Tough Times, Tender Vegetables

When times get tough, people grow vegetables.  The Victory Gardens of both world wars proved this years ago, and the huge spike in vegetable love during the 2008 economic downturn seems like just yesterday.  While its great news that more folks will be getting their hands dirty, I’m concerned with the success of these novice gardeners, given the perils of horticulture.  So here are some tips from someone whose thumbs have been both green and brown.

Let them have light!  Veggies need sun, at least six hours a day.  Leafy greens tolerate the least light, and flowering plants such as squash and tomatoes need the most. 

Dirt matters.  Vegetables like a good quality loam, neither too sandy nor clayey.  Make every effort to add at least two or three inches of compost before planting anything.  Leaf or manure-based composts are both good, are abundant locally, and are more of a renewable resource than peat moss (ask anyone who owns a horse).  The money spent and the shoveling required will pay you back in spades.

Vegetables like nutrients.  If you expect your produce to be high in lycopene, flavinoids, anti-oxidants and those other mysterious compounds TV tells us are beneficial, you’ve got to give the plants the goods to grow.  Add 2 lbs. of standard 5-10-5 or organic 5-3-4 per 100 square feet and turn it into the soil before planting.  Alternatively, you can give each young tomato, pepper, or zucchini transplant a handful once you install them, and put a thin band along seeded row crops such as beans, lettuce and carrots. 

The stakes should be high when growing tomatoes.  Almost nothing is worse than huge tomato plants sprawling on the grown, dropping fruits, which then rot and get eaten by varmints.  It literally stinks!  I like tomato cages re-enforced with a large metal post, but wooden stakes and soft green twine, or almost any support system, can work.  Stake before the plants get too wild to confine.

Worse than flopping tomatoes are wild weeds.  Unless you slice, grub, smother, or yank them out, they’ll pull out their six-shooters and take over.  As a youngster my father gave me weed duty – August torture when the garden resembled southeastern Asia’s jungle.  Too late I learned that mulch applied early – newspapers, dead leaves, black plastic, even old rugs – can be your best friend.

 

Less is more.  It’s heartbreaking to pull out and discard tiny carrot and radish seedlings, but if you’ve got eighty-five per inch of row, no good will follow.  Thin carrots to be 1 to 2 inches apart, lettuce to 4 inches for leaf types, 12 for heads.  Don’t feel guilty about the plant carnage.

More is better.  Plant extra zucchini so that when the squash bug strikes, you’ll still get yours.  Ditto tomatoes, which are devastated by fungal pathogens.  Share extra bounty with your neighbors (at a distance, of course). 

Contact Extension at (518) 272-4210 or dhc3@cornell.edu when disaster strikes.

Relish the successes, don’t fret the failures.  Find peace through vegetable gardening.