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Rand Lee
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Rand Lee
Payne's Nurseries
and Greenhouses
Vegetable Passions
If we all cross our fingers and hold our breaths and count to 10 and promise to think only good thoughts on Sundays, the weather up here in Northern New Mexico’s mountains might settle down enough for it to be totally safe to plant warm-season vegetables outdoors.
I mean vegetables like squash, cucumbers, melons, peppers, eggplants, okra, and tomatoes. If you’ve bought and planted some vegetable starts already, you’ve probably seen some dieback due to the late night cold and spates of hail we’ve been having. If you need replacements, come by our nurseries in Santa Fe. We’ll have vegetable starts available through the middle of June at least. But if you haven’t planted yet, a few tips:
Make Your Bed, Dear
Prepare your bed deeply, digging down a foot, loosening the soil another foot below that, and mixing in fertilizer and soil amendments as thoroughly as possible. If you have heavy clay that doesn’t drain well, dig in lots of compost (not peat moss; it helps with moisture retention but otherwise adds nothing to the soil — sort of as though you’d dug chopped-up cellulose sponges into the bed — and besides, peat is mined from ancient bogs, and once they’re gone, they’re gone forever). Homemade is best, but for those of us who don’t generate enough plant matter or have access to enough horse, cow, chicken, or llama poop to make much compost of our own, I recommend Payne’s Soil Conditioner. It’s made of rotted-down cotton waste, adds nitrogen to the soil, and slightly lowers our naturally-alkaline pH, which most vegetables will appreciate.
Feed the Need
Add fertilizer to your vegetable bed, too. I don’t recommend Miracle-Gro™ and similar artificial plant foods for in-ground planting, because such fertilizers are high in chemical salts. Our soil is saline as it is, and over a longish period, artificial fertilizers raise the saline
content of the soil high enough that the beneficial microorganisms all plants need to digest their food properly begin to die off. That’s why, over time, you need greater and greater applications of artificial fertilizer to get the same results you had the first year you used them.
So use organics. They don’t salinize the soil, most won’t burn plant-roots even if applied lavishly, and they’re released slowly to the plants over time, so your vegetables put out steady, sure growth over the entire season. I particularly like the Peace of Mind™ line of plant foods, sold at our North store. When I experimented with Peace of Mind tomato food last year, I got 25% greater root growth on my tomato plants than with the artificial
fertilizers I used. Peace of Mind makes plant foods for trees, shrubs, and
flowers, too. I highly recommend them.
Another great vegetable food is Yum-Yum™ Mix. It’s made in Northern New Mexico for Northern New Mexico conditions. It’s not cheap, but it’s primo, and aren’t your tomato plants worth it? And you can use it on anything, from aspen trees to petunias.
The best time to use artificial fertilizers is when you’re growing plants in pots, windowboxes, hanging baskets, and tubs. The concentrated nutrients artificial fertilizers provide compensate for your containerized plants’ severely restricted root-room. My favorite artificial fertilizer is probably Osmocote™. Osmocote granules resemble little blonde pearls which, when mixed with the soil in your container, release food to your plants’ roots every time you water. One application in your pot will feed the pot for 3 months. Osmocote comes in green or pink bottles. The green is the better choice for fruiting and flowering plants; the pink is the one to use for plants mostly grown for their foliage (including cabbage, collards, and lettuce).
Pot Up Your Veggies!
If, like me, you’ve got back problems that make digging difficult, or if you have limited space, try growing your vegetables in containers. Get a big enough plastic pot or wooden half-barrel, and you can grow practically any vegetable variety in it, including sweetcorn, pole beans, and the viners, like squash, melons, and cukes. Fill your container with any standard potting soil, such as Fertilome™; just make sure that any soil you use has plenty of perlite for drainage. Perlite looks like snow-white granules. It’s very light and moisture retentive, but it also aerates any potting soil it’s mixed with, so plant roots can penetrate the soil more easily. Perlite is not an artificial product. It’s volcanic rock that’s been heated so much that it’s popped, like Rice Krispies™.
And to keep your pots from drying out too quickly — particularly pots five gallons and smaller — try mixing a small amount of water-absorbant polymer granules to the soil in the pot before you plant. SoilMoist™ is a commonly available brand. These polymers, which are dust-size biodegradeable plastic granules, expand hugely when wet, till they resemble lumps of translucent Jell-O™. The granules act like little water reservoirs. Plant roots grow
into them and, during stress periods, draw upon their water reserves to stay in active growth. Use of these polymers can really cut down on your container watering chores (you can even use them in hanging baskets).
Be sure and follow the directions on the package exactly. You’ll be tempted to use too much. Don’t. Otherwise, the first time you water, the granules will expand so much they’ll start pushing your plants out of their pots! And I don’t recommend adding these polymers to in-ground plantings. One landscape crew that tried this ended up with a field full of slime. When they watered, the polymer globs all migrated to the surface of the soil until the entire would-be lawn area looked as though the Blob From Planet 9 had been hosting a bachelor party with his closest and yukkiest buds.
Vegetables For Containers
The bigger your container, and the more regularly you fertilize it, the higher yields you can expect from your crop. While (as I’ve noted above) you can grow any vegetable variety in a pot if the pot’s big enough, some varieties have been bred specificially to thrive with a restricted root room. Eggplant, carrots, peppers, potatoes, leaf-greens of all kinds, onions, and yams all make good container subjects. Look for bush cukes, bush squash, bush beans, and bush melon varieties, too. And then there are the tomatoes!
Tomatoes For Pots and Baskets
Right now at Payne’s we’ve got over 40 varieties of tomatoes from all over the world just aching to go home with you and start pumping out fruit. We have signs and lists at our stores describing each and every variety we’re selling, and again, you can grow any of our tomatoes in containers. But some varieties are better suited to container growing than others
The following tomato varieties stay reasonably compact and can be fruited very nicely in a pot five gallon size and up (‘Red Robin’ will fruit in a 6 inch pot). Ones marked with a star * are heirlooms or open-pollinated, which means you could save seed from them at the end of the season and grow out new plants yourself next year):
Beefsteaks
- Cosmonaut Volkov* Big 8-12 oz. richly flavored red fruit in about 65 days
- Maestria* “Master;” 75 days; 1/2-3/4 lb beefsteaks; one of Europe’s finest hybrids
- Moon’s Superbush* Big round delicious red tomatoes in 62 days
- Park’s Razzleberry F1 Big 7 oz pink tomatoes of excellent flavor in 76 days
- Siletz* 70-75 days; 1/2-1 lb red fruits on compact plants in several flushes
Cherry Tomatoes
- Koralik* 61 days; big trusses of very sweet 1” red cherries
- Red Robin 55 days, very compact plants with good yields
of 1/2-1” red cherries; ideal for 6” containers and hanging baskets! - Sugar Lump 65-75 days; delicious scarlet cherries over a long period
Salad Varieties
- Banana Legs* 75 days; weird, long, golden, banana-like fruits,
great sliced or for sauce - Beaverlodge Slicer* Compact spreading plants with tons of
2 oz tasty red fruits in only 55 days - Bonito Ojo* 75 days; drought tolerant, heavy producer of 2 1/2” red fruit
- Celebrity F1 Tasty red 7-8 oz tomatoes in 78 days; disease resistant!
- Czech’s Bush* 70 days; heavy yields of flavorful 4-6 oz. scarlet fruits
- Homesweet* 70 days; 4-6 oz very sweet red fruits on disease
resistant compact vines - Legend F1 68 days; 6-8 oz very sweet red fruits
- Lemon Boy F1 72 days; my favorite hybrid salad type:
big round golden fruits with delightful sweetness) - Sophie’s Choice* Flavorful 2 oz orange-red fruits; 55 days
Come by the North Store and ask for Rand if you’d like more tomato info. We’ll be having chile peppers, eggplants, squash, melons, and cucumbers coming on throughout the month of June, when the soil will have warmed up to the point where all these heat-lovers will really take off. The best is yet to come!
Copyright 2007 Rand B. Lee.
