Your Small Kitchen Garden |

I laid out seeds, envelopes, and envelope labels on a table in my billiards room. While I’m giving away Blue Hubbard squash, neck pumpkin, and paste tomato seeds, I also collected seeds from butternut squash, dill weed, and several types of peppers. Most of these will go to The Dinner Garden, a charity that provides seeds to family’s starting gardens in response to economic difficulties.

Two weeks ago, Your Small Kitchen Garden offered up sets of seeds to visitors who asked for them. I’ve been pleased by the response; more than 40 people have left comments requesting seed sets. A complete set includes six seeds of Blue Hubbard squash, six seeds of neck pumpkin, and twenty seeds of chili-pepper-shaped paste tomatoes.

In that post I joked that I’d judge comments on creativity and humor, and I’ve enjoyed the humor in some of the comments. However, the only criteria for receiving seeds are:

1. Leave a comment explaining which seeds you most want to grow
2. Complete a “Contact Us” form with your mailing address
3. Do these things before the seeds run out.

The Small Kitchen Garden Seed Project

I’ve been packaging seeds. To do this, I set up a small table in the corner of my billiards room and laid out all the seeds I saved last season. I designed and printed simple labels and stuck them on coin envelopes. As I started to count out seeds and package them it occurred to me: what if the seeds aren’t viable? I’d feel rotten to learn I’d sent seeds to so many people, and none of those seeds sprouted.

More than a week after planting, one of the three tomato seeds I planted to test viabiity sprouted. By the time I finished this post nearly 2 days later, all three seeds had sprouted. I’m mailing out more than 40 packs of these seeds in the coming week. If you left a comment on my post Free Seeds from Your Small Kitchen Garden, did you also send your mailing address to me via the web site’s Contact Us form? I noticed many visitors overlooked that important step.

So, I test-planted some tomato seeds and waited. Last March, when I started tomato seeds indoors, I had sprouts two days after planting! This January, there were no sprouts for over a week. Finally, on Monday, the first tomato seed sprouted. On Tuesday, two more sprouts appeared. These seeds are viable!

As the cutoff date for my seed giveaway approaches, I’ve packaged up several dozen sets of seeds. I’ve more to package, and I haven’t yet addressed all the envelopes, but I’m confident these seeds will perform when treated properly.

I’m excited to share the seeds; I hope that many of the people who receive them will write once or twice to tell me how their seeds do, and to tell me what they think of the produce they grow.

In the meantime, I’ve already started this year’s small kitchen garden; I’m going to try to keep my tomato seedlings alive indoors until April. I’ll build a tent around them to trap in some moisture and heat, and I’ll flood the tent with light. If things go well, I’ll transplant into larger containers once or twice, so I’ll have very large plants when it’s time to move them outdoors.

By “potting up” the plants this way, I may get a 30-day or better jump on the tomato-growing season. Who knows? Maybe I’ll harvest a few tomatoes in early July this year.

Technorati Tags: blue hubbard squash, neck pumpkin, plant squash, plant tomatoes, seeds, tomato, tomatoes

Your Small Kitchen Garden blog recently received a question about watering. The question was fairly general, and I ended up writing a detailed answer that would make a good post. So, here it is:

Rain in a Small Kitchen Garden

In early spring, young spinach sprouts pop out in the bottom of a furrow in my small kitchen garden. I deliberately plant in furrows and basins so water will collect around the plants and soak in there.

Ideally, it will rain on your garden, and that will reduce your need to water. Sadly, it may rain too much on your garden as it did for most of us in the northeastern United States in the summer of 2009. Once you’ve planted your garden, there’s little you can do when it rains too much; roots may drown where water collects and foliage may rot. Molds such as late blight thrive in wet growing seasons.

So, plan your garden with torrential rain in mind: don’t place beds in low spots. Better still, build raised beds that assure roots won’t steep in standing water should it rain heavily one year.

Optimize Water Use

Your plants will appreciate good drainage. As a favor to the environment (and to your finances if you use tap water in the garden), optimize the garden’s use of whatever water it gets. Assuming the garden bed drains well even in torrential rain, set your rows deeper than the surrounding soil. This means your plants will grow in the bottoms of troughs. For an individual plant such as a tomato, eggplant, squash, or pepper, create a small depression—a basin—with the plant in the middle of it. These low areas will collect rain or hose water and give it time to soak in around the plants’ roots.

How much Water is Enough?

As for knowing when you’ve watered enough? I wrote an earlier post on the topic titled Watering Your Small Kitchen Garden. My approach isn’t rigid; I simply try to keep the plants alive with the least amount of watering they’ll accept happily. I note the weather and I watch the soil and the plants. If there has been no rain in several days and the soil looks dry… or worse, leaves are starting to droop… I water heavily. If there is a sustained dry spell—several weeks or more with little or no rain—I change my watering strategy: I water lightly every morning. The idea is to provide just enough water on top so that any moisture that is already below the surface stays there.

Whenever I water, I target the soil line of my plants. If it’s a tight row of greens, carrots, peas, and such, I distribute water evenly along the row. If I’m watering individual plants such as tomatoes, squash, and peppers, I make sure the water lands where a plant emerges from the soil. There may be a relative desert between my tomato plants, but the soil extending a foot from the stem of a plant receives several light waterings a week during a dry spell.

Spot Water Your Small Kitchen Garden

It’s important to note: when I water, nearly every drop ends up in the depressions in which the plants grow. For heavy watering, I try to fill the trench that defines a row, or the basin holding an individual plant. After that soaks in, I fill the trench or basin again. For light watering, I may not fill the trenches and basins, but I direct the water into them.

Finally, I can’t emphasize enough the advantages of mulching close to your plants, and mulching heavily. Having a lawn, I believe, is a horrible affront to Planet Earth. However, as long as I have a lawn I’ll use grass clippings to mulch my small kitchen garden. Lawn clippings, fallen leaves, newspapers, cardboard, black plastic, pine needles, pine bark… come up with something that’s easy enough to manage that you’ll actually manage it. Mulch lets water through to the soil and significantly reduces the amount that evaporates on dry days.

I shot this sequence of photos one day when I was watering some newly-planted tomatoes. The photo on the left shows a tomato plant in its own basin freshly filled with water. Subsequent photos show the basin over the next 40 seconds as the water soaks in around the plant.

Technorati Tags: mulch, plant vegetables, spinach, tomato, tomatoes, water, watering

If you visit Your Small Kitchen Garden blog often, you’ve probably seen this photo of diseased tomatoes on the vine in my garden. Home growers were particularly distressed by tomato diseases, but some commercial growers also lost crops.

I’ve written much in Your Small Kitchen Garden about the woes of home tomato growers in 2009. As you might expect, some commercial operations also suffered this year. While most apply chemicals to stave off late blight and bacterial infections, some don’t. What’s more, conditions were so bad this season that even chemically-treated crops might not have escaped disease.

Our local paper ran an article yesterday about a crop-sharing group that lost money because of the tough tomato-growing weather. It’s fascinating to see the figures the commercial growers cite in the article. For example, the growers expected to harvest 31 tons of tomatoes per acre; instead they reaped only 19.42 tons per acre.

Another telling statistic: Because of low temperatures and excess moisture, it took 42 days for tomato plants to grow significantly after planting compared to seven days last year, and only four days in 2007! Everyone in the eastern united states seems to have had this type of weather, but apparently your plants might have faired better if you planted them later in the season.

Buying shares in crops can be an economical way to get fresh produce for non-growers… though some crop shares pay out only in cash (as the ones in the article seem to). Crop shares are also a terrific way for farmers to spread risk for years when things don’t go quite right. This was one of those years.

The article is an interesting read. Please check it out: Tomato gamble withers on vine

Technorati Tags: blight, crop shares, late blight, tomato, tomatoes

Late blight infections in 2009 spread all over the eastern United States, wiping out many small kitchen garden tomato crops. Late blight can express itself as brown discoloration on tomatoes – green or ripe.

As the plants fade in your small kitchen garden, the temptation grows to get out there and clean things up. If the plants aren’t going to produce more, why keep them around? The question became more complicated for many this year when late blight destroyed tomato plants all over the north eastern United States.

I posted about late blight in an article titled Tomato Strife in Small Kitchen Gardens Everywhere, and subsequent conversations got me curious about late blight. I did some research and learned stuff about late blight that every tomato- and potato-grower should know.

Late Blight is Mold

For years I’ve heard late blight referred to as fungus, but last month at a tweet-up with a group of gardening enthusiasts in upstate NY, Bridget McManus (@b_mcmanus on Twitter) put me onto an article that identifies late blight as mold. So, late blight is mold, but it’s susceptible to chemicals that kill funguses.

Pretty much any place a late blight mold spore sticks to living tomato tissue, a lesion will emerge in four to six days. By this time, chances are spores have infected other nearby plants and tomatoes.

There’s vaguely good news about late blight: most late blight in the United States is of one strain or another so in a particular infection, every mold spore is genetically identical. These identical molds can reproduce only asexually resulting in spores that can’t survive beyond about four hours without a living host… unless they’re in the soil. To make durable spores, mold must breed sexually—that is, it must breed with a strain of the mold that is genetically different from itself.

To gardeners, asexual late blight means infections die out along with the plants on which they live.

Small Kitchen Garden Late Blight Management

If late blight can survive only on a living host, why do people fuss about the importance of removing blighted plants from your garden… and not adding the plants to your compost? There are several reasons:

Late blight shows as brown splotches on stems and leaves, and rapidly spreads over the entire plant, eventually killing it. In the lower-right background of this photo, there is a seriously-infected green tomato… actually quite brown at this point in its demise.

• Active late blight on any plant can rapidly spread to other plants. In fact, if you see lesions on a leaf, stem, or fruit, there’s a reasonable chance that blight spores have already spread to other leaves, stems, and fruits.
• A plant may not show signs of infection for four days after becoming infected.
• A single lesion can release hundreds of thousands of spores every day, each of which can cause a new lesion.
• Spores, while not hardy, can survive for about four hours without a host—or several weeks if they get mixed into the soil. That gives them plenty of time to ride the wind to neighbors’ plants or to wild plants that might provide a nurturing environment.

So, your attitude toward blighted plants should be about containment: By the time you recognize late blight in your small kitchen garden, it may be too late to save your crops. However, if you remove the plants and bury them six inches underground… or bag them and put them out with your trash, you may slow the spread and spare other gardens from the ugly disease.

The risk of composting is that the compost heap may provide ideal conditions to keep asexually-produced spores alive far longer than they’d live out in the air. Worse: if you also compost susceptible roots or tubers, spores may infect them and winter over.

Put Your Small Kitchen Garden to Bed

With rain and wind, late blight spores eventually spread over the entire surface of a plant, making it look mummified. Amazingly, while every scrap of green on this plant was overwhelmed by late blight, the actual fruit ripened and dried without growing lesions.

Late blight dies along with the plants it’s infecting. So, if you have blighted tomato plants in your garden when killing frost hits, your blight problem may be past. I say **may be** because you might also have potatoes in your garden… or there may be wild plants nearby that can host late blight mold spores.

So, if your tomatoes had late blight, pull the plants out, bag them, and put them out with the trash… or dig a deep hole for them well away from your garden, and buy them under at least six inches of soil. Dig your potatoes… make sure you don’t miss any. The one you leave behind could be the vector for next year’s late blight infection.

Aside from these activities, don’t work the soil in your infected garden bed; once you’ve cleared the plants away, give remaining late blight spores several weeks to die out: don’t cover old, dead or dying plants with mulch (grass clippings and fallen leaves count as mulch). In fact, I’d leave the garden bed exposed to the elements through the winter and plan on adding amendments at the beginning of the next growing season.

Sad News for Prevention

When last I wrote about late blight, I explained steps you can take to reduce the chances of your plants becoming infected. Sadly, in a wet growing season, those steps may be only marginally effective. The sad truth is, the only reliable way to prevent infections is to treat your plants against fungus throughout the growing season.

Naturally, there are chemical, non-organic sprays that are highly successful. I’ve spoken with several farmers at the local farmers’ market whose sentiment is, “I didn’t have any problems with blight this year because I used chemicals.”

Apparently, the most effective organic preventatives are sprays containing copper… which can build up to toxic levels in the soil. Alternatively, spraying foliage with compost teas has proven somewhat effective according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service.

So, the answer to the question, What can I do now to prevent late blight infection next season? is, very little:

• Hope that your late blight has lived asexually
• Remove all plant material that could host late blight in and around your garden (potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and nightshades must go)
• Leave the soil undisturbed and uncovered for two or three weeks before amending it or mulching it

Next year, you’re not likely to see late blight unless the weather treats you the same as it did this year. If you hate to gamble, you’ll have your best chance of success if you treat your plants regularly with antifungal spray that’s labeled as a late blight preventative. You need to decide what treatments are acceptable to you… and what level of loss you can tolerate should your garden disappoint.

Some information for this post came from the Cornell University Vegetable MD Online web site. It’s an awesome resource for kitchen gardeners.

Here are some other sources for information about late blight:

• The Return of Late Blight (Cause of the Irish Potato Famine … – Late blight is infamous as the cause of the Irish Potato Famine, an unforgettable period of Irish history in which four consecutive years of potato crop failure in the mid-1800s left millions of people starving or dead.

• Preventing late blight next season | Brownfield – Purdue University plant pathologist Dan Egel says steps can be taken now to prevent late blight from showing up again next spring in tomatoes and.

• Genome Of Irish Potato Famine Pathogen Decoded – A potato plant infected with Phytophthora infestans. A large international research team has decoded the genome of the notorious organism that triggered the Irish potato famine in the mid-19th century and now threatens this season’s …

• Late Blight — Irish Potato Famine Fungus — Attacks U.S. Northeast … – Leaf lesions due to late blight. Home gardeners beware: This year, late blight — a destructive infectious disease that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s — is killing tomato and potato plants in gardens and on commercial farms …

Technorati Tags: blight, late blight, tomato, tomatoes

By late summer, squash and pumpkin plants dominate in my small kitchen garden. There are bush wax beans, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, broccoli, and cauliflower still producing, and they’re all packed in so tightly that it’s nearly impossible to navigate among the leaves.

Within a few weeks of starting Your Small Kitchen Garden blog, I realized it had taken me somewhere I’d always wanted to be: out in my garden with friends. Within days of my first post, Your Small Kitchen Garden had visitors. And, as I’ve posted more of my gardening experiences, more visitors have come. I’ve enjoyed the comments and the conversations, though seeing the number of visitors, I often wish more of them would leave comments, suggestions, or questions.

Where to Find Gardeners on line

When I wrote my first post, I had no idea that there are, perhaps, thousands of gardening blogs. You can find these by reading blog rolls—lists of the blogs bloggers like to visit. (I recently started a blog roll to which I’ll be adding more sites over the coming weeks; you may need to scroll down quite far to find my blog roll, but please check it out; I hope you’ll enjoy some of the blogs I enjoy.)

My “Imaginary” Gardening Friends

You can also find gardeners on Twitter. There, home gardeners, landscapers, farmers, nursery owners and workers, gardening magazine and book writers, garden products producers, and radio and television personalities exchange thoughts and encouragement. Connect with one or two of them, and the interaction will lead to hundreds of others. Float a question to the gardeners on Twitter and you’re likely to get some helpful answers within a few hours.

I’ve interacted with several hundred gardeners and garden-focused folks on Twitter, but because I haven’t met them in person, my daughter refers to them as my imaginary friends.

Imaginary Becomes Real

Someplace along the on-line gardening path, members of the community find ways to meet in person. So far, two of my imaginary friends have become real. Each visited me in my isolated homestead in central Pennsylvania.

Yes, I had an awesome tomato season, despite the trench foot and the very late expression of late blight. We’ve eaten a lot of tomato salad, various pasta dishes with tomato sauces, risotto with tomatoes, and sandwiches with tomatoes. On top of all the great tomato dishes, I’ve put up 36 pints of tomato sauce and 18 pints of diced and whole tomatoes. Still, there is about a half bushel of tomatoes awaiting attention, and, perhaps, two or three more gallons on the vines.

I’m pleased that an upshot of one of these visits is that my no-longer-imaginary friend, Punkrockgardens (Laura Mathews is her given name) has featured my tomatoes in her blog. In her post, Tomato Tidbits: Why do we do all this? she captures the motivation of home tomato growers, and highlights some of the quirks of this nearly past growing season.

I enjoy Laura’s blog because she reports at-large about the gardening scene in central Pennsylvania… which is where I live. I also enjoy the photos she includes with her blog posts; she is a professional photographer with a thoughful and creative eye.

Expand Your Small Kitchen Garden

Please check out the Punk Rock Gardens blog, and visit other blogs on my blog roll. As you browse my blog posts and those of other garden bloggers, leave comments and bookmark entries that you find useful; comments are just about the only measure bloggers have of whether they’re reaching their audiences.

But don’t stop with blogs. Join Twitter if you haven’t yet, and participate in the gardening chatter. Follow me as @cityslipper and you’ll quickly find hundreds of gardeners and gardening enthusiasts with plenty to share.

Technorati Tags: friends, harvest, tomato, tomatoes

From a tiny yellow blossom: a grape-sized tomato, a golf-ball-sized orb, or something the size of a grapefruit? The size of the blossom doesn’t tell you much about the size of the fruit that’s on the way.

Tomatoes are coming on full-force in my small kitchen garden, and I hope you’re having the same kind of luck with yours. I understand that cool and wet weather has challenged many tomato plants from the Midwest into the Northeast. The lucky folks, apparently, have lost some fruit to blossom-end rot. The unlucky ones have seen late blight decimate their plants.

Whether your tomatoes are growing strong, coming ripe, or dying on the vine, you’ve probably been involved in at least one conversation about tomatoes this year. The one I hear repeatedly is about how terrible are the tomatoes you buy in grocery stores. Invariably, everyone in this conversation agrees, and someone offers up that those tomatoes come off the vines green and travel cross-country while ripening… and if it doesn’t ripen on the vine, it’s just no good.

I respectfully submit: That last observation is complete hogwash.

Water regularly, and your tomatoes will likely come out OK. However, one ill-timed rainstorm could cause cracks that lead to rot, insect infestations, and mildew.

Genetics Makes a Lousy Tomato

If you want a tomato that tastes horrible and has lousy texture, start by planting seeds for the “tastes horrible and has lousy texture” tomato. That’s what commercial grocery suppliers do. Plant breeders spent decades developing varieties of tomatoes that hold up incredibly well when stacked and jostled during harvest and transport. They paid no attention to the flavor and textural appeal of these tomatoes.

Hapless grocery store shoppers buy those horrid things because those shoppers have grown up believing real tomatoes taste horrible and have lousy texture. OK… that horrible flavor becomes an acquired taste if it’s the only tomato you ever eat.

If the tomato cracks early, it may try to heal itself. Once healed, it won’t attract insects and disease, but there will be a section you’d rather not chew.

These tomatoes aren’t bad because they’re picked green. They’re bad because they’re a lousy breed. Put a decent tomato on a truck and ship it 3,000 miles, and it’ll be a smooshed tomato at its destination.

Vine-Ripened is Over-Rated

On the flip-side of this discussion is the erroneously perpetuated belief that a tomato must ripen on the vine to be good. I’m confident that the belief exists because no right-minded gardener would pick a tomato before it’s ripe (unless there was threat of frost). Yet, would the right-minded gardeners of the world pick some un-ripened tomatoes for the sake of comparison, they would learn an astonishing and happy truth: vine-ripening is way over-rated.

In fact, vine-ripening tomatoes is one of the most challenging of all gardening tasks… yet experienced gardeners so often suggest tomatoes as the ideal beginner’s crop: Tomatoes are so easy to grow, we say, and they’re so superior to store-bought. But unless you have absolute control over how much rain falls in your small kitchen garden, and how often it falls, growing beautiful ripe tomatoes is a bit of a nail-biting proposition.

This tomato cracked because it got too much water during ripening. The cracks healed, but then the tomato received too much sunshine, so it developed green shoulders. When I slice this up for salad, I’ll probably cut off some of the green stuff, leaving less to eat.

Perfect Tomato Culture

When a tomato first emerges from its tiny yellow tomato flower, it’s hard to visualize the monster it may eventually become. Still, over the course of a month, the little green ball grows larger as it sucks water from the tomato plant. To produce a perfect, ripe tomato, the plant must draw from a steady supply of water. If there is no rain, you should water two or three times a week. Ideally the weekly total will be a full inch of water over the area defined by the outstretched leaves of the plant.

If you can manage that, you may also need to control the amount of sunlight that reaches the individual tomatoes; a tomato that gets excessive direct sun may not ripen evenly.

Cracks and Hard Spots (Green Shoulders)

So, you’re controlling the amount of water and sunlight your tomatoes get, and then it rains. Your tomato plants don’t mind too much of a good thing; they suck up the additional burst of water and the young, green tomatoes get larger. Here’s the rub: tomatoes that have started to ripen aren’t as resilient as younger, greener tomatoes. As they expand under the new load of water, their skins are likely to stretch and tear.

A tomato that gets extra water during its last week or two of growth can develop stretch marks and cracks in the skin. Left to finish ripening, the cracked tomato can attract fruit flies and other sugar-loving insects, fungus and mold, and bacteria that rapidly reduce the tomato’s innards to smelly slime.

Even without the rain storm, sunlight striking the top of a tomato on the vine can prevent ripening there while the bottom and sides of the tomato sweeten, soften, and turn bright red (or whatever other color represents ripe for the varieties you grow). These “green shoulders” detract considerably from the flavor and texture of an otherwise ripe fruit.

This tomato has just started to show pink; I‘ll let it ripen on my dining room table and it will be ready to use in seven-to-fourteen days. It will taste every bit as good as a cracked tomato with green shoulders that ripens on the vine. Actually, it’ll taste better, because it won’t have green shoulders!

So, Don’t Vine-Ripen!

Earlier I said, “…unless you have absolute control over how much rain falls and how often…” You do have such control! Quite simply: don’t let your tomatoes ripen on the vine. When pink first appears on a tomato’s skin, pick the tomato and set it inside out of direct sunlight.

Unless I get busy and miss a few days, I pick each tomato when it starts to change color. Typically, this means that every second day, I harvest anything showing pink. I fill a large stainless steel bowl with the day’s pickings, and set it on my dining room table. About seven-to-ten days later, the tomatoes reach peak ripeness without torn skin and without green shoulders… and every tomato is just as delectable as any tomato I ever let ripen on the vine. In fact, every tomato is nearly perfect… and I could never say that in the days that I left them on the plants.

I picked these tomatoes about two weeks before I photographed them. They ripened on my dining room table, and they are as red, juicy, sweet, and delicious as any vine-ripened tomato.

Oh, Yeah? (an Anecdote)

I visited with a farmer once who managed an impressive kitchen garden. Before touring his garden, his wife and I discussed various gardening techniques. At one point, she insisted: “Oh, we let all our tomatoes ripen on the vine. They’re just not as good if they don’t.”

I countered: “I’ve found if I pick them when they start to ripen, they never split or develop green shoulders… and you can’t taste the difference.”

Her reply: “A farmer can taste the difference… and our tomatoes never crack.”

When we reached the garden, every red tomato on every tomato plant had one or more cracks in its skin. (No, I didn’t comment about it… that would have been rude. But I’d sure like to put my tomatoes up against hers in a taste-test with farmers.)

Here are links to other articles that discuss green shoulders and cracking tomatoes:

• Ripening Disorders in Tomatoes « Weekly Crop Update – I have seen a considerable amount of tomato blotchy ripening, yellow shoulder, graywall and white tissue in market tomatoes recently. The discolored tissue is often hard even when the rest of the tomato is ripe. These are physiological ripening disorders and not diseases.

• Tomato Quirks Part 3 – Green Shoulders : Veggie Gardener – Have you ever had a tomato that seemed to never really ripen all the way on top? Find out how and why this happens, and how to prevent it.

• Cincinnati.Com | Cincinnati Enquirer | Cincinnati Gardener … – Tags: black walnut tree, black walnuts, Cincinnati, cracked tomatoes, garden, garden question, Home and Garden, juglone, juglone toxin, split tomatoes. This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 3:06 pm and is filed under …

• tomato garden – cracked tomatoes causing disappointment this year … – longtime gardeners have struggled this year with cracked tomatoes — just as the tomato is almost ripe, it splits and in a short period of time, is invaded by insects or rots. many of the vegetable more …

Technorati Tags: harvest, plant tomatoes, tomato, tomatoes

I bought my homemade upside down tomato planter for 99 cents in a grocery store. It’s no more than a reusable shopping bag with a 2-inch slit cut in the bottom. It will hold five gallons of soil, though I’ve filled it only half way; I’ll add more soil in the next few days to ensure there’s someplace for the roots to go if they decide to grow upward contrary to their geotropic tendencies.

This season, I succumbed to the hype and added upside down tomato planters to my small kitchen garden. As regular readers of my blog might attest: I’m kind of lazy. I’m always looking for gardening shortcuts that still result in decent food-production. The hype about upside down planters has made them seem like a lazy gardener’s dream.

But, while I’m lazy, I’m also cheap… er, budget-conscious. The best price I’d seen for the original Topsy-Turvy upside down planter would have gotten me two for about $17. A knock-off product turned up at Walmart this spring for about the same price. So, I scouted the Internet for ideas on how to make upside down tomato planters without that cash outlay. On somebody’s blog about making a planter using a soda bottle, there was a comment suggesting that you put a hole in the bottom of a reusable shopping bag instead. For 99 cents, I bought a shopping bag and went to work. Here’s where I wrote about my home made upside down tomato planter.

Tomato Sadist

I’m reasonably certain that the person who invented upside down tomato planters actually hates tomato plants. He or she one day decided to plant tomatoes upside down and watch them struggle and overcome the mind-numbing orientation. I’m going to describe the torture my upside down tomatoes are experiencing. It’s not for the squeamish; please forgive me if this discussion becomes too graphic… in fact, if you have a weak stomach, you may want altogether to skip the photos.

Within a day of moving into its upside down planter, my tomato plant bent upward against gravity. Being very small, the plant bumped its head against the bottom of the hanging planter. Being under the planter, the tomato was in constant shade. Being a plant, each morning the tomato tried to grow toward the sun… and it tracked the sun throughout the day.

I used a 3-liter soda bottle to fashion an upside down planter according to instructions on the web site www.ohcripes.com. Such a planter adds injury to injury: a tomato plant’s roots will grow into a space holding several gallons of soil—as many as five gallons. A 3-liter soda bottle holds less than a gallon.

A few weeks after hanging the soda bottle torture planter, I also hung some one-gallon milk jug tomato planters. While the sad, abused upside down tomato has struggled to grow up, the upside up tomatoes have simply grown, quickly overtaking the tortured tomato in size and in health.

For several weeks, my poor upside down tomato plant bumped its head on the underside of the planter while trying to find an easy pathway to follow toward sunlight. Finally, it grew big enough to extend from under the planter. Now the poor, tortured plant looks like an untreated victim of scoliosis: its spine twisted into a hideous curve that no bracing or surgery can correct.

I tried to accommodate the upside down craze by designing an alternative planter. For this planter, I put the slit about two-thirds of the way up from the bottom of the bag, filled the bag with soil, and inserted the tomato plant with its root ball nearly on the surface of the soil. The stem runs diagonally down from the root ball through the soil and out the slit in the side of the bag. I figure the plant would immediately turn and grow upward, but the roots would have the full depth of the bag to grow downward. That’s what has happened so far… eventually, I figure the weight of the plant and the tomatoes that grow on it will pull the stem downward and crack it or break it off, but the weight may come on slowly enough to let the plant sag gently under its own weight. The idea seemed far nobler than setting a plant to grow upside down. In retrospect, I’d fill the bag with soil and plant the tomato through the bag’s top. Let it grow up the way nature intended. You know what plants I’d grow in an upside down or sidewise planter in future growing seasons? NONE! Please don’t you grow any either.

As the plant grows longer and sets fruit, it will inevitably grow heavier. The weight will force the stem down, flexing it unnaturally against the ghastly bend it has grown in effort to right the nasty wrong of living upside down. By the time this weight accumulates, the twisted stem will have “hardened down” meaning that it will be brittle rather than supple; it’s likely to crack or break off unless I provide support for the emerging fruits.

Don’t Grow Tomatoes Upside Down

I implore you: Don’t buy upside down tomato planters. A plant may do well in such a device; it may even thrive. However, upside down is not natural and provides not a single advantage over growing upside up (or upside right, if it pleases you). Contrary to a lie you might hear in a Topsy-Turvy advertisement, gravity in no way helps move water and nutrients down the stems to the leaves and fruit of an upside down plant… this is simply not how plants work.

Other claims made on the Topsy-Turvy web site aren’t quite as preposterous, but they are misleading. Does a greenhouse effect warm the roots in an upside down planter resulting in explosive growth? Is an upside down planter safe from ground fungus, bacteria, and cutworms? Does an upside down planter eliminate digging, weeding, backbreaking work, and the use of pesticides? The answer to each of these questions is: Absolutely no more than an upside up planter would. That’s right: every benefit claimed for an upside down planter comes as well with an upside up planter… but an upside up planter has one additional benefit: it doesn’t torture the tomato plant. If you want your plant to provide a bountiful harvest, why abuse it by forcing it to struggle against such unnatural conditions?

Upside down tomato planters are popular because they’re novel, not because they offer a better way to grow food. My on-line gardening buddy, Amanda Thomsen (see her blog at horticulture magazine) aptly referred to upside down planters as “The snuggies of the plant world.” In my words: A little marketing goes a long w… too far.

So, if you feel the urge to plant tomatoes and vegetables in a novel upside down planter, check yourself. Even if you can stomach the piteous efforts of your plants to right themselves; even if it doesn’t turn your stomach to witness the grotesque contortions of abused plants… consider your neighbors. Consider the children who might see your tortured tomatoes and be forever scarred by the experience.

Please visit Kerry Michaels’s containter gardening site for further discussion about upside down tomatoes.

Technorati Tags: plant tomatoes, tomato, tomatoes, upside down planter, upside down tomatoes

Small and delicate, tomato blossoms give no clue that they will soon give way to fruit that can weigh but an ounce, or as many as seven pounds.

Your Small Kitchen Garden was going all hot-and-heavy about planting tomatoes but then it went off in other directions. Well… tomatoes have returned! I imagine many of you have already figured out how to support your tomato plants, and a few have decided to let your plants “free-range.” If you’re in neither of these categories, stick with this post. In fact, even if you’ve created tomato support for your garden, please hang in. I’ve been a tomato-staker for forty years, but I never again will be. This post explains the tomato support I’ll use in my small kitchen garden from now on.

No Suckers in my Small Kitchen Garden

In an earlier post, I explained about how to manage tomato plants. I, personally, am a sucker-plucker; even on determinate varieties of tomatoes, I remove suckers and tie the tomato vines to supports.

Every year that I’ve grown tomatoes, I’ve diligently plucked suckers and tied my plants to wooden stakes. I sacrifice an old tee shirt each season, and tear strips from it to harness the plants. It’s a pleasant task that eats up a lot of time when you have a lot of tomato plants.

Because my dad did, I have always tied my tomato plants to stakes. Within a week of setting a tomato seedling in the garden, I’d drive an 8-foot tall wooden stake into the ground a few inches from the seedling. Then, as the seedling grew, I’d tie it to the stake using strips of cloth I’d tear from an old tee shirt.

I have about 24 tomato stakes that I made by ripping 2×4 lumber into thirds and then cutting one end of each into a wedge-shaped point. (By ripping, I mean cutting the 2×4 along its length with the grain.) These stakes are hefty and strong. Since an eight-foot 2×4 costs about $2.50, my 24 stakes cost about $20—not even a dollar apiece. Of course, the stakes wear out; the pointy ends rot while they’re in the ground. So, some are no longer eight feet long… but the cost of replacement remains low enough that I can maintain my inventory for decades and the cost per stake wouldn’t be punitive.

I planted about sixty tomato plants this year.

I make my tomato stakes by ripping 2×4x8’ lumber into thirds on my table saw. Then I cut a point into one end of each stake—sometimes using a hand-held jig saw, and sometimes using the table saw along with a jury-rigged jig to hold the stakes at appropriate angles as they move through the saw blade.

My first completed trellis wouldn’t win an award from the “gorgeous garden glamour” judges. To erect the trellis, I stood on the step ladder and used a crack hammer (with a four pound head) to drive the uprights about a foot into the ground. I also stood on the ladder when I lashed the horizontal crossbars to the tops of the uprights. It took about twenty minutes to build the first trellis, and three more went together in about 15 minutes each.

Support for Crowded Tomatoes

A standard square lashing is easy to tie and very strong. You can drill holes and bolt your trellises together, twist wires around the joints, hold them together with plastic quick-ties, or otherwise substitute for the square lashings.

For my first time ever, I started tomatoes indoors from seed this past winter. I planted lots of seeds because I expected to have problems… but every seed sprouted and thrived under fluorescent lights on my ping-pong table. So, I’ve planted a row of tomato plants with one-foot spacing between plants. In my other tomato rows there are only 18 inches between plants. Were I to support all these plants with 8-foot stakes, I’d be buying and ripping a lot of 2×4s. This appeals neither to my budget, nor to my lazy gardening style. Goodness, who wants to hammer 60 tomato stakes into the ground?

I’ve seen tomatoes supported by strings hung from overhead supports and figured that would be a low-cost alternative to planting 60 stakes. I already had 24 stakes to work with, and I figured I could repurpose them to make supports from which to hang strings. I’m very excited by the results.

The scheme is simple: My tomato rows are 14 feet long. I pounded a stake in at each end of a row, and a stake in the middle of the row. Two further stakes became cross-bars that I mounted across the tops of the uprights. I didn’t want to damage the stakes (in case I hated the result and decided to stake each plant individually after all), so I lashed the cross pieces in place with string.

It’s hard to capture a single meaningful photo that illustrates how the twine looks when wrapped around the stem of a tomato plant. These three photos give you a pretty good idea. Because you tie the twine to the crossbar above the plant, it can be a little tight, requiring more extreme flexing of the stem when you add a wrap around the plant’s newer growth.

With a row of 14 tomatoes all supported by twine hanging from above, it takes only a few minutes to support the new growth on all plants in the row. About once a week, I pluck suckers and work the twine around the newest growth at the tops of the plants. With traditional staking, I’d spend more than twice as much time at the task.

Once a plant is 18 to 24 inches tall, I tie it into the support. To do this, I tie a piece of string to the cross bar directly over the plant. I cut the string off at ground level and wrap it three or four times around the plant’s stem. If the string tries to unwind from the plant, I pin the end of the string under the last wrap it makes near the ground. Usually, the string stays in place, particularly if it ends immediately beneath a leaf.

As the plant grows, I gently flex the leading stem and leaves out of the way while working the supporting string around the stem. After a week’s growth or so, there’s enough new stem to make at least one twist, and sometimes two.

This tomato support is so stupid-easy to manage, and so effective. It’s way quicker than tearing up an old tee shirt and tying tomato stems to stakes. The materials in a given season will cost two or three dollars until I need to replace stakes (a decent ball of twine is the only expense). If I’d started using this approach 15 years ago, I’d have saved, perhaps, 60 hours for other activities.

Technorati Tags: tomato, tomato support, tomato supports, tomatoes

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.

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…

Technorati Tags: container garden, container gardening, plant tomatoes, tomato, tomatoes

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.

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.

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