Lil Tomato Houses

Girl in action. Lil tomato house inaction.

The first weekend in April, Olympia's Farmers Market opens (and I rejoice). That time of year around Puget Sound, even the best farmers don't have much produce, so they fill the gap with plants started in greenhouses (and all of us gardeners rejoice). 


But April, even May, can be a cruel time for plants to have their roots thrust into cold wet soil, tops shivering in the mist one day and wind the next. This is especially true for tomatoes, which might enjoy the occasional sunny days, but not the cool wet ones, and especially not the frigid nights (which tend to be even colder following a clear sunny day). They may not actually shrink, like mammalian maleparts may in such conditions, but they sure as heck don't wanna grow, and cannot summon the strength to fight blights and fend off fungal foes. 


So you either wait til it's warm, which may not happen til days are already getting shorter, or you give them shelter. Following Solomon's advice (conveniently reproduced for us moderns in Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades before he took off for Tasmania, that devil), I grew them in a hoop house (instructions here) last year, which worked out very well. Even though the Spring was long and cool, a little bit of plastic allowed me to harvest photons throughout, giving the plants a big head start by the time Summer finally arrived.


This year, I decided to grow more, and to experiment with individual tomato houses, which are basically cages with a form-fitting plastic cover. This will let each plant get about twice as big in the warm confines of its home before it starts bumping into the plastic cover, demanding release.

This shot gives you the basic idea. First, make a wire frame (what does not show up well is that if you use fence like this, you should cut out a few 2 x 2 holes in the grid so you can reach in later and harvest). Then, cut plastic wide enough to wrap completely around and tall enough to close over the top. Slide this prophylactic over the cage, and wait for juicy tomatoes to burst forth. That's about it.

But not completely it. Already, I've learned of some flows in my brilliant plan. Try not to replicate my idiocy and inexperience:

• Plant the tomato first, because it's a pain to reach inside to plant it. Literally, if your cutting left sharp wire nubs like I did.
• Stake down the cage, or it'll blow over. I used the wire I cut out to tie the cage to a rebar pounded into the ground, and it has held so far.
• Make the plastic slightly loose fitting. That way it is easier to slide up so you can water, or let the tomatoes breathe on the hot day that will inevitably follow your planting. 
• Don't depend on tape to hold the plastic together. In the photo above, I did not remove the plastic to make the cage visible; it fell off. [I am leaving a couple like that as controls to test the efficacy of the remaining lil tomato houses. Ineptitude and laziness can be recast as science.]
• Don't leave town. You can cook your plants in a hurry if you don't slide the plastic up several inches on sunny days, and make sure they are watered. 
• Try and make the roof tighter than I did. All I did was clip the top, which does not make anything even close to a sealed envelope. I am pretty sure the heat flows out by nightfall,  but again am too lazy and inept to fix it. [Sometimes they cannot be called science, although I am able to rationalize that I'm probably not baking the plants during days when I am not there to coddle them.]

No doubt, as time passes, I'll learn more. Maybe I'll follow up at the end of the season. It will be interesting to see if the covered plants outperform those left to the vagaries of the Puget Spring (as I write, they are enduring a cold rainy night). If nothing else, they are in nice cages, so I won't have to do anything more than guide a few branches through the holes to give them support. These plants won't be as crowded as their hoophouse sisters, which according to Solomon should pay off. We'll see. 

Heads

This post appears over a few blogs. I've been self-referential before, linking to old posts and between Mojourner blogs, but this time it's a matter of there just being two approaches to the same focal point: Spot Shrimp, Pandalus platyceros. Here, I'll do the heads--over at Mocavore, I'll deal with the tails.


In Hawai'i, shrimp tales involve the whole thing. Even though not everyone partook, every time shrimp or prawns showed up intact, some people could be counted on to rip off the head and suck down the juice before mocking non-partakers. But on the Salish Sea, that doesn't happen, and I can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that my manhood and epicuriosity won't be maligned for my reluctance to slurp green guts. A woman who grew up fishing and cooking Northwest critters and another whose husband fishes for a living both said not to eat the heads. One allowed as to how I could make a broth, but didn't sound too sure, much less enthusiastic. 


So what you do is snap off the heads and toss 'em. Unless you are friggin' frugal. In which case you make the shrimp-head broth, realize that not a single person you know will help you eat it, chicken out on eating it yourself, and decide to re-purpose. [In the interest of self-referentiality, may I digress and link here? If you can figure out why, I'll, uh, give you a prize, maybe.]


The broth I recognized as the far superior aromatic kin of that weird shrimp ramen stank, a single waft enough to dispel my 30-year befuddlement over why anyone would want shrimp-flavor. But I still didn't eat it; I fed it to an apple tree. No particular reason. 


Then I was left with a kettle o chitin and shrimp sludge. The dog was beside herself wanting to eat it, roll in it,...whatever it took to immerse herself in the smell. I figured raccoons and rats and various vermin would be similarly attracted if I were to compost it, or even work it into the garden. In the end, I decided to bury it in a pit near the base of a Japanese maple that decided to come up a couple of years ago. Then put a rock on top to keep the dog out. If the rats tunnel into this cache, no prob. They'll transport pieces and transform the rest into poop. It'll return to the earth, if not that particular maple.


The tides sent the plankton. The shrimp incorporated the plankton. The fisherman plucked pots of shrimp from Hood Canal. And I traded some cash and a stash of willow bark and red ochre for a few pounds. Thus flows the migration of primal sea life into an Olympia garden.


This ain't natural, I suppose, but a pulse of shrimp protein into urban soil a few dozen miles from where it was caught falls far short of bizarre. Unlike the petrochemicals flowing year-round from the other end of the globe, this fertilizer was an unexpected gift. That smell my family couldn't stand will feed flowers some day. Shrimp stripes will echo in maple bark.





 

DIY Salt

One gallon of ocean, dehydrated.

As long as I'm behind on the seasonal updates, I may as well talk about something that can be done pretty much any time you can turn on a stove. Yeah, I'd like to make salt under the sun, but that's hard to arrange in the maritime Northwest. Making pa`akai ('solidified ocean) is a different matter. It would be a shame to make salt on a stove with the Hawaiian sun available, and one of my favorite memories from the island was pouring the kai into bowls carved into the lava by ancient Hawaiians, and coming back a few days later to peel off flakes of Kona crystal.

But here I am, next to Puget Sound, Spring hiding in the most somewhere. So I fire up the stove and start cooking. 

There's not so much a recipe for salt as some techniques. Like once you have the water, you should filter it, unless you want the added flavor or plankton. Then while you cook it (in a stainless steel or enamel pot, because iron rusts and aluminum gets skudgy), stir now and then, because you can actually burn it if the salt starts to cake on the bottom of the pan. Eventually, this gets impossible, and you want to scrape the salt slush onto a plate or pyrex dish, so you can spread it out and bake it in the oven. This you do at very low heat--all you're trying to do now is evaporate, not boil. I'd turn the oven on, pop in the plate, and then turn it off. Do not rinse, but repeat, until the moisture is gone.


And you have salt. A gallon of sea water (I got mine up near the Strait--the far South Sound is less saline) yields a cup or so of salt. Enough to last a while, unless you're in a rush to increase blood pressure.

Influx Off

Gardening is good. Almost always, especially if it begins in a backyard and ends on a family table. 

But then, I am curmudgeonly (ever since I was a kid--age ain't got much to do with it), and can find fault with most anything. And so it is that I cringe when I surf the gardening and urban homesteading sites that proliferate like dandelions, because so many of them rely on quick fixes that undercut the soul of a gardener and the soil of the earth. The blogs I'm drawn to resist chemical assaults and may even proclaim organicity, but it is possible to disobey and disgust Mother Nature without raping her. 


High on the list of such actions is the Raised Bed Full of Trucked in "Soil" Syndrome. I've gardened in volcanic cinder rendered near-lifeless by city-scaping, in Virginia clay stripped of topsoil and driven over for good measure, and in glacial sand that can't hold nutrients or water any more than Monsanto can get a grip on the importance of diversity in evolution. As my last post admits, I am not pure, and there have been occasional bags of compost and other inputs into my gardens (that Honolulu cinder got on the road to soil when I'd go steal bags of clippings from rich people who had yards and then compost them, but I like to think that's more of a Robin Hood action than buying bagged steer-shit). 


But here in Olympia, which many would consider an epicenter of groovy organicism, there is this fascination with raised beds full of fake soil. Slap up a frame (I see photos sometimes of chemical treated wood used for this, ick), and fill it with alleged compost. Even if the material is not full of nitrogen-leaching wood products or feedlot chemicalized cowshit, it ain't soil. It may be the best compost ever, fluffy and black, rich as a Romney, but it has nothing to do with the soil in your yard.


In bags or trucks, it is a big fake input, not borne of the stuff in your yard. And often as not, people put some kind of barrier between their yard and the new stuff, attempting segregation as if the microbia of their own yard are somehow dangerous and inferior. Although mixing and incorporation into soil development is inevitable in the long run, your earthworms and fungi must think the new stuff tastes weird. 


The box o' compost may produce a great crop or two, but it is also a destabilizing force. It may be so rich in nitrogen that it feeds foliage at the expense of strength and structure. It may turn your raised bed into a symphylans corral. It may come laden with weed-seed, or it may just play host to the thistle and dandelion that ride the wind to your domain. 


Much slower to augment slowly from your own leaf-fallen, grass-clipped, storm-dropped organics. Much slower to plant and plow under legumes or cultivate shrooms. Much slower to exercise the patience Solomon (no link, you either know whereof I speak or you don't) advises and keep the additives to a minimum lest pests be fruitful and multiply. Much slower to grow soil before you grow your ideal grocery list.


But in the end, this slow, influx-starved process proves more resilient, more healthy, more durable. Soil is not the stuff you add, it is the multi-layered organism that grows over the land. It is earth's skin; like your skin, it is healthiest when you do what is good for the body, not when you add chemicals (organically derived or not). The best topsoil is on intimate terms with the subsoil, formed from its minerals and the poop of a thousand worms, a million hyphae, a trillion bacteria, all flowing up and down and all around. Taking off in the worm-grit of a robin's craw and returning in the chickadee's droppings, but not arriving by the ton in a truck.


Soil well grown, plus an acceptance of what works in your yard and what does not, is the solution to the long-term gardener. In Honolulu, a decade of growing cane and ti and banana produced the leaf-mulch that changed cinder with a few skinny cockroaches into black loam full of worms. In Virginia, a couple years of woodpile followed by grass and leaf compost (and yes, hours of back-breaking cultivation) turned compacted clay into reasonable topsoil. In Olympia, cook-out ashes (from alder cut in my yard) and various other home-grown biomass--and of course, the miracle of wild strawberries--seems to be working. Based on past performance, the fact that this yard's soil is much-improved must mean I am about to move, to take on some new deadscape...oh well. The joy is in growing.

Under the Strawberry Hide

Free the Bulbs!

It's Spring Break, time for play, maybe a trip south for the cold, the old, the collegiate lemmings. 


Or, hours of bending, kneeling, and crawling along, ripping up a web of strawberry vines run amok. And though my spine's got the grindey-disk blues, my mind's deep-down satisfied. Weeding can do that.


The long bed running roadside was the first one I dug. The top edge cuts into the gravel, and mostly it didn't have much of what you'd call top-soil. Sandy clay. So I put herbs in as is but most everything else was planted with anything from a fist-full to a few gallons of whatever manure or bark-based compost was cheap at Home Depot at the time, and one year I mulched it with compost that was mostly nitrogen-sucking bark fiber.


Then one time down by some cranberry bogs, I saw this strawberry that grew on the road.  From off the shoulder, runners long-jumping onto asphalt, implanting roots, en-planting and growing into another team sending out runners onto that sunny country road. Soon enough, runners cross each other and red-strung web plays out over the colony. Plants branch like multi-headed giant millipedes (which infestation, incidentally, can be avoided by planting any Artemisia), and beneath that their roots tangle a tough horse-hair blanket.


Then there's the road. Except, the interstices are investigated by all manner of arthropods and microbia, including regular-headed millipedes. Pretty soon, the paltry bacterial stratum that had slowly been working on the tar hosts a mat of vegetation reaping photons enough to feed a host of other plants, fungi, and critters. Which poop, causing hyphae to send out web-forming runners to clean up. For every creature eating another, there is something else feeding on it's waste. The result of all this cleaning up is, ironically to some, dirt. Soil, a living layer, incorporating whatever road gravel it loosens from the matrix, as well as sands blown or washed in, leaves and twigs, rabbit pellets and deer hair, a crow feather. Anything that gets snagged in that red-runner web goes through this slow-motion grinder til it is soil.


Or until some guy happens by and cuts out a little mat and takes it home to plant in a roadside bed. Not really thinking of soil formation, but of strawberries. I teased apart the mat and spaced the plants in the bed. 


But it doesn't take long to learn that these plants just want to vine and entwine, not set still and make berries. That was fine, I figured, let them roam. All through the rest of the bed, up over the edge and into the roadside gravel, into the grass. The runners are so bright that it's easy to nip them off before they run into another bed where I don't want them.


Three or four years later, and the strawberry mat has run its course. They were good groundcover--tough and undemanding, abundant flowers, red leaves hanging through the Winter--but now they smother the camas and tulips and assorted plants venturing out for the Spring.  


So I bent down to start ripping. Thumb and forefinger pinch a rhizome, and pull it's rootfro from the rain-soft earth. Easy, but then you do it a thousand more times. Maybe more. A couple of wheelbarrel loads. Then collapse, just laying there with the mist dropping on you, surveying the bed.


Where there is soil. It always looks better in the Spring wet, but I see dozens of worms wiggling, waving, and peristalsis-ing on a crumbly black field. It was easy to feel how friable the soil was while pulling the weeds; roots 4 inches deep came up willingly. Whatever reluctance I'd had about removing perfectly functional ground cover imploded when I saw what lay beneath. Sweet happy soil, ready to receive something new.


The strawberry field may not have been forever, but it had a good run. Ripping it off quick like taking off a band-aid was the way to go. I could have piddled around, clearing one small section, or just continuing to clear little pockets for other specimens, but it would be bothersome, and it would have been hard to perceived the overall transformation and potential. I'd have missed things I planted long ago and forgot, which may never have poked up through the grizzled strawberry hide, and instead been drowned and ground down. Contributing to the soil, yes, but maybe the soil can do fine without it's mono-mat, and in its place the charms of new flowers and foods will have their day in the sun.

Second Spring

 

Hot on the heels (or is that, coldly nipping at the heels?) of First Spring, comes the mayhem of Second Spring. Clear days approaching warm followed by snow that plays mayhem with morning commutes only to disappear by lunch. At the greenstead, this time requires constant motion combined with a focus on the long term, instantaneous reaction paired with faith in the long slow progression of earth in her orbit. 

This year, Second Spring was Nettle Spring, early March madness devoted to snapping tender tips as nettles push up from the leaves. Already, these plants are stretching, gathering up urticaceousness sufficient to keep the tender-skinned at bay through summer. Only about a week  separates the hidden in humus from the lanky "Howdy, you're a might late ain't ya?" wave of the stinging nettle, but this year I managed to gather a couple big grocery bags full and freeze them for later. To get more this year, I'll need to head up, following Nettle Spring into the lagging hills.

But here at the greenstead, Second Spring gives the snowdrops a rest while the daffodils begin opening. Grass grows rank, berries black and blue loose leaves from huddled buds. The wild greens get a head start on the planted ones; some say this is weeds getting the upper hand, but I see it as first course of the long garden feast.

But there is planting to be done in Second Spring, especially successive sowings of spinach, broadcasts of poppies, rills of radishes, pokings of peaseeds, and all the other cold spring crops. Sow early, sow often. If round one succumbs, the next will fill in, but if it succeeds, I get to eat early. I plant too soon because it just may pay off, books and master gardening 'wisdom' be damned. 

 There's still time in the prequinox to make some last minute moves: take those blueberries languishing under the hazelnut and put them where they stand a chance. Gather up that rhubarb from the not-quite-right spot before its leaves turn from pale crinkly February scrotums to stalks aroused by full-on Spring.

A little weeding this early (whether it yield a meal or not) is a good bet. Dandelions plucked easily with small roots in moist soil will never be this cooperative again. Grasses can even be manageable. It's time to decide where you want to let blackberries roam, and where you will do battle. A minute of Second Spring becomes an hour of Summer. 

In truth, Second Spring is already over. Most of the perennials are already putting on growth. Firework bursts of flax have exploded everywhere, valerian and lupines remind me they are not dead yet, emerging from the grave. It'll be too late to plant early things soon (or will it? I push the boundaries in both directions, because you never know when we'll get one of those everlasting springs), and there are still those clean-up jobs lingering from First Spring procrastination. I observe with a mixture of anticipation and franticism that the soil is warming, that dry days arrive more often,...and I rush.

But not so much that I cannot pause to soak in sun that actually has some warmth. Not so frenetic that there is not time to listen to the varied thrushes with the mellow substrate to a growing list of songbird virtuosos inhabiting the Indian Creek watershed. With each new Spring, new levels of beauty and bliss, the kiss of the sun awakening passions from chlorophyllic cells to the sparrows nesting in the birdhouse by the door.

Cutouts, Or the Sunken Raised Bed

 

In that interim between freezing and foliating, I tend to engage in a campaign of expanding cultivated area. Out comes the flat-bladed spade, and back go the grassy margins. Beds expand, the ground still wet and soft enough to dig and shake soil from grass-roots, dandelions readily separated from matrix. Then, I rake the dirt into a raised bed, which usually rises no higher than the surrounding grass, the persistent mockingly unproductive remnant. There are no wooden or masonry edges, just a low ziggurat slouching in a cutout of the lawn.

The bed is soil mixed up bottom to top so any remaining weeds lay dispersed and unrooted, easy to pluck out later. Seeds in, weeds out, so goes the next few days. The weeding continues: pluckings of non-productive obviocracy, cullings of non-crops, ferreting out of sneakerweeds. The seeds sprout and flourish. 

Sandy soil makes this easy. No clay-clung weed-root balls propagating. Easy extraction. 

My hope is that unimpeded root-foods will grow large here, that cultivars will flourish into the weed-freed spaces. We'll see...Even the weeds that may emerge are better eating than the pathetic lawn that preceded them...