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Blanco, Texas : Thyme Traveler : August 2007
Wordz of Wizdom
August 31, 2007 09:05
Here are some clips from posts to the GardeningOrganically group at Yahoo.
Everyone should join this group, they are exceedingly polite and knowledgable, you will learn many words of wisdom. The moderators are from Texas, too, which comes in handy during world wide discussions of the price
of vanilla in Sri Lanka. See you there!
~Traveler
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For tomato cages, we make circles of 8 ft. high 4-inch mesh wire, cut 10 ft. length to make a 3 ft. diameter cage and use 3 steel posts for each.
Drive the posts first, then wrap with the wire. You may choose leave one side open to make harvesting easier, but they blow over easier in the wind than circles.
So it's important to use wire you can get your hand thru, and not make the circles wider than you can reach the center. Put the cage on a big mound of compost rich soil about 1 ft. high and 6 ft. wide.
These last forever or until the wire rusts away.
Set 3 tomato plants close to the wire on east, west, and south sides.
Plant basil on the north side, several dwarf marigolds around the border of
the mound, and mulch deeply.
Alternate years plant bean or squash family members on the cages, rotating each crop every three years. This means you will need three rows of cages to keep the rotation going.
Rotate the companion plants, too. Beans like very clean, finished compost and settled soil, while tomatoes love it deep and almost raw, so plan your fertilizing and mulching cycles accordingly.
Water by soaking the center of the mound and flooding the furrows around the circles. Tomatoes prefer evenly moist soil to prevent cracking, but early in the season you want to water very deeply but infrequently before they
start to set fruit, so the roots will go as deep as possible before hot weather.
When the tomatoes start to sprawl, "tie" them up by wrapping their own long leaves around the wire and weaving the growing tips upward.
Never use string or wire, it makes cleaning the dead vines off the wire very difficult. A healthy tomato vine will hold itself up with a little help. If you prune the tomato plant to one strong stalk when it's young, you will have better control over the direction of growth later.
I never do that, of course, so the tomatoes end up taking over the world with thousands of small fruits, and I do a lot of good yoga stretches trying to reach them in the middle of the jungle.
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My garden is not very wide, but it's way taller than my head! I went wading in the other day, zeroing in on a patch of red deep in the green, only to find that it was a dwarf (?) French marigold blooming at shoulder height...........now that's some good soil. It sure could use more mulch, though.
Our beautiful leaf mulch and pea gravel pathways that we worked so hard on last winter all came up solid crabgrass, which didn't get mowed during the early summer flooding, so now I get to pull it all and mulch the paths with it.....about 350 feet of yard wide path, aaaguh.. and by the thyme I'm at the back gate, the weeds at the front will be tall again.
Mulch smothers weeds for that season.....then it turns into compost which feeds next season's weeds. To keep a 6-inch thick layer of mulch all year, you have to add 12 inches of material to it rather often as it breaks down.
This is almost as much work as weeding, though not as back breaking it is time consuming and requires vigilance. Great workout for the latissimus dorsi and gluteus maximus muscles. Endless clean-and-jerks until all the weeds are defeated. Get out your hone and sharpen that hoe, ho ho.
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This is the best time to kill off unwanted annuals before they go to seed.
Can anybody say crabgrass?
Our lovely pathways of pea gravel and bark mulch quickly turned to crabgrass and didn't get mowed during the early
summer floods. Weren't they fun? We complained about no rain last year, some people are never satified.
This age of Global Fluctuations will present interesting gardening challenges. We have the advantage over our
ancestors of instant access to satellite maps of the weather in Texas, so be sure to keep ahead of the latest to know what chores your garden will need from day to day.
I used to study the almanac, but we live on the Divide between Zones 7-8-9 on a piece of land with three completely different ecosystems, so even the Austin and San Antonio weathermen don't quite know what's happening in our garden.
For all our rejoicing in the abundance of summer, this is the hot, hard Time To Kill we all dread, getting ready for the easier eating of winter gardens. You will never, ever, ever have a no-work garden unless you just want to
watch the wilderness grow.
Which ain't a bad idea, is it? We could use more slack in the landscape, in my opinion. The we could just run around stalking the wily vegetable, getting our fresh air and exercise, and visiting with wildlife, all at the same thyme.
I love my wild garden........hopefully the heirloom veggies will go to seed and sprout where they wish, feeding us nicely next year, too.
"Plant it all, let God sort it out."
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