Hot Time in the Ol' Garden... or, "How to Be Besties With Your Veggies"

“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”

Masanobu Fukuoka –“The One-Straw Revolution”

Permaculturalists are nonconformists by nature, so it should hardly be surprising that none of them do things the same way as each other.  Oh, there are some commonalities – lots of use of cardboard, heavy emphasis on seemingly random distributions of various plant species, integration of wetlands and orchards with herb and vegetable plots, heavy reliance on native plants and, of course, plenty of animals around who not only fertilize everything, but also get to eat their fair share.

But in general?  No two permaculture gardens are going to look more than vaguely similar.

Only one of many, many different "Permaculture" or "Forest Garden" schematics

We were thinking about that singular fact recently when we were asked a question about tomatoes by an online chum of the straight-and-narrow twentieth century square-garden-plot-enhanced-by-Miracle-Gro school of thought.  Seems he had moved from Colorado to Central Texas a few years ago, and wondered how to keep his tomatoes producing for as long as possible; when he lived in Denver, he got tomatoes all summer long; last year, living as he does now in San Antonio, they petered out in early June, when the heat simply became too much.

“When it gets over 90°, they just stop producing.”

A common misconception, the truth of which is invisible to anyone who does not practice some form of “forest gardening” or “edge gardening” or “permaculture” – depending on which one of us hippie freak gardeners you are talking to, and what we happen to be calling it on any given day.

The problem is not the daytime high being so ridiculously hot.  No, the problem is the nighttime low not being low enough.

“Well, great,” you may be thinking, “but I can’t do anything about that, either.”

Oh, ye of little faith.  There’s plenty you can do about it.  Fruit set for large swaths of the United States, of course, involves the opposite problem (if it’s too cold at night, fruit will either not set, or else if already set, will not ripen), but that, too, is solved by placing your beloved tomatoes in a broader context, making them part of a wider and more diverse little ecosystem.

Without all the jibber-jabber… give ‘em plenty of shade (put them near a row of shrubs, or a trellis covered with beans, or any of a number of vining squash, or passion fruit, or some such), mulch them heavily with leaves, or straw, or wood shavings, get indeterminate varieties and instead of putting them in cages, let them trail along the ground.  And for y’all Yankees who might be reading our humble blog, the same works in reverse – the things that aid in the prevention of a heat sink in the southern garden also insulate against the loss of heat in the northern garden.

All of these suggestions fly in the face of conventional wisdom, of course.  Practically everyone has a story about their grandmother or great-uncle, or some such, who grew State Fair grand prize winning giant tomatoes in cages, with so-and-so’s miracle fertilizer, and made sure to pinch the suckers from the base of the plant on a daily basis, and did the whole “shake-pollination” thing where they tap the blossoms with their thumbnails.

It’s probably true.  You can produce humongous individual fruit, and humongous bushels of bland-tasting produce from a genetically modified hybrid tomato plant, provided you are willing to suck your soil dry of all other life, and are willing to hang up your garden hat by the middle of June, when the plants will have all gotten crispy in the blistering Texas sun.

We’ve never run out of tomatoes when they are “in season” in spite of not doing all those things common wisdom deems necessary.  We have never had problems with pollination, because we take care of the local wild bee populations, and as a result they take care of us.  Weeds and the like do not bother us because they are a sign of healthy soil, and when harvested in moderation make for excellent salads for us and forage for the chickens.

And those suckers so fastidiously removed by other tomato fanatics?  Yeah, removing them will increase the fruit yield on the plant, but at the expense of the plant’s overall health.  If you don’t mind it dying in June, then by all means, prune away.

We would like to suggest a different course, however.

Rather than thinking of tomatoes as either “Spring tomatoes” or “Fall tomatoes” why not just call them “tomatoes”?  In their natural habitat (something slightly misleading, since they have been bred into ridiculously contorted varieties no longer resembling the wild ground cherries of ages long gone by) they are a perennial fruit.  And in some greenhouses, tomato trees (really just trellised indeterminate vines) live for not just multiple seasons, but actually for multiple years.

Epcot's famous tomato tree

Even if you don’t have a greenhouse, you can still protect the plants from the ravages of the extremes of the year.  We would suggest that step one in such a cause would be to change philosophies regarding your relationship to the plants and to the soil in which those plants grow – a couple of helpful concepts from other cultures (taken in a slightly different context from their usual associations) will illustrate what we mean.

First, the Japanese idea of “Wabi Sabi” – this word is all the rage among interior designers and antique dealers.  Wabi Sabi is the appreciation of imperfection; typically it refers to liking the weather-beaten look of a “lived on” sofa, or the gritty texture of centuries old silverware that has been polished a few too many times, or the beauty of the lines around an old woman’s eyes, showing clearly that she has spent many, many decades smiling and laughing and loving.

In the garden, Wabi Sabi means not clearing away “last year’s crop” – those dead plants?  They are next year’s mulch, and the following year’s soil.  Nothing ugly about them at all, they are a beautiful part of the cycle.  And once your new year’s tomatoes are growing, all the “weeds” in the bed are not ugly, either, nor are they a detriment to your plants’ health.  They are trap crops (attracting beneficial insects, and distracting detrimental ones), living mulch, keeping moisture in the soil and – most important – regulating temperature.  “Better Homes and Gardens” may think your tomato bed looks imperfect; we say, “So?”

The other borrowed concept we’d like to address is the Swedish concept of “Lagom” – loosely translated into American English, this means “plenty good” and we need more of it.  You can never have too much moderation.

Basically, lagom in the garden means not worrying so much about getting the biggest tomato, or the largest yield, and instead having big enough tomatoes, and harvesting enough for your purposes.  A healthy relationship with your environment means not just doing as little harm as possible to the environment on a macro scale, but also treating each part of it with respect on a micro scale.

Our daughter is an avid animal rights activist, and eschews the eating of meat on moral grounds, and she asked us a question recently that we have heard asked in a sarcastic manner before by cynical devotees of the exploitation culture:  “What are the ethics of eating plants?”  Understand, she was not asking whether it is right to chomp on a carrot or not – no, she was asking what are our responsibilities in our relationship to carrots and such?

Understanding that we are actually in a relationship with everything around us, including our garden vegetables, is an excellent first step towards making those relationships right.  Lagom teaches that if we are truly grateful to our plant friends, we will only ask what we need, and will only take what we need.  No more.

As such, any gardening philosophy geared towards getting more than we need may as well be geared towards learning how to grow 7-11 Big Gulp fountain drinks, and McDonald’s Supersized fries.

On the other hand… taking just enough means we get to take for a longer period of time.  We fully anticipate having ripe tomatoes in July and August, in spite of daytime highs in the 100°-plus range, and nighttime lows in the 78°-plus range, because the plants will not be stressed, they will be shaded by velvet bean vines, and cooled by a host of so-called weeds, earthworms, mulches of old vines and oak leaves, and plenty of their own leaves as they trail along the ground, preventing the soil from soaking up all that daytime heat.  They are our friends; we will support them, but we would never presume to tell them their own business – they know how to be tomatoes far better than we do.

However you go about getting friendlier with your garden, we hope you have fun with it.

Happy farming!