Beyond lettuce, bread and mayonnaise, there are many other things that tomatoes go well with. Thus we come to the concept of companion planting.

Known positive companions:

Companion planting is a somewhat murky area of horticulture. Sometimes a plant will be carried as a positive companion on one list, and shown as a negative companion on another. Then, too, varying levels of expertise come into play. It’s a mess … but ‘something’ is going on out there in the garden. Tomatoes planted alongside young dill do better than tomatoes planted further away from the dill. But, as the dill matures, the advantage transfers over to the tomatoes planted AWAY from the dill.

This is a short list of plants generally considered to benefit the tomatoes in one fashion or another. Books can be, have been, and will yet be written on this topic.

Positives: Onion, Chives, Garlic, Cabbage, Carrots, Celery, Mint, Asparagus, Basil, Bush Beans, Cucumber, Head Lettuce, Marigold, Nasturtium, Parsley, Hot Peppers, Pot Marigold, Sow Thistle, Bee Balm, Borage, Young Dill, Horehound, Pea, Petunia, Sage

Known negative companions:

Corn (shares a pest), Fennel (shares a pest?), Potato (shares blight diseases), Kohlrabi (pest?). Cabbage and cauliflower are sometimes mentioned as being both good and bad. Mature dill weed (solution: cut the dill while still young and full of natural dill oils).

Disease resistance: Tomatoes have often been bred for disease resistance to various pathogens. Such resistance may be noted on a seed packet, a plant tag or in a catalog description using the following codes:

• A – Alternaria leaf spot
• F – Fusarium wilt
• FF – Race 1 & Race 2 Fusarium
• L – Septoria leaf spot
• N – Nematodes
• St – Stemphylium Gray Leaf Spot
• T – Tobacco mosaic virus
• V – Verticulum wilt

Disease vulnerabilities:

Molds & fungi during times of cool, damp weather love tomatoes. Treat with spray of compost tea as a preventative or commercially available copper-based fungicide. Avoid Bordeaux mixture due to the general toxicity and potential for accidental ingestion. Even with varieties rated as resistant to Tobacco Mosaic virus, always wash your hands after smoking and before entering the garden. Do NOT smoke in the garden as nearly all tobacco is contaminated with the virus.

Corn meal, worked into the soil at the rate of 10-20# per 1,000 sq. ft. is a good anti-fungal and, after looking at perhaps 100 web sites (including a couple from universities) it now appears that it is effective against many varieties of Pythium, Sclerotinia, Sclerotium, Rhizoctonia, Fusarium,  and Phytophthora. While not a panacea (other fungi can also cause problems with tomatoes), it is both a good general antifungal and a good (10% N) slow-release fertilizer that is well-liked by earthworms.

Blossom End Rot (BER)

BER is often seen as a disease. It is not: it is a mineral deficiency, just as rickets in humans is a vitamin deficiency and not a disease. This hard black area on the blossom end (and ONLY on the blossom end) of the tomato renders it unfit for market.

BER is caused by the inability of the tomato to move calcium from the soil to the fruit. This is caused by a) insufficient moisture in the soil to make the calcium available to the plant, b) insufficient calcium (rarley the case) or c) insufficient magnesium in the soil. The ‘fixes’ for these conditions are to a) keep the soil uniformly moist b) add calcium as either ground egg shell, ground oyster shell or food supplement tablets and c) add a light sprinkling of Epsom salts to the soil by working it in to the top couple of inches of soil. Fruits already showing BER should be removed from the plant. They can be used by cutting around the black part, but there is no cure that will make them ripen properly.

Any mineral that a plant needs can contribute to a deficiency but BER is a frequent offender with an easy solution … just keep the soil moist enough and the fairly complicated chemistry that needs to occur will, in fact, occur. Moreover, since uninterrupted growth yields the healthiest, most productive plants, you should be taking care of this any way. BER is a slap on the wrist telling you that you are letting the soil get too dry between waterings.

(Revised 2/26/09)

If you’ve never started a garden from seed, you’re in for a treat … if you do it right.

Here are a handful of links and some useful commentary to help you do it right.

The first thing you need to know (to a reasonable degree of certainty) is the last frost date in your location. While the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAH) keeps the detailed records, you’ll probably find that this list, at Victory Seeds, works well enough for your needs. I don’t have any financial association with them but, since they had already did the grunt work with the tables from NOAH, why not give them the credit?

Then, when you’ve got that handled, head on over to Little House in the Suburbs for a little calendar / planner to help you use those dates you got from Victory Seeds.

If you don’t already have seed catalogs filling your mail box, surf on over to Jungs Seeds and Plants, Hirts Greenhouse or Totally Tomatoes and either order the seeds and plants directly or at least get your name in the hat for their catalogs. Hirts claims to have the world’s hottest pepper, the Bhut Jolokia.

A few years ago I made the mistake of handling a number of habaneros with bare hands. I will NEVER, EVER repeat that mistake again. At well over 1,000,000 Scoville units, the Bhut Jolokia blows the Habs away. It deserves to be handled with extraordinary care.

In the past, planting a few extremely hot peppers scattered through my garden has seemed to repel a number of bugs. Apparently they know to avoid the aroma and having the hot peppers interspersed with the other plants makes the whole area smell ‘off limits’. I have seen exactly ONE bite taken from a habanero leaf. The Bhut Jolokia is pretty expensive … a show-off plant. But a dozen habaneros (or similar) would not be terribly expensive and could well pay for themselves via produce saved from bugs.

I would encourage you to give extra preference to open-pollinated and heirloom varieties. These do not fall under plant patent protection and will generally breed true … allowing you to save seed from one year to the next. You may need to select for disease or pest resistance if such are not controllable through other means (and they usually are – see the tip about hot peppers above), but the hybrid plants or seeds that you buy will not breed true the following year – if they will sprout at all.

Avoid GMO seeds and plants at all costs. Pandora’s box is being opened by the seed companies in a bid to monopolize all food production everywhere. (When their plants breed with your plants, your seeds end up carrying the patented genes added by their pollen. You, then, are held to have violated their patent on that gene. Is this unfair? ABSOLUTELY. But it is the way the law works.)

If you’ve got a favorite seed or plant vendor and I haven’t mentioned them, why not pass the word via a comment below? When we’ve collected enough to make things interesting (a dozen or so), I’ll create a list as a permanent page.

Tomatoes are prone to attack from a variety of pests, most of which can be warned off by careful inter-planting with marigolds, chrysanthemums and certain herbs.

Pest vulnerabilities:

• nematodes: (pull plants immediately at end of season and remove from garden, many nematodes and their eggs will be trapped in the roots and removed; plant resistant varieties, alternate cropping areas with French Marigolds (Tagetes patula) in one half of the garden the first year, and in the other half the second year. Plant marigolds no more than 7 inches apart in any direction for complete coverage.),
• caterpillars: (treat with Bt, predatory species such as syriphid wasps, praying mantis),
• aphids: predatory beetles (lady bugs, for instance), predatory wasps, chili pepper sprayed on foliage (discourages many chewing / sucking insects)
• Rodents & birds: most often when these are taking a chunk out of the tomato, they are simply thirsty. Supply water in shallow dishes nearby to reduce the problem. A rodent infestation may call for more drastic measures, but an occasional spray of “Habanero rat repellent” can be effective without loss of life, although it may be a while before their taste buds recover.

Mode of eating fresh:

Tomatoes are eaten in both the ripe and the unripe stage. Refrigeration reduces flavor. In the green state they are justifiably famous when dusted with flour or cornmeal and fried in oil, shortening, lard or butter. In the ripe state they are well known for use as a sliced accompaniment to meats, on sandwiches, or in salads. Then, too, they make great eating right out in the garden – bring a salt and pepper shaker with you for an exquisite explosion of taste. As sauces (including catsup), they can be added to other dishes to add a bold flavor. In the dried form, they can be powdered or added intact to increase the tomato taste of dishes or to add a visual impact. One interesting twist is to eat dried tomatoes just like other dried fruits. Not only are they actually sweet, but they are loaded with vitamins and lycopene. Research indicates that lycopene can be useful in the prevention of prostate cancer — a cancer which kills more men than breast cancer does women.

Mode of preservation:

Tomatoes can be canned whole, in sauces, in relishes, as juice or paste. They can be frozen whole after blanching and peeling or after cooking to a sauce consistency. They are also easy to dry, whether in the sun or a dehydrator. To dry, simply wash, drain, slice lengthwise into wedges and place in a dehydrator or out of doors, protected from bugs by screening. Pack in a poly bag when fully dry.

Nutritional value:

Tomatoes are not just good, they’re also good for you. A single cup of raw tomatoes provides over 50% of the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin C and almost 25% of the RDA of Vitamin A, as well as a host of other vitamins and nutrients, including iron, folic acid, potassium, calcium, bone-enhancing Vitamin K and even lycopene, the photosensitive chemical that gives tomatoes, strawberries, and carrots their distinctive colors … and cancer preventative powers.

(Watch the soil temperature with a soil thermometer (50 deg. F.) or by observing the neighborhood yellow forsythia. When it starts to bloom, the soil is warm enough.)

The soil thermometer is especially useful because it will tell you if your soil warming techniques have worked well enough to ‘cheat’ the calendar. Even just a few days on this end of the season and another few days on the other end are enough to give you an extra month or more of growing season.

(Okayyyy Bill … let’s see the math on that!)

If you can cheat the calendar a few days in the spring you’ve gained a few days … and that’s it. Good to have, nice to know, worth two ‘atta-boys’ and one pat on the back and not much else. Except that you have learned to defeat Jack Frost in your own garden with your own materials.

But if you can defend the garden against the first frost of next fall (using the skills developed in the spring), you can probably count on 2-3 more weeks until the next one. Michigan is justly famous for its “Indian Summers” … a frost followed by a month or even two of growing weather. However, if the first frost caught you unprepared, you won’t have to worry about the timing of the second one. You’ll be too busy pulling out dead plants and generally feeling sorry for yourself.

Tender vegetables that require both warm air and warm soil are shown below:

• Beans – from seed
• Sweet corn – from seed
• Summer squash – from seed
• Tomatoes – as transplants
• Chinese cabbage
• Chicory (Radicchio)
• Corn
• Cowpea (Black-eyed pea)
• Cucumber
• Melon (all varieties)
• Okra
• Peanut
• Pumpkin
• Rutabaga (Swede)

The seeds are fairly easy to cheat with, but you’ll want to pay attention to what you are doing with any plants you set out on this list.

Arghhh! I’m being tormented by unseen beings! Get ‘em off me! Get ‘em off meeeee!
(grin)
All this nice weather recently and the ground is still frozen. That’s so sad. Are you going just a little nuts waiting for the weather to break so you can get out in your garden?
Me, too. I don’t know whether to go off my meds, double up on ‘em or take someone elses!*

So, here’s what I want you to do:
Even if it’s snowing, get outside tomorrow. Pull some leaves back and scratch the soil a little. Sprinkle some loose-leaf lettuce seeds** on top of the soil and smooth it over with your hands. Return some of the leaves to the planting site and go on inside to a hot cup of tea.

It won’t be long now.

In ‘the D’,
Bill

*Just yankin’ yer chain.
** Black-seeded Simpson is my favorite for “Wilted Lettuce Salad”