Developing Plant and Soil Skills: One Tomato at a time.
Author: Phil Reilly, B.Sc. Owner/operator (for 25 years) of a perennial plant nursery, advocate for garden design serving diverse ecological functions, and an environmental activist focused on wetland preservation.
A new gardening season has begun in the Ottawa area. Pre-starting one’s own favoured varieties of vegetables, to obtain an earlier harvest of a that enjoyed produce, is a time-honoured practice that many gardeners undertake with joy and anticipation. While the seeds of most tomato varieties planted directly in a sun-filled garden can yield a harvestable crop by fall, the satisfaction of an early
harvest of favourite produce drives many of us.
With 25 of years experience growing and marketing experience while operating our home-based ornamental plant nursery, tomatoes have always been grown amongst our gardens for our family’s seasonal consumption and processed for off-season consumption.
Now that our ornamental nursery is closed (for retirement reasons), we have undertaken, in earnest, a quest to produce, process and/or store not just tomatoes, but many other fruits and root crops, to make ourselves less dependent on foods’ just-in-time costly fossil fuel-delivery (with its exhaust gas negativity) to local retailers. Our motivation is to reduce our ‘plant-to-plate’ costs and to have knowledge that what we eat is healthily grown and managed without reliance on herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides. The developed survival skills, during severe drought and storms brought on by Climate Change, will be welcomed in the years ahead.
Yes, this involves daily oversight, in our 144 square-foot indoor greenhouse, 320 square-foot outdoor hightunnel, and numerous gardens on our one-acre property. Timely identification and management of pest and disease outbreaks, more common than we would like, includes interventions such as aquatic soap and oil sprays, hand picking, use of insect-attracting yellow sticky cards, attention to watering regimes to keep soils ‘not too wet … not too dry’, and seasonal use of floating row covers over plants of concern, to minimize insect damage, to give us a bounty of quality foods by seasons’ end. As a bonus, our plant-rich home during winter months provides a visually-delightful way to have plants’ photosynthetic process consume some of our home’s available carbon dioxide to give us an oxygen-enhanced, moist, and sometimes fragrant, environment in which to while away winter’s miseries. And, back to tomatoes, we delight in being able to harvest cherry tomatoes from our indoor greenhouse beginning about February 15 each year!
Concern for the continuation of pollination insects in our environment stimulated us to develop and maintain our ornamental gardens with the aim to have them approved (done!) as a Monarch Way Station (by Monarch Watch) Monarch and Backyard Habitat (by the Canadian Wildlife Federation). We encourage all gardeners to include native plants in their gardens to serve our broader environmental needs.
I hope that this presentation offers readers useful insights and tips to successfully grow, on balconies and in gardens, a few tomatoes that are not not bred to withstand transportation rigours but have the array of heirloom varieties mouth-watering sweetness and flavours.
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