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I have to admit that the main reason for my garden is the tomatoes. Most grocery store tomatoes are varieties that have been bred for appearance and shipping durability, but are often mealy and tasteless. There is an almost endless variety of tomatoes available in the seed catalogues and garden centers, with varying color, size and purpose. There are beefsteaks, grape, cherry, Roma, pear, zebra striped, yellow, orange, purple, and green tomatoes. They’re all good if you ask me.
Tomatoes need to be started from seed indoors under a grow light, and they’re not ready to put in the beds until they’re 8 weeks old. I’ll do a separate post about seed starting in a later post. I have found great plants in the local home improvement garden centers and other local nurseries. One problem with these plants, however, is that they’re often either mis-labeled or the plants cross pollinated. In other words, I’ve been surprised when the “beefsteak” I purchased turned out to be an Early Girl, or Celebrity or other type of tomato. They’re all good; it’s just that when you raise you plants from seeds, you know exactly what you’ll get.
Tomato plants fall into 2 categories, determinate and indeterminate. Determinate plants are smaller than indeterminate, and produce their fruit all at once. Roma, bush tomatoes and some others fall into this category. Indeterminate plants grow tall, some up to 9 feet! They produce fruit over a longer period of time, usually throughout the season. Beefsteaks are usually indeterminate plants. These take up the North end of most of my beds. I like to have at least 6 tomato plants growing, and like to stagger the crop, so I plant Sweet Baby Girl tomatoes which ripen first, then I’ll also have Early Girl or Fourth of July, early 4″ tomatoes which will ripen while I’m waiting for the beefsteaks to mature. I love Burpee’s Brandy Boy tomato, a large pink beefsteak, and it takes about 2 – 1/2 months to ripen.
It’s important to cage the plants. I know some people stake them, but the beefsteaks grow so tall that two cages are a lot easier. As the tomato grows, I just tuck the branches in to the cages. I secure the cages to the trellis so that the wind doesn’t blow them over.
Here’s an example of how I plant a tomato bed:
 You’ll notice that I put the large two beefsteak plants at the North end of the bed, and put smaller, determinate tomatoes in the South end so they don’t shade the beefsteaks. I tuck herbs like parsley in the front, basil in the middle, thyme and dill in the back, and onions and marigolds around the rest of the bed. These are all great companions to the tomatoes.
Tomatoes like to be planted deeply. For this reason, I plant them lying down (the tomatoes, not me!) Simply determine where you want your plant and dig a trench the length of the plant as deeply as you can. Strip off the lower branches of your plant, leaving 3 or 4 branches at the very top. Carefully lay the plant in the trench (tomato vines will break easily), water it well and cover it with soil, leaving the top of the plant poking out. Place a stick or marker where you put the root ball of the plant so you don’t accidentally dig there. Every where you stripped the branches off, roots will grow. This will give your plants a great foundation.
I know you organic snobs out there will hate this, but I fertilize with Miracle Gro for Tomatoes. I mix it in the sprayer with an organic kelp fertilizer called Sea Magic, and if I spray the plants once a week, I get a ton of fruit. Both work well as a foliar feed (meaning that the leaves absorb the nutrients) as well as a ground feed.
It’s important to succor the plants once the fruit begins to form. What I mean by this is that I’ll trim off the branches that don’t have blossoms or fruit on them, I’ll strip off the bottom branches, and I’ll try to encourage one or two main vines to grow. This concentrates the energy of the plant to growing the fruit.
I usually harvest the tomatoes when they begin to blush. If I don’t, sometimes bugs begin to munch on them. Green tomatoes are also delicious lightly breaded and fried in a little butter.
And one main rule: NEVER REFRIGERATE TOMATOES! This ruins the flavor and texture. There’s an enzyme that breaks down under 40 degrees and you’ll lose that great flavor. They’ll do just fine in a basket or large bowl on the counter.
Happy Gardening!
Marian
Ahhh yes, the musical fruit. Full of fiber, protein and deliciousness. Here in South Florida, about the only things that will grow well during our tropical summer are sweet potatoes and beans. Sweet potatoes require very little maintenance, and I like them because they cover the beds with vines and push out the weeds. When I harvest the potatoes, I have (relatively) weed free beds.
I also love to fill my bean beds with lots of bean seeds. The tropical rainy season is perfect for the yard long beans which grow about 2″ a day and love lots of rain.
 
Here’s a pic of Burpee’s Asparagus Yard Long Beans. You can click on the picture to get to Burpee’s site for this seed. This variety is particularly wonderful. The beans grow quickly into yard long beans, and usually sport 2 beans per blossom. They’re easy to harvest and go a long way in the dinner department. About 10 beans cut up is plenty for a side dish for 2. They keep for weeks in the fridge in zipper bags and are tasty and tender. Try them!
Make sure to use a good probiotic full of nitrogen fixing bacteria when you plant legumes. It’ll insure healthy roots and add lots of nitrogen to the soil.
Happy Gardening!
This beautiful cucumber trellis is a great example of utilizing every square foot of real estate in your raised garden bed. I love that in this picture, the gardener planted lettuce all around the cucumber trellis, which has very shallow roots. The cucumbers will send their roots deeper into the soil so you won’t have root competition. I also love that they showed the cucumbers dangling below the support (why it’s a must to use chicken wire or good stiff garden trellis netting) so that the vine can grow on both sides of the trellis. These plants will stay aerated, will get a lot of direct sun, yet will allow for a nice variety of lettuces to grow beneath it.
Gardener’s Supply is the on line store that I’ve given my business to for many years. They just have the best selection of plant supports at the most reasonable prices. Every year for several years I ordered more of their tomato cages. They last forever if you pull them out at the end of the season and clean the damp soil off of the legs. I now have about 24 of them, enough to support all of the tomatoes and eggplants that I want to grow. They now sell extenders for the cages, but I always found that another cage would easily stack on top of the other. Here in South Florida, these tall extendors offer protection when I have to throw a sheet over the plant for any expected frowts. They fold flat to make storage easier, they are easy to stack to support my tall beefsteak plants, and they make harvesting so very easy. It’s also much easier to find predators such as the dreaded tomato horn worm because you can see the plant foliage very easily Rather than continually tying the vine to a stake, you just tuck the growing branches into the cages.
Click on the pic below to take you to their site.
 
 Hot peppers hail from Mexico, and the closer you can mimic that climate the more successful you’ll be at growing them. They like lots of sun and hot, dry weather. Start them in the spring 12 weeks before the last frost if you’re living above zone 10. Here in Florida they do best during the hot summers. I grow them in the winter garden as well, but they don’t produce fruit until the weather warms up.
Square foot gardens in raised intensive beds are ideal for growing peppers. They like to be planted close together, one per square foot. When mature their leaves should touch. If you fertilize them you’ll get lots of leaves and very little fruit, so just plant them and keep them weeded and they’ll grow like crazy. Mid season an application of wood ashes around the plants can help stimulate a second blossom production. If you can make yourself pinch off the first few peppers when they reach dime size you’ll help stimulate the production of more peppers.
The only pests that bother them are aphids and spider mites. A row cover will prevent these from pestering your peppers, but make sure to remove the covers when the blossoms appear so the bees and other pollinating insects can get to them.
Peppers like it on the dry side, so don’t overdo it with watering. You can plant different varieties together, but if you plan on saving the seeds for next season, beware that because of the open pollination, you may get a hybrid that looks like a jalopeno but has the heat of a habanero!
Picked young, hot peppers are not so hot. As they ripen, their heat develops. The heat of peppers is measured in Scoville units, named after an Englishman named William Scoville who first developed the rating system in the early 1900′s. A Hungarian wax pepper may be mildly hot at 500 Scoville units, while a cayenne pepper may be 5000 – 10000 units. Move into the Scotch Bonnet and Habanero peppers and you’re up to 100,000 units! Take care when handling hot peppers. Wear latex gloves when handling the really hot varieties, as even the outside skin can have oils that can burn your hands for days.
Hot peppers are great slow dried in the oven at 150° for 12 hours, then cooled and ground into flakes (with a food processor) or powder (with a coffee grinder, used only for spice grinding.) I make both every year from my cayenne peppers, and the aroma of fresh roasted cayenne peppers is just wonderful. I sprinkle the flakes on garlic bread, in salads, on pizza, and in all sorts of sauces.
Get those peppers planted!
Happy gardening.
 This was the first baby cucumber of my garden. Cukes are one of my favorite vegetables. Seldom do I not have a few in my crisper drawer. They vary in delightful ways, from “burpless” varieties to ones bred just for pickling to slicing varieties. They come in round, long, short, yellow, green, and white varieties. They are all great in salads and cold soups and sauces. No summer garden (or South Florida winter garden) should be without them. If given direct sun, evenly moist, fertile soil with good drainage, success is all but guaranteed. Before planting, work in lots of good organic compost if you have it to help the soil retain moisture.
There are two types of cucumber plants, like tomato plants, there are vining types and bush types. ”Salad Bush,” “Bush Champion,” and “pickle bush” are all types that can be grown in a 5 gallon bucket on a patio. Just one plant can produce many cucumbers if it’s watered daily.
The vining type of cucumber is well suited to the raised bed vegetable garden. You can grow them in the back row of your square foot garden, and let them climb up the trellis. Or, you could build a cucumber support such as this one that allows you to grow lettuce underneath it.
 Cucumber Trellis The only problem I see with this support is that it’s not large enough to support full growing cucumber plants. They would still need a trellis upon which to grow or they’ll spill over into the yard.
Utilizing one of your beds for cucumbers would be ideal for them. Plant the seeds in the back 4 square feet of your bed. Most varieties come with instructions to plant 3 or 4 seeds in a little mound, 18″ apart. This translates to a square foot garden in one of two ways. Utilizing the back two rows of square feet, plant 3 or 4 seeds in the middle of each 4 sq. ft. square. Or, you can plant one seed per square foot in the last row only. They need plenty of room for the roots to grow, so don’t crowd them. Cucumbers like peppers, which would be good planted in the squares just South of the cucumbers. In the front row plant herbs or lettuce or radishes or carrots.
South Florida has a particularly nasty little beetle that has destroyed my vining crops in my past attempts to grow organically. I called the Broward County extension and spoke to the master gardener about this problem. My cukes, cantaloupe and squash were doing fine until one day the leaves got spotty, then turned into hairnets, then died. He recommended one spray that is the “closest thing to organic” insecticide that would work. It’s Bayer’s multi purpose spray and I now use it on the growing plants before they send out blossoms or fruit. If you do choose to use an insecticide of any kind, use it only at dusk so you don’t kill your bees. Bees are your friends, and their benefits will be discussed in a later blog. In the mean time, protect your bee population by never spraying in the mornings especially when they’re gathering nectar. If you kill your bees, you will have no cucumbers unless you pollinate them yourself.
Happy Gardening!
Marian
Just for the record, Burpee’s do not now, never have, and never will sell GMO (genetically modified organisms) seeds. Here’s the scoop straight from the owner’s mouth:By George Ball – Burpee Chairman and CEO
I and others at Burpee are asked occassionally about our alleged connection to Monsanto and whether we sell GMO seed. We have even been accused of being owned by Monsanto on the Internet. I’ve decided to address these questions and false allegations formally with the hopes that someone out there in cyberspace may refer back to this post for information on these issues—straight from the source.
For the record, I own W. Atlee Burpee & Co. Burpee is NOT owned by Monsanto. We do purchase a small number of seeds from the garden seed department of Seminis, a Monsanto subsidiary, and so do our biggest competitors. We do NOT sell GMO seed, never have in the past, and will not sell it in the future.
As I peruse this year’s Burpee catalogue, I imagine my dream garden. I see eight or ten raised 4′ x 8′ beds, filled with the perfect mix of compost, vermiculite and peat moss. The walkways between the beds are unobstructed and wide enough for my garden cart. Each bed has a trellis frame at the northernmost edge, so each has the option of hosting vertical crops. Two beds are dedicated to flowers, the rest are ready for vegetables. I also have several bean beds, which oare narrow – only 2′ deep and 8′ long, with an aluminum pole frame over the top that will later secure the bamboo poles I set when I plant the seeds so the vines can freely climb.
This year’s catalogue has 3 full pages of bean varieties from which to choose. There are yellow wax beans, lots of bush beans, pole beans and my favorite, yard long pole beans. These beans grow a full yard long and are tender and delicious. I’ve grown them several years in a row, and they are abundant and easy to harvest. Eight or ten of these bad boys are enough beans for supper for Rick and me. I harvest them, curl them up in quart size zip lock bags and toss them in the fridge. They keep for weeks, but are so good that we eat them long before then.
To plant pole beans, soak them overnight in water to get them started. Then drain off the water and sprinkle lliberally with a legume inoculant to help them to fix the nitrogen producing bacteria. (It’s a bean thing…) With your finger, make a furrow about 3″ deep and drop a seed every 1 – 1/2 inches along the furrow. Cover loosely with soil and make another furrow 6″ from the first one. Drop the seeds in the second furrow, cover with soil, then place your bamboo poles between the furrows, every 4′ apart. As the pole beans grow, they’ll find the bamboo sticks and climb easily. Water the bed well every day, but try to not wet the foliage when you do. In about 55 days you’ll have your first harvest. Pick as you get them and the plants will keep producing for weeks.
Bush beans can be planted the same way, but you won’t need the poles for support. These beans will produce a large crop all at once, then a second smaller crop a few weeks later. Then they’re done, so you can dig them back into the soil. Bean plants are a green fertilizer, providing lots of nitrogen for the soil.
My current Burpee catalogue also has pages and pages of beautiful squash, peppers, carrots, artichokes, okra, and lots and lots of tomato varieties. I’ll focus on them next.
 
I just got my new Burpee catalogue in the mail, filled with delightful photos of the huge variety of seeds that are available for the home gardener. I just love this time of year and drool over the beautiful vegetables that I can grow. For the Florida gardener, now is the time to plan your 2012 winter garden and get your seeds. If you are anywhere outside of zone 9 or 10, you can plan on a spring planting.
You want to start your seeds at least 2 months prior to your estimated planting date. There are many seed starter systems available, and a grow light is a must for your indoor starting. Two things are vital to start seeds: light and temperature. It must be warm enough for the seeds to germinate, so if you’re starting them in an unheated place like a garage or shed, you’ll need some seed warmer pads to put under your seed starter trays. If you start them indoors, you won’t need the warmers, but you will need a grow light.
I like a self contained seed starting system and have tried several. There are many to choose from; I usually get mine from Burpee or Gardener’s Supply. Here is one of their systems as an example.
 
This system comes in several sizes and is affordable and reusable.
Don’t be afraid to start your own seeds. You’ll be rewarded with the exact variety of vegetable you want, so when the catalogues arrive, pick out what you want, then go online, click on one of my links and order your garden supplies!
Happy gardening.
One of the latest rages nutrition wise is kale. Full of antioxidants, it’s considered a “super food.” Now there’s a way to turn it into a healthy crispy snack. Enjoy.
- 2 bunches kale
- 4 Tbsp olive oil
- sea salt
- crushed red pepper flakes
- garlic powder or salt
- fresh lemon
Take the center stem off of the kale leaves and tear into bite sized pieces. Put in a large bowl and drizzle over the olive oil and toss well so each leaf is lightly coated. Lay out in a single layer on 2 sheet pans and sprinkle with salt and pepper flakes. Bake at 350° for 10 – 15 minutes until crisp but still green. Remove from oven, squeeze over a little lemon juice and sprinkle with garlic powder. Serve immediately.
 Beautiful Perfect Cabbage-BiotaMax Treated Side
Isn’t this a beautiful sight? This tender young cabbage plant is just perfect, growing beautifully because of the proper probiotics I added to the soil by using BiotaMax. Not only do the right organisms in the soil aid in growth, but they strengthen the plants so that disease and pests aren’t a threat.
If you use chemical fertilizers or pesticides, you’ve effectively killed your soil. Soil needs life in order for the plants to be able to absorb the nutrients in the soil. If you’ve stripped your soil, it is necessary to add these essential bacteria and fungi back into it. BiotaMax is a product that’s economical to use and very, very effective.
Of course, the best way to feed your plants is to ditch your chemical fertilizers (sorry, MiracleGro) and start a compost pile or bin. Composting is simple, economical and a great way to reduce waste and recycle your vegetable scraps, eggshells, coffee grounds, and table scraps. You can put it all in your compost, but please don’t put andy meat or meat fats into it or you’re inviting problems and pests.
I prefer a compost bin that has a handle that I can turn once a week so I don’t have to take a pitchfork to a pile of scraps. Compost must be turned as it “cooks” to distribute the essential bacteria that break it down into useable fertilizer for your garden. The other advantage of a compost bin is that you won’t have the neighbors complaining about the unsightly pile of refuse in your yard, the local raccoons can’t get into it, and the smell is contained. Vegetable compost doesn’t really stink, but anything that decomposes will produce some odor. When you’re rewarded in a month or so with rich, brown, crumbly compost that you can use to dress your garden and nourish your plants, you’ll be so proud!
Happy gardening!
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I LOVE Burpee’s Seeds! Burpee offers the greatest selection of vegetable varieties. Have fun exploring their web site.
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This compost tumbler is affordable and easy to use.
 
 
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I love this sprinkler and these tomato cages.
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