Gardening with shirts and shorts
Gardeners, there is still time to start some home garden veggies and be able to taste the fruits of your labors before spring.
The pleasure of growing you own foods and the fresh taste of home grown foods is just a great way to spend the winter. It is not hard. You can still plot as small as 4×4 or grow foods in a black plastic pot from the garden center or nursery. You can even do things extra simple by purchasing a large size tomato plant already blooming and safely enclosed with a plastic growing cage. Growing in that mode or starting out with small single plants, you just need a space with at least seven hours of sun and some patience.
My two favorite are bell peppers and tomatoes. Bell peppers grow fast and well and if you leave in place, after they are green, they will evolve into a beautiful red pepper that is even more nutritious than when it was green.
Tomatoes, well let me tell you, there are so many varieties of these beauties: Big Boy, cherry, grape and even the very interesting and expensive heirloom, as well as the favorite plum.
Basically you need sun, a nice compost soil, in or out of the pot, and patience.
Do not get a pack of small starts and put them into a larger pot. They are going to grow a lot and you will just have to transplant them into their own pot later on.
Read the plant labels that are attached to each plant or in the pot. You will see a very important note that says this is an indeterminate or determinate plant. You need to know.
If you want a nice upright plant to stake or set into a plant cage, this is for you and it will do well, setting flowers a lot and producing fruit and then be done with it.
Determinate is the kind you want. This is usually a Big Boy. A big tomato will need a large black pot to start with.
An indeterminate plant is going to be a sprawling mix of stems and will only stay upright if it staked or in a cage. It will also produce flowers and then set fruit. This plant will set fruit and set fruit for a long time. I have had to trim off some of my indeterminate plants because they just keep producing and the poor bush starts to turn yellow here and there and looks like it needs help to survive. Trimming will not hurt anything on this type of tomato plant.
You need to remember to water well after about five days, always around the soil, not the plant itself. Mother Nature rain is OK, not man-made rain.
Your plant tags will give you an idea how many days until harvest. It will be somewhere between 45 and 60 days or a little more. Do not worry, it will happen.
Do not spray any of the plant while it’s growing. You can spray around the ground or plant some basil which some gardeners use to deter some of the soil critters. Coffee grounds, OK. But with good soil and a little fertilizer about half way through growth time, you will be OK.
I have lately placed my pots on a couple bricks or an old saucer to make sure no nematodes decide to visit. I have never had any around these plants but gardening friends say they are always a danger. I am pretty selfish and do not want to share my harvest with any critters, even birds. A little netting as plants really start to appear would deter birds. Raccoons? Who knows what will deter them. We do not really have a lot of them roaming around any more in the Cape.
I do not think coyotes or monitor lizards eat tomatoes, however iguanas do eat every one they can find. I know one gardener who figured the only way to save his crops was to put an electrified fence around his 6×6 plot. The family and selective neighbors were not in favor of that project. Now he just goes to the farmers market.
You have no doubt noticed that we have a night or two of really low temperatures right now. This will continue off an on, hopefully only a night or two at a time. My answer to that is keep you old sheets and just cover plants carefully, before sundown. Hopefully they are nice and damp at the soil level, not wet. Water during the early afternoon so that the sun will warm the soil and hold some warmth through the night. Take off the cover first thing in the morning.
A gardener who wants to grow lots of tomatoes can always use a fence line to hold up the plants. I have a gardener friend who grows a lot of everything, especially tomatoes and she has been doing this for a time. This year she had to put out a call to friends because her supply of panty hose, the perfect tie-up material, was depleted.
While she was waiting for help, she needed to start tying up her many plants so she started looking around and decided that her husband had a lot of old cotton shirts and hey, even a pretty good supply of shorts, in his drawer, so she helped herself. The shirts and shorts, cut up in nice even strips, are working perfectly. Her husband is not really upset over this; they have been married for over 52 years and he is used to her creative ways in gardening. Lucky him, no red hearts or NASCAR shorts are out there plowing in the wind.
In case you do not understand, we plant tomatoes now because if we wait until spring, the evenings will be too warm for the flowers to set and without these flowers there will be no tomatoes.
Home gardeners already have a supply of tomatoes and bell peppers, so get started. You can purchase veggie compost and fertilizer at the big box stores or at your favorite nursery; sometimes even the grocery store.
Get started and enjoy. Remember if you do get confused, just ask a gardener or call the Lee County Extension Service.
A lot of things are going around the community this winter season, some are just fun and games and food, join in, just be careful and safe. There are several garden seminars in the Cape and the large March in the Park, the local Garden Club one-day event in March. Too many to mention.
You also should remember you will not need to run sprinklers as much as usual. The rain has let up but so has the heat and established lawns just do not need watering twice a week right now.
Happy gardening until we meet again!
H.I. Jean Shields is past president of the Garden Club of Cape Coral.