The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

I have no statistics on this, but I believe that tomatoes are grown in more gardens than any other vegetable. As a result, a lot of tomato tricks and technology have been developed over the years.

One such technology is plastic “mulch”. For the past seven years we have been using three different plastic mulches. These lightweight plastic sheets differ only in color as far as I can tell:

The red colored plastic has been researched by Agricultural Universities. It has been proven scientifically that the red light that is reflected by the plastic stimulates the tomato plants to produce more tomatoes.

We really don’t run any kind of formal experiments here and just by “eyeballing” our harvest, we haven’t noticed any appreciable difference in yield from year to year with the plastics. However, if one were to measure the increase over many acres, I’m sure the difference would become apparent.

The silver plastic film has also been extensively researched. It works by reflecting light upward and confusing insects. The bugs become disoriented and can’t find your tomatoes.

The brown colored mulch, as far as I can tell, works only by smothering weeds. Actually, all three of these mulches have the ability to suppress weeds. In our tomato beds, we do very little in the way of weeding.

I’m sure you noticed in the photo that we use tomato cages along with our plastic bed covering. This technology has been used for tomatoes in one form or another for decades. The cages are useful in helping keep the plants up off of the ground. This makes for fewer disease problems and easier picking.

We started out years ago putting six tomato plants per bed. By using the cages, they all fit. The problem was that the plants always grew so large that they crowded each other. As a result, diseases and other pests seemed to spread quickly. It was hard to pick tomatoes when they were that close together too.

There is an old British gardener’s saying that goes something like, “Air and light makes tomatoes right”. So, this year, we finally decided to heed that saying and separate our tomato plants to give them more space. Only three plants per bed were planted this year.

I have a feeling our harvest will be nearly as large with only half the plants being used. The quality should improve as well.

Tomato technology and tradition marches on!

Bob

Nah, it’s just a view of a banana flower. I thought it might be fun to show how they look. I always get a “big kick” out of these flowers. I hope you enjoy this photo.

This is the relative size of the outer covering of the flower, also known as a “bract”:

I guess I won’t be singing “Yes! We have no bananas” anymore for a while. (Yikes! am I getting that old?)

Bob

Here is another reason I don’t particularly like dumping chemicals on a lawn just to kill those “evil” dandelions. Chemicals have their place, but they are often used indiscriminately.

In this example, a liquid herbicide containing the compound “2,4-d” was applied in the general area of these grapevines. It was a warm day, the chemical evaporated and drifted over to the grapes. Here was the result:

This was the second time in two years that these grapevines were damaged by the same compound. The first time it was a granular “weed and feed” that was applied. The results were much the same.

2,4-d kills weeds by disrupting the hormone balance within a plant. It is this disruption that causes the severe twisting and curling you see in the photo. Unfortunately, the chemical will kill any broadleaf plant, this includes grapes (which are particularly sensitive). Other plants nearby were also affected including some spinach.

With a mild exposure, most plants will out grow the damage. However, it has been around 3 weeks since the grapes were exposed and they haven’t really “bounced back yet”.

I’m afraid that some of these vines may have gotten a higher dose than they are able to handle. The fact that they have been damaged twice in the past three seasons, I’m sure has some bearing on their slow recovery.

Bob

Blossoming in our garden right now is Verbascum, a member of the Mullein family of plants. We grew these from seed last year:

The plants shown above are just over 30″ tall.

They prefer hot dry areas, so I planted them in a spot (where the irrigation doesn’t reach) near the asphalt driveway.

This is the first year of blossoming for these perennials…I forgot I had planted them! What a pleasant surprise.

Bob

There was quite a rhubarb out in the garden this morning.

No, it wasn’t a loud and boisterous argument that we had… it was a couple of huge rhubarb plants in need of harvest.

The easiest (and healthiest for the plant) way to harvest rhubarb is to just grab a stalk near the bottom of the plant and give it a sideways pull. They come right off with a satisfying “snap”.

Only the stalks (technically, a “petiole”) can be eaten. The leaves are poisonous so they make their contribution by going into the compost.

When I delivered this bushel of rhubarb, I took an informal poll asking how each person was going to prepare their share of the rhubarb.
Rhubarb pie was the most common response, followed by rhubarb sauce, rhubarb wine was mentioned as a distant third.

One lady mentioned that as a child in Germany, her mother would pick a tender stalk of rhubarb for her, dip it in sugar and serve it fresh as a sweet candy-like treat. I’m going to try that tomorrow, it sounds delicious…kind of sweet and sour and crunchy.

This time of the year (during harvest time) rhubarb will send up seed stalks. If you want to keep your harvest going, break off those seed stalks as soon as you see them. This way, you should be able to harvest stalks from a mature rhubarb plant (three years or older) for several weeks.

Now, we have had the other kind of “rhubarb” in the garden from time to time but that’s a whole ‘nother story!

Bob