What to do this week
If you are doing what I am doing this week, it has to do with tomatoes. By now your beans should be planted, or you are also planting them, but your squash, not yet. Squash will be bothered by the few cool days we are still bound to get. This week is the time for tomatoes.
Deep-planted tomato plant. (Photo by Dave Wallis / The Forum)
Of course, you have properly hardened them off so they won’t be shocked by the sun, the wind or any of the other realities of life in your garden. Even so, there is more to do. In a Cape Breton climate, you want to bury some of the stem. What tomato plants do, which is what a lot of nightshade plants do, is send out roots along its stem if that stem comes in contact with the soil.
If we had warm soil in Cape Breton, you could bury the plants straight down, but we don’t, so I bury part of the stem sideways (with the main part of the plant, of course, above ground.)
Remove the lower leaves along the part of the stem that is going to be buried. This lower part of the stem and the root ball should be buried under five or six inches of soil. Gently coax the top of the plant upward. It will look like a little tuft of tomato leaves for about a week, then all of a sudden it will just shoot up. It takes off because it has developed a fantastic root system that wants to feed a big plant.
With this technique, number one, you are building a bigger root system; but you are also ensuring a thicker, sturdier stem, much better for our Cape Breton winds. This is especially good if your seedlings have gotten a little leggy in the window or greenhouse, but it is good even if that is not the case. We do get wind here.
I’m back to transplanting, so get to it. Next week, I will fill you in on how you can use ground cover, once your seedlings are off to a good start, to help protect the soil all summer.
Market gardener, farmer, workshop leader, seed-saver, political candidate and mother, Michelle Smith has spent over 30 years coping with the challenges of our bioregion and in the process has built a store of practical and technical knowledge. The Inverness resident has served on the board of Seeds of Diversity Canada and represented Alternative Producers with the Federation of Agriculture but can do nothing about her hair. She is pictured with a head of Club Wheat, a seed that shares her approach to hairdressing.
Backyard food gardener Madeline Yakimchuk caught the food-security bug in the early ’90s through Cuba’s Urban Agriculture Department, taking her first permaculture course and planting her first garden. She can often be found discussing food security, nurturing a plant-based lifestyle or trying to give away vegetables. Professionally, she is GRYPHON media productions but sometimes uses la bruja in her volunteer work, most notably in managing the garden column, which begins life as a telephone interview.
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