By Linden Staciokas
I intended to write the following column in August, which is when I traditionally report on the various gardening experiments I conducted during the course of the summer. However, one of my experiments is going so well that I want to explain it now, while it is early enough in the season that other gardeners can still try it for themselves.
And what has convinced me that this experiment is a success when not even a month of the gardening season has elapsed? I set my tomatoes outside on May 1, and I now have tiny tomatoes--not large enough to eat, mind you, but large enough to trigger summer fantasies.
Many things have spurred my interest in growing indeterminates outdoors, including questions from readers and a year when I accidentally planted Sweet 100s outdoors and had a bumper crop when I should have had complete failure. But what galvanized me this year was a young mother of three who really does depend on her garden to feed the family for much of the year.
Last spring Emma had seen me throw away seedlings because I'd run out of planting room and deemed the rejects too imperfect to pass on to the Hospice plant sale. This past April, she shyly asked me to give her any compost-bound seedlings, so she could save the money she might otherwise spend at the nursery. Since most of my excess seedlings are usually indeterminate tomatoes, which are doomed if grown in a regular garden, I began a quest for a way to raise so-called greenhouse tomatoes outdoors.
Since I knew my friend could not afford raised beds, I settled on containers as the only other sensible option. Wanting to duplicate her financial constraints, I visited a few garage sales, until I found two gigantic plastic containers at $1 each. One was light brown, and took 25 gallons of water to fill; the other was dark green and had a 21-gallon capacity.
At the same time, I rediscovered an old issue of "The Tomato Club," which carried an excerpt from Leopold Klein's book, "100 Pounds of Tomatoes Out Of An Inexpensive Foam Box." This guy, who was once given the title "America's Champion Tomato Grower" by the National Garden Bureau, has developed what he calls "Box Culture." His guarantee is that you can make less than 4 square feet produce 100 pounds of tomatoes.
The materials are cheap, and I found two ways to decrease costs even further. The final product should look like a square box with the bottom and top cut out. You make it from 2-inch Styrofoam (the technical name is extruded polystyrene), the stuff that comes in 2-feet-by-8-feet sheets of pale blue or pink. It can be purchased locally for $13.50 a sheet. Ask the lumberyard to cut the sheets into four pieces, 22 inches by 22 inches each, or slice it yourself with a sharp knife or a circular saw.
Form the square by tacking the Styrofoam together with a total of eight 4-inch nails, hammered in about an inch from the top and bottom of each side. The nails simply give you a form to work with; they are not what will hold the frame together in the end.
Next, build corners that wrap around the edges, protecting and strengthening them. "The Tomato Club" article suggested using wood corner molding, scraps of which can be scavenged or purchased. Klein insists in his book that the corner pieces must be made from aluminum. In an effort to economize, I used the rounded edges of clear plastic milk containers--although the strips did not run seamlessly from top to bottom, they were long enough when pieced together and held in place with a few temporary staples.
The final step in construction is to cut wire or heavy twine into five lengths, each long enough to go around the box three or four times. Start from the middle, and wrap one length of the twine (which is what I used) tightly around the box over and over, until you run out of twine. The result should be tight, but not strangling; the sides will push out as the container is filled with dirt, naturally tightening the string or wire. Repeat this maneuver four more times, spacing the circles of twine about 4 inches apart.If you use sections from a plastic milk jug, make sure that the twine is positioned so that the plastic is underneath. The point is to protect the Styrofoam from being cut into pieces when the pressure builds as the box is filled with dirt. This potential problem will not exist, of course, if you use one continuous piece of wood or metal corner molding.
Line the box with heavy plastic and place it in the area of your yard that receives the most sunlight. Since there is no bottom other than the plastic liner, you will have to position the box before you fill it. As with all containers, use a soil that has been amended with vermiculite or perlite, to counteract the compacting tendency all soil has. I placed my three containers--the brown and green plastic planters and the Styrofoam box--side by side.
Although Klein states that he plants four indeterminates in each box, I planted two, at opposite corners: a Sweet 100 and a Big Beef Beefsteak. Next I hammered a heavy wooden stake in next to each plant, and then tented all three pots with a length of 3 mil plastic. From May 1 to June 1, I also covered the plastic tent with two old overlapping blankets ($1 each, from the same garage sale) from about 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Each container was checked daily for watering needs, and fertilized with a weak mixture of 10-52-10 every Saturday. The applications of water, whether with fertilizer or plain, were all warm, usually about 80 degrees.
The seedlings had all been started the same day, and treated to identical growing and hardening-off conditions. When I finished transplanting, all had about 2 inches of stalk and leaves visible. Yet, within one week, the Styrofoam box plants had outstripped the container tomatoes in height and stem thickness. As I write this on June 1, after a month of living in sometimes frigid conditions held at bay by only the plastic and the blankets, both of the box tomatoes have tiny fruits.
By comparison, the brown container tomatoes have blossoms, open on one plant but closed on the other; the green tub tomatoes are measurably smaller than all the plants in the other containers and have no blossoms.
The early results speak for themselves. And it is not too late for you to try this experiment, provided the set-up is complete by June 10. (read below for further info!)
By Linden Staciokas
Except for a few final hold-outs, such as my asters, the gardening season is over. Since this is also my last column until next January, it is time to announce the results of my various experiments.
First, the Styrofoam tomato box. I first described this contraption in a column published in June, but for those of you who missed it, here is a brief recap: cut 2-inch-thick blue or pink Styrofoam into four squares, 22 inches by 22 inches each. Tack the sides together with a total of eight 4-inch nails, hammered in about an inch from the top and bottom of each side.
Next, protect and strengthen the corners. You can use those prefab wood or metal corners found in hardware stores; in an effort to both recycle and save money, I use the rounded edges of clear plastic milk containers.
The final step in construction is to cut wire or heavy twine into five lengths, each long enough to go snugly around the box three or four times. The sides will push out and tighten the string as the container is filled. Repeat this maneuver four more times, spacing the circles of twine about 4 inches apart. Set one open end on the ground, and fill the box with soil and tomato transplants.
The theory, which I first read about in that edifying newsletter, The Tomato Club, is that surrounding soil with the insulation will keep the roots warm (especially at night) and result in rapid and lush growth. Well, I prune indeterminates regularly, so I am not sure about the lush part, but the rapid part sure is correct--the first tomatoes appeared before June and some were ready to eat by mid-July.
I had also started the same tomato varieties (Sweet 100 and Big Beef Beefsteak) in a brown and a green plastic planter. While initially the brown container performed better than the green one, by the end of the season the plants were about equal in size and production. And neither one had edible tomatoes until mid-August.
The bottom line is that the Styrofoam box definitely performed better than the plastic containers. However, it lagged about two weeks behind my greenhouse. Further, all of the container vines had to be pulled after the last frost, while my greenhouse tomatoes were still producing. Basically, as long as I have a greenhouse I won't bother with the Styrofoam box again.
My next experiment again involved tomatoes, and was spurred by a letter to the editor published a few years ago in Organic Gardening. This writer was ensuring maximum growth and production not through keeping the roots warm with Styrofoam but by a down-home method of continuously organically feeding the tomatoes.
The setup was simple: using hardware cloth or chicken wire, construct a circular cage about 4 feet in diameter. Fill it with materials ready for composting and then plant six or eight tomato plants around the perimeter, close enough that the compost cage can do double duty as a trellis. After the first transplant bath, omit watering or feeding the plants for the rest of the season. Instead, wet down only the compost, allowing the plants to be fed by the water and nutrients that flow out the bottom of the cage.
The theory is that the plants will benefit not only from compost filtered water, but that the decomposing waste will keep the soil and the vines themselves warmer. And, since most people tend to water their gardens more regularly than their compost, the decomposition process will proceed more quickly as well.
Frankly, I did not notice any difference in growth or production, nor in the decomposition rate. However, a suspicious number of the fruits resting against the cage rotted before they turned red; this did not happen anywhere else in the garden or greenhouse. Further, the vines grew far taller than the cage, and so additional supports had to be jammed into the ground to keep the plants from bending in half. More annoying, virtually every time I added a load of organic materials to the compost, pieces fell to the side and had to be picked off the various vines. This was not too problematic until I was jamming in used poultry bedding, trying to avoid inhaling the stench. I ended up spending 10 extra minutes picking up escaping globs. On the plus side, by July the compost heap was attractively camouflaged from view.
Bottom line? I'll never bother with this again. If I want to provide on the-on-the-spot nutrients, I'll simply revert back to planting tomatoes and pumpkins on top of an existing compost heap.
Speaking of pumpkins, my other unsuccessful experiment was quite simple and pleasantly passive. Instead of doing or building something new, it simply involved ignoring advice I'd followed faithfully for years. Remember how I always tell you to trim pumpkin vines, thus forcing the plant to divert its energies to the pumpkins? Well, this year I just let nature take its course; I never had before, and had always harbored a secret suspicion that pruning is unnecessary in the Interior.
As you can see from the accompanying picture, nature's course took the vines over the sides of my 3-foot-high planter, across an expanse of lawn, down toward my giant cabbage containers. What you see is the mid-July condition of two plants gone feral, a Big Max and the white variety named Lumina. Things were much worse by season's end. And while the foliage had its wild charms, the crop did not. I ended up with four Big Max pumpkins, each weighing between 20 to 30 pounds. The yield of the Lumina was six pumpkins, none over 8 pounds. This is about a third of previous years, whether you go by number of fruit or total poundage. The bottom line is I was not happy.
Finally, this year I tried a new method of trellising my greenhouse watermelons. Instead of training the vines up a stick or through a round or square cage, I made mounding trellises. I used 36-inch-tall old metal fencing--not chain link, but that stuff that looks like stiff metal 2-inch-by-4-inch squares welded together (in fact, I think it is called welded fencing). I cut it into easily handled segments. The result was 36-inch-tall fencing cut into lengths of about 5 feet.
Next I took one of the segments and shoved one end of the 5-foot length into the soil, right up against the far wall of my wooden planter. This meant I now had the remaining 4 1/2 feet or so sticking straight up into the air. I then gently bent the fencing toward me, until I could stick the other end of it into the soil, up against the inside of the planter side closest to me. The result was a hump made of fencing, held in shape and place because each side was wedged up against the opposite inside walls of the planter.
I set the watermelon transplants in the soil under the humps, and when they grew tall enough, I gently pulled each one through a square.
By early June, the fencing was obscured by a blanket of leaves and yellow blossoms, all of which arranged themselves naturally across the entire mound. As the watermelons formed and grew, they were similarly supported. Unlike other years, no vines, leaves or fruits were damaged by contact with wet soil.
Additionally, I did not have to make any desperate last minute salvage efforts, trying to stop heavy fruit from pulling themselves right off the vines. Bottom line? An unequivocal success.
Linden Staciokas has gardened in Alaska for more than two decades and writes a gardening column for the Fairbanks News-Miner newspaper.