Could it possibly be tomato planting time already?
It sure is some tempting weather coming up this next week. The long-range forecast calls for lots of 80-degree days and — more important to all of you anxious tomato-growers out there — nights are predicted to stay in the high 50s. (As we have stressed many times, it is the nighttime temperatures that are most important to the crops of summer, such as tomatoes, peppers and eggplant.)
So — is it safe to plant? Longtime listeners know I’m traditionally a coward on this subject, but I’m going to perhaps shock them and deliver a qualified yes for tomatoes — but only if they are planted inside cages over which you can drape row covers or sheer curtains if we get a cold night after Mother’s Day.
Hold off on the even-more-cold-sensitive peppers and eggplant for a while. They can go outdoors in their pots, but don’t plant them in the ground for another week or so — and bring them back inside on any nights that dip below 50.
Here are some tomato planting basics:
- Always remove the bottom leaves and plant most of the stem underground, where it will grow auxiliary roots. You only need to leave a couple inches above the soil line. (Unless, of course, the tomatoes are grafted — then the graft must stay above the soil.)
- Provide calcium in the planting hole in the form of crushed eggshells, calcium carbonate pills or Tums to prevent blossom end rot later in the summer. Or, if you prefer, spread an inch of compost on the surface of the soil, then a cup of an organic tomato food that contains a lot of added calcium (such as the widely available Tomato-Tone), then cover that with another inch of compost. (Granulated fertilizers all work better when covered with compost or soil.)
- Whether it sandwiches fertilizer or not, always mulch tomatoes with two inches of compost, which will function as food, disease preventive and mulch. Never mulch tomatoes with wood or bark — wood mulches breed disease.
- And never feed tomatoes chemical fertilizers — it makes them fill up with water and dilutes the flavor.
Plowman’s Folly 2015: Why we shouldn’t till our soil
Stan in Arlington has a timely question. He writes, “You recently stated that we shouldn’t turn the soil in our raised beds. Can you please explain why? I have 22 raised beds that are a little over three-by-three feet each, and they are difficult to rototill.”
I’ll bet they are, Stan! The reasons are many. Let us list them:
Reason No. 1: Tilling shouldn’t be necessary
Tilling is often necessary when you first build a bed, but one of the prime benefits of building beds the size of yours is that you never have to step into them — you can easily reach all parts of the bed from the outside. (That’s why we always specify four feet as the maximum width for raised beds — your ‘threes’ are even better!)
Not stepping on the light, loose soil in those beds means no soil compaction from your big feet, which means no need to till to loosen up the soil. Unless you really like that part where your arms shake for days after you put the tiller away.
Reason No. 2: Loss of nutrients
Every time you turn the soil, you expose the captured nitrogen in that soil to its much-more-fun cousins in the air. Nitrogen — the primary plant food — is also the primary component of our atmosphere, and soil nitrogen is very ephemeral, always “trying” to escape into the air.
Tilling breaks the seal holding the nitrogen in your soil, and allows all of that sequestered nutrient to immediately escape into the atmosphere, where we can breathe it — but you probably wanted it to stay down there and help make your plants big and strong instead.
Reason No. 3: Tilling = Weeds, weeds, weeds!
Now we get to the big reason: weeds. Even the best garden soil is loaded with dormant weed seeds just waiting for the sound of a tiller being fired up, because those anxious seeds know that tilling will expose them to sunlight — the trigger for germination. (Dormant weed seeds can survive for 40 years down there, and 90 percent of them are in the top four inches of your soil.)
Then the nice tiller person will almost certainly level out that tilled soil — effectively planting those weed seeds. Then they’ll almost certainly feed and water that bed. Then they are shocked — shocked! — to see a bed of weeds thicker than their lawn pop up a week later. Be proud of those weeds. It might be the best planting job you’ll do this season!
Seriously, don’t be a weed farmer. Stop tilling and simply add two inches of fresh compost to the surface of the soil every year to keep your organic matter content nice and high. Then free of weeds your beds will be.
How to prepare that first-year bed — Go ‘stale’
I advise against tilling the soil in raised beds every season, but then, how do you prepare a bed the first time? And what can you do if you’ve already tilled your soil for this season?
Make a “stale seed bed.”
After you finish turning the soil, level it, water it well and then leave it alone for a solid 10 days. By then, all the dormant weed seeds you’ve awakened will have sprouted. Then take a garden hoe with a very sharp blade at the end (you can have an old hoe sharpened or buy really cool ones that have replaceable blades that are as sharp as a single-edged razor blade on the end) and very gently slice their little heads off right at the soil line. And that’s it.
The seeds used up all their inherent energy in the sprouting, and you then quickly prevented their leaves from achieving photosynthesis: end of weeds.
And yes, it really is just that easy.
