them. For those of us in temperate zones, the outside influence is usually frost. Hypothetically, these indeterminate tomato plants will continue growing indefinitely as long as the conditions are favorable.
A determinate tomato plant has a built-in off switch. It simply stops growing at some point during the season.
Tomato enthusiasts promote all kinds of watering schemes; they’re all good. I know a grower who punched holes in #10-sized cans, and buried a can next to each tomato he planted… buried it with the can’s open top at soil level. Each day, he filled the can to the top with water; it was “The perfect amount of water for a tomato.” Poke around on the web, and I’m sure you’ll find other such watering schemes. Photo captions in this post explain my very simple watering scheme; a fine solution for a lazy garden.
Vine-ripened, shmine-ripened! Ancient farmers have told me, “A farmer can tell whether a tomato ripened on the vine.” Without scientific investigation, I can authoritatively report: HOGWASH. I wrote a post titled, Are Your Tomatoes a Mess? It explains how to harvest tomatoes with incredibly reliable results, and I stand by it. I’ve harvested tomatoes this way for ten years, and am still awed at how consistently better they are than vine-ripened tomatoes.
Before You Plant Tomatoes
Your Small Kitchen Garden has presented several posts that explain how to prepare garden beds for planting. The first of these articles explains the benefits of preparing soil. The second and third provide step-by-step instructions for preparing traditional planting beds using traditional methods, and using the “minimal till” approach that I use in my garden. The fourth article suggests one approach to preparing soil in a raised planting bed. Links appear at the bottom of this box.
The instructions in this post for planting tomatoes assume that you’ve prepared your soil and have marked a row awaiting seedlings.
If you’re still shopping for tomato seedlings for your small kitchen garden, consider buying large plants that are already flowering or setting fruit. If a seedling is over six inches tall, it should have a fairly tick stem at the base—perhaps as thick as your pinky finger. If the plant is setting fruit, the stem should be even thicker. This three-foot tall tomato cost $20 and came with a pot and a tomato cage: everything you’d need to manage it on your patio or deck. For around $5, I could buy a two-foot tall plant ready to transplant into my garden.
If your small kitchen garden is in raised garden beds, you shouldn’t have to work real hard to plant in the spring. Soil in a raised planting bed gets little or no foot traffic. This means it shouldn’t get compressed, and it shouldn’t require deep tilling to make life easy on plant roots.
That said, you really need to get moving if you haven’t yet planted your small kitchen garden. At this point, cold-weather crops should be well under way; perhaps you’re even eating spinach and lettuce, and there are flowers on your pea plants. If you’re growing tomatoes, you’d have done very well to keep them indoors under lights until now; April and some of May have been the coldest I remember in 14 years of kitchen gardening in hardiness zone 5/6.
As of the first of June, I can hope to see four solid months before any threat of frost; that’s 100 days for the slowest-growing plants to mature, and only twenty days of tomato harvest. Of course, I should get a much better harvest if I plant tomato varieties that mature quickly; some claim 65 days to maturity, which would provide 55 days of tomato harvest.
Prepare a raised bed by weeding, spreading three inches of compost or manure, and marking off planting zones. I set potted tomato seedlings on the soil to evaluate their spacing in the bed.
Plant Tomatoes Now
If you want to ensure your best harvest from slow-growing tomatoes, buy large plants. At garden stores and nurseries in late spring, you can usually find plants so mature that they are already flowering… and maybe even setting fruit. Such plants are pricey, but if you can plant them this week, and start harvesting within a month, they’ll easily pay for themselves.
To plant a seedling—tomato or otherwise—in a small kitchen garden raised bed, dig a hole through the compost layer into the soil. Pile the soil you remove from the hole to one side, and dig deep enough to set the root ball of the seedling completely under ground.
Use the soil you removed to make the hole to back-fill around the root ball. This combines soil and compost, providing a rich mix for the seedling. Other photos below illustrate appropriate planting depths for tomatoes and for nearly all other produce seedlings.
Look for leafy plants with thick stems—perhaps as thick as your index finger (or your thumb) where they emerge from the soil. Don’t buy a large tomato plant that has long, skinny stems between leaves. Chances are it hasn’t received enough light or it’s severely pot-bound, or both.
If you still have time to get in 120 or more frost-free growing days, you can plant four-to-six-week-old tomatoes from flats. Again, be cautious: by late spring, garden stores may be selling off the last of the year’s seedling inventory. If you have a choice between tall, slender plants with few leaves, or short, thick-stemmed plants with lots of leaves, buy the short ones. But if your only choice is tall, slender plants (many gardeners call them “leggy”), that’s OK. Under your expert care, they’ll fatten up and produce beautifully (it’s a simple trick I’ll explain in an upcoming post).
When your seedling is in a peat pot, you can plant the pot along with the seedling. I encourage you, however, to tear off the pot. Though roots can grow through the peat, as you see here they tend to wrap around inside the pot and slow the plant’s growth. I buy tomatoes in flats which are usually plastic. To remove one for planting, gently squeeze the cell it’s in a few times, then pull up on the stem of the seedling.
How to Make the Bed
That sub-head is metaphorical, referring not to the actual building of a raised bed, but rather to adjusting the pillows, sheets, and blankets to make a bed look tidy after you get up in the morning. I wrote several posts about preparing soil for planting, the last of which described one method for preparing a raised bed: remove weeds and other debris and then cover the bed with three inches of compost or manure. Please read the entire post here: Small Kitchen Garden Soil-Preparation
With the organic layer in place, planting a seedling is a snap: dig a hole large enough to fit the root ball, insert plant, back-fill with compost and soil. The photos in this post illustrate how to plant a tomato seedling in a raised bed. In an upcoming post, I’ll explain some characteristics of tomato plants that make them easy to grow. I’ll also explain how to deal with problem tomato seedlings to get the best possible results from them.
Planting Depth in a Small Kitchen Garden
Most kitchen garden plants will rot and die if you plant their stems too deeply. Tomatoes, on the other hand, benefit from having a lot of stem underground. As a rule, plant according to the photo on the left below. When planting tomato seedlings, plant according to the photo on the right.
For nearly every type of seedling you might plant in a small kitchen garden, set the top of the seedling’s potting soil even with the soil of the garden bed. The green line on the photo to the left emphasizes that the top of the root ball of the pepper plant will sit even with the soil of the container in which I’m planting it. Plant tomatoes deep. The stem of the six-inch tomato seedling I’ve planted on the right was already hardening off and would not have thickened as the plant grew. So, I’ve buried the root ball deep enough that only the top three leaves of the seedling are above soil (the green line shows the path of the stem from the roots to the surface). Roots will sprout along the buried stem, and new growth above ground will thicken out, making a strong plant.
The earliest lettuce sprouts in my small kitchen garden are no bigger than pebbles in the soil. Cracks in the soil indicate high clay content; clay cracks as it dries out.
I planted lettuce and spinach in my small kitchen garden nearly seven weeks ago. These are crops you can plant outdoors as soon as the soil thaws. I argue that there’s no hurry: cold weather crops will survive a heavy frost, but they won’t grow much if the temperature remains low. So, I tend to wait a few weeks after the thaw before I plant any cold weather crops.
On the other hand, if you wait too long, some cold-weather crops may not produce to their greatest potential before summer heat shuts them down. Pea plants, for example, wilt and die when cooked by summer heat. Lettuce and spinach grow slowly when nights are cool and days are warm, but when nights are warm and days are hot, these greens “bolt” meaning they send up stalks of flowers in a rush to make seeds before the heat becomes unbearable.
Don’t Wait to Plant Lettuce
A handful of lettuce seeds hardly resembles the food I begin to harvest about a month after planting. I’m always a bit awed that so much grows from such tiny packages.
If you’re in hardiness zone six or five, it’s not too late to enjoy a lettuce or spinach crop. It takes about 40 days from the day you plant seeds till it’s reasonable to harvest young plants—or leaves from them. If you plant now (the end of May), lettuce and spinach will grow quickly, though it’ll probably hit the wall in July.
Whether I plant lettuce early or late, I use a simple method that forces me to harvest young plants aggressively: I plant many seeds very close together—ideally about 3-5 seeds per square inch. Here’s the procedure:
Before You Plant Lettuce
Your Small Kitchen Garden has presented several posts that explain how to prepare garden beds for planting. The first of these articles explains the benefits of preparing soil. The second and third provide step-by-step instructions for preparing traditional planting beds using traditional methods, and using the “minimal till” approach that I use in my garden. The fourth article suggests one approach to preparing soil in a raised planting bed. Links appear at the bottom of this box.
The instructions in this post for planting lettuce assume that you’ve prepared your soil and you now have a furrow awaiting seeds.
1. Prepare soil according to the method that best fits your situation. The box, Before You Plant Lettuce provides links to posts that explain various methods of preparing soil. When you’ve created a six- to eight-inch-wide furrow in which to plant, you’re ready for step 2 below.
2. Read the planting instructions on the package holding your lettuce seeds. Chances are, they call for a planting depth of ¼ inch. Depending on the variety of lettuce, the instructions also may include thinning guidelines such as Thin to 12” between plants. Ultimately, you plants will need to be approximately this far apart or they won’t have space to mature. But I encourage you to start them much closer.
3. Pinch a bunch of lettuce seeds between you thumb and index finger, and sprinkle them around in the furrow as you’d sprinkle seasoning into a frying pan of cooking food. I think of this as seasoning the soil with seeds. You’re trying to deliver from two to five seeds on every square inch of soil in you furrow. As your pinch of seeds runs out, take another pinch and sprinkle areas that you missed with the first pinch. Repeat this until you’re confident there are seeds spread the full length and width of the row.
4. Cover the seeds with ¼ inch of soil. I usually pick up lumps of soil from the edges of the furrow and crumble them into the furrow. If there aren’t appropriate lumps, I sprinkle hands full of loose soil onto the seeds. Were I planting dozens of feet of rows, I’d rake soil onto the seeds, but it only takes a few minutes to cover a 14 foot row with hand-sprinkled soil.
I planted three three-foot sections of lettuce. The first holds a salad mix with four types of leaf lettuce. The second holds Ithaca head lettuce, a flavorful lettuce that forms crisp, small heads. The third holds Romaine lettuce. This is the first time I’ve grown Romaine. While the plants in these photos are already crowded, they aren’t yet big enough to fill a salad bowl simply by thinning.
5. Gently pat down the soil in the furrow. I press lightly with my fingers and the palm of my hand. This encourages soil to stay in place when it rains and when I hand-water the newly-planted seeds.
6. Water deeply and then water daily until the plants emerge. Then water if the soil looks dry or if the plants look wilted.
Crowding in Your Small Kitchen Garden
Your lettuce plants will be very crowded, but resist the urge to thin them until they produce leaves big enough to eat. This may take a few weeks, but then watch you’re your crowded plants may grow so fast that it become hard to keep up with them.
I take my first harvest from the middle of the furrow. I work my hand among the plants and grasp several at once right against the soil. I gently pull them from the ground, leaving a small gap in the lettuce patch. Ideally, I work the entire row for a single meal. If there’s simply more lettuce than we can consume, and the plants are pressed tightly together, I may pull many small plants and toss them on the mulch or compost pile; it’s important to keep air spaces among the remaining plants or they’ll hold moisture between them leading to possible problems with slugs, snails, insects, and even rot.
When my crowded lettuce plants are 3- to 4-inches tall, I work my hand into the mass of plants and pull several up along with their roots. I twist the roots off and toss them away, but the young, tender leaves go into the evening’s salad. I like to thin starting in the middle of the row. Ultimately, only five or six plants may mature, and thinning is necessary to provide space for them to grow.
As I harvest over the course of two or three weeks, I take plants always from the densest sections of the row. As lettuce matures in two months, I thin at a pace that I estimate will provide the requisite spacing about six weeks after planting.
For leaf lettuce, when you’ve thinned enough that the plants don’t crowd each other, change your harvesting technique: now use scissors to cut leaves from the plants an inch or two above the soil. More leaves should grow on the cut plants.
For head lettuce, continue to harvest entire plants as-needed. As heads approach maturity, you’ll need fewer of them to make a meal, and a head you harvest near the end of the season may last for several meals.
Here’s a video I made that demonstrates both how I plant lettuce and how I thin and harvest to make room for some plants. It’s about 6 and a half minutes long. Please enjoy:
When you buy a house from a kitchen gardener, you may find a rhubarb patch in the yard. Rhubarb requires relatively little maintenance, and it rewards you with a delicious, fruity crop when most other food crops are just sprouting.
Do you have rhubarb in your small kitchen garden? I can’t imagine my garden without it. I’m certain that Rhubarb is almost strictly a food of gardeners; I don’t remember seeing it in the produce section in Boston’s grocery stores when I lived in Boston—or at the farmers’ market near Faneuil Hall.
In rural Pennsylvania, you can buy rhubarb in a grocery store and at the farmers’ market during the month or two it’s in season. I’m always overwhelmed by the price of rhubarb, and I note that it rarely has a prominent position in the produce section or on a farmer’s table at the market.
It seems unlikely you’ll experience rhubarb by chance. In my experience, people who know rhubarb grew up eating it at home. I imagine, however, that a lot of people have acquired rhubarb plants along with houses they’ve bought; if a former owner planted rhubarb, it’s quite likely still growing there. That gives the uninitiated a commitment-free excuse to try rhubarb.
If you’ve never tasted the stuff, don’t invest in plants. Rather, find a neighbor who’s willing to share—or buy some rhubarb stalks somewhere—and make some rhubarb sauce. The flavor might surprise you… but if you don’t care for rhubarb sauce, don’t give up on rhubarb. I’ve seen people who won’t touch rhubarb sauce devour rhubarb pie… and strawberry rhubarb pie, jams containing rhubarb, and rhubarb breads. I suspect they’d also go for a good rhubarb cake, but I’ve never seen a rhubarb cake, so I can’t be sure.
About Rhubarb
Once you’ve decided you like rhubarb, you’re ready to commit to one of the most rewarding home kitchen garden plants. Around here, you can buy rhubarb plants in nursery pots at garden stores and nurseries. A single plant runs about six to nine dollars, depending on where you buy it.
If you cut sod when you dig a hole to plant rhubarb, place the sod, grass-side-down, in the bottom of the hole before adding soil and compost. The sod will provide excellent nutrition for the young plant as it gets established in its new home.
Rhubarb grows thick, tuberous roots that don’t like to be wet for extended periods. It also likes lots of sunlight and very rich soil. My dad used to dump raw horse manure around his plants to make them happy in the spring, and they never complained.
When you plant, select a place where the soil drains quickly. This is important: All my plants died one very rainy season when standing water collected for days on end. The next season, I planted in a slightly raised bed, but still lost two out of four plants when another rainy stretch saturated the soil.
Dig a hole at least six inches deeper than the nursery pot and about twice its diameter. If you cut sod to start the hole, put the sod grass-side-down in the bottom of the hole and cover it with soil and compost. If you didn’t cut sod for the hole, fill with compost and soil until the hole is as deep as the nursery pot. You should set the rhubarb roots two-to-three inches below the soil line, so if the nursery pot is full to the brim, make the hole you plant in a bit deeper.
Remove your new plant from the pot, set it in the middle of the hole, and fill around it with compost and soil until the hole is full. If there are young rhubarb stalks already growing from the roots, it’s OK for the soil to cover the bottoms of the stems. The stems themselves may not like it, but in the long-run, the plant will adjust to this planting depth; ideally, the top of the root should be three inches under ground.
Water rhubarb plants heavily for a few weeks after planting until you see new, vigorous growth.
Low-Maintenance Bounty
It’s hard to kill a rhubarb plant by accident. I’ve never seen one burn from getting too much fertilizer so fertilize heavily in the spring, two or three times through the growing season, and again when you put your garden to bed in the fall. If you eschew chemical fertilizers add compost or manure often. Rhubarb grows most aggressively in mid-to-late spring, and may look pretty beat in the heat of summer. By fall, a rhubarb patch can look shot as the leaves wilt and stalks shrivel. I usually have some rhubarb-looking growth until fall, but everything above soil wastes away well before snow falls.
Don’t let the plant’s summer droopiness cause you to overlook it when watering. If the rest of your small kitchen garden needs water, so does the rhubarb. Give your plants occasional deep watering especially during dry spells.
Rhubarb emerges within a few weeks of the ground thawing - even from under a thick mulch. I was just starting vegetable seeds indoors under lights when I snapped this photo in early April.
Once stalks and leaves die back at the end of the season, mulch over the area with compost, manure, leaves, or grass clippings. Mulch will protect roots from early deep frosts, and provide some nutrition as young stalks push through in the spring. Rhubarb wakes up very early, and may be the first food you harvest in a season.
And that’s one of the most compelling reasons to plant rhubarb in your small kitchen garden: you do nothing to it from fall until spring, but it wakes up and quickly gives you a delicious fruit-like crop. This year, I harvested my first rhubarb stalks in early May while just a few of my herbs and vegetables were starting to grow. Only hardy herbs are ready in my garden as early as the rhubarb is.
In case you’ve never harvested rhubarb and made sauce, I wrote a blog entry detailing how. You can find it under the title Eat Rhubarb from Your Home Kitchen Garden. If you prefer watching over reading, here’s a video I created that explains how to make rhubarb sauce. It’s about seven minutes long. I hope you find it useful:
Here are links to articles that describe other uses for rhubarb:
Rhubarb Juice: A Many Spendored Thing - by David Perry. Many of you have heard or read me raving about rhubarb juice, a simple, healthy nectar that Dave Brown, wooden bowl maker, bread baker, birder, master canoeist, photographer, storyteller, life magician and director of the Wildbranch Writer’s Workshop first introduced me to…
Back to the Locabar: Rhubarb Margarita I’ve been hinting for weeks that I wanted a special cocktail for my birthday. Last summer we got so used to fresh, seasonal ingredients that our long winter presented a special challenge for the Cocktail Study Club. More often than not, Friday night rolled around and Charlie would say, “How about a martini?” I love his martinis but enough is enough….
In one twenty-minute thunderstorm, all the planters and seedling holders I had outdoors filled with water. Some potted seedlings floated and tipped sideways. Had I not spent ten minutes draining things, roots might have drowned. Without drainage holes, your container garden poses unecessary challenges.
When I’m not in my small kitchen garden, I spend a significant amount of time browsing the Internet to see what other people are saying about gardening. A few weeks ago, I read an article about container gardening that made my jaw drop. The author poo-pooed putting drainage holes in your containers. I don’t recall his exact words, but this represents the gist:
It seems most people tell you to put drainage holes in the bottoms of your planters. You don’t have to. Go ahead and try planting without drainage holes and you’ll see what I mean.
I hope this author thought that everyone growing plants in containers does so indoors. Then his observation is valid: you really don’t need drainage holes for containers that you maintain indoors. You can control how much water you give your plants, and add more only when the soil is dry; with little effort, you can master watering whether your pots include drainage holes or they retain every drop of water you pour into them.
17 days ago, I cut the top off a soda bottle, punched drainage holes in the bottom, added soil, and planted 11 carrot seeds. Things are coming along fine. While carrots will withstand a light frost, I’ve kept my planter indoors; we’ve had four unseasonably cold nights this May with another on the way. I’ll move the planter outdoors tomorrow.
Container Gardening Outdoors
If you plant in containers outdoors, make sure there are drainage holes in the containers. This is imperative. A single rainstorm can dump many inches of water on every surface. A planter without drainage can capture all that water, and end up overflowing. Depending on what and how you’ve planted, this can be very bad for your plants.
For example, a recently-repotted plant in light soil could float to the surface of the pot and then fall out. A heavy rain can wash much of the soil out of a pot. Perhaps worse: once saturated by a heavy rain, a pot without drainage will hold water that can drown a plant’s roots, encourage the growth of algae and mold, or provide an inviting environment for bacteria that will cause your plant to rot.
Over the weekend, we had a twenty minute downpour that filled some of my planting containers with three inches of water. It was an awesome powerful rain. Many of my potted seedlings sat in that rain. They are still in peat pots, inside of food-storage containers intended to protect my ping-pong table when the seedlings were inside under lights. After the rain, I spent ten minutes draining water from the containers and topping several up with soil (much soil had floated away on the rainwater).
If your small kitchen garden is outdoors in containers, make sure the containers have drainage holes, or heavy rains could destroy your produce.
Here are other articles about container gardening that you might find useful:
Which Plants are Best for a Container Garden? - by Sarah Duke. Container gardening is a very easy way to get fresh produce with very little effort. A wide variety of vegetables, herbs and fruit can be grown in pots. Herbs are the most popular, followed by vegetables. …
re: grow your own food - you also might think about container gardening. my mom doesn’t want to be bothered with a whole garden and grows just a few tomato plants in pots on the carport. it works great. copy and paste the following url for a fact sheet on …
Back in November when I planted them, the roots of my young fruit trees looked a lot like this one. Still, all three tree, two pear trees and a sour cherry tree, are growing vigorously.
Last autumn, I reported in Your Small Kitchen Garden about my decision and subsequent effort to plant fruit trees in the fall. Only after ordering trees from an on-line nursery had it occurred to me to seek customer reviews of the nursery. The reviews I found made me a bit edgy, and I wrote about it in a post titled Aggravation in my Small Kitchen Garden.
Still, I was pleased with the arrival of my order, and with the condition of the plants when I unwrapped them. In a post titled New Pear Trees in my Small Kitchen Garden, I shared the story of planting them.
More Angst About Summerstone Nursery
My post about Summerstone Nursery (the Aggravation post) has drawn a few comments from obviously unhappy customers. I don’t doubt these people have had bad experiences, and I stand by my earlier comments: I suspect there are exponentially more satisfied Summerstone customers than there are angry ones. I happen to be one of the satisfied customers.
Consider the photograph from last November’s post (above, right), showing the bare root of the sour cherry tree I planted then. I imagine a large number of people would say that this tree has no roots; it looks, after all, like a stick. The roots of all of my new bare root trees were similar to this one.
The blossoms on my new moonglow pear tree are a beautiful soft pink. The leaves of the plant are a greenish purple. It will be a bit of a wait, but I’m looking forward to seeing this in bloom once it’s full-grown.
Now have a look at the gorgeous blossoms and purple/green leaves growing from my Moonglow pear this spring (left). The sour cherry tree and my Bartlett pear tree aren’t as sensational, but all three fruit trees have produced new branches and leaves and are growing vigorously. (I have no photo of the sour cherry tree because it’s inside a makeshift tree tube to protect it from rodents and cutworms.)
The pecan trees look dead, but I can’t blame that on Summerstone Nursery: a few days after I planted them, a wild animal gnawed several inches off of each one. My subsequent efforts to protect them from further damage stressed them, and I think they’re not coming back (though I continue to hope).
Summerstone or Not?
Based on my experience with Summerstone, I would buy from them again. Here’s my rationale:
Their prices are low; replacing dead plants at half price is inconvenient, but it would bring the total cost up to what you’d pay for your first purchase at other on-line nurseries.
They have variety that many on-line nurseries don’t.
All my interactions with them have been satisfying.
Would I recommend that you buy from Summerstone? No. Don’t buy from Summerstone Nursery unless you live near them and can pick up your plants in person. Don’t buy from any nursery unless you can pick up your plants from them in person.
You could learn a lot from visiting a nursery or garden store, and when you’re there, you can select specific plants with the help of experienced professionals. The advantages of buying locally in-person are so great that I can think of only one reason to buy plants on-line: Buy plants from on-line nurseries only if you can’t find what you want at a store near you.
My Fruit Tree Prognosis
I’m confident my two new pear trees and my new cherry tree will be fine… assuming I take care of them properly. I won’t be harvesting fruit from them for several years because they’re all under two feet tall. Still, I’m pleased with how this fruit tree project is going.
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