Warm Season Vegetables, Fruit, Edible Landscape
by Don Boekelheide
April 15th is Tax Day
A day of moaning, groaning &
dark thoughts of tea parties
Why, then are all the gardeners smiling?
As every Mecklenburg Extension Master Gardener volunteer knows, April 15 is also our last frost day, so we can plant our summer food gardens.
At last!
In go the corn and the tomatoes, the squash, and the okrie. Move over, peas and pansies! Make room for the “real” garden.
Gentlepersons, start your beans!
We’re off to the races!"
To be precise, unlike taxes, said to be as sure as death, April 15 doesn’t absolutely mean the end of frost. It is our 90% frost-free date, meaning nine years out of ten it won’t freeze on or after April 15. There’s a tiny bit of risk, but it’s manageable. We aren’t talking credit default swaps or hedge funds here.
Though “hedging your bets” isn’t necessarily a bad idea in the garden.
Take tomatoes, for instance. The veggie stand man down at the end of Sardis Road puts out his tomatoes in late March. Horrors! He does it by cheating, of course. He uses a gizmo called a “Wall’o’water,” a green plastic cone filled with water. This protects his tomatoes, still tiny but hearty transplants, from frost.
The underlying mechanism is interesting and clever. Water when it freezes changes state from liquid to solid, a physical reaction that produces a small amount of heat. Counter intuitive, but true. The cone of water captures that heat, which helps keep air and soil inside the cone warm enough for the crop. The water also soaks up solar energy, releasing it during the chilly early spring nighttimes.
Why does he bother? Because if he gets those tomatoes to market a week or two before anyone else, say in mid-to-late June, he gets a premium price.
Turns out, by marketing tomatoes as fruits, early American farmers were able to avoid taxes on vegetables. It worked for awhile, until the courts spoiled the fun.
Home and community food gardeners can profit from the same trick. A pack of three Wall’o’waters is available for $10 at Renfrow’s Hardware and also online. It’s not for profit, but for bragging rights to the first ripe tomato, and bragging rights count for gardeners, don’t they?
Taxes, as it happens, are behind the “Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable” dilemma. We don’t get at all bothered by peppers, eggplants, squashes and even beans being botanically “fruits.” We call them veggies without batting an eye. So why the classic barstool debates about tomatoes?
A more practical little known fact that tomatoes grow very well in Charlotte when direct seeded. Trials over the past three years have shown increased yield, vigor and disease resistance. Only problem? You can’t start them in the garden until Tax Day, so they don’t start producing until mid-July. The answer? Relay crop, even tomatoes! Start some now and some later.
Relay cropping is the idea of planting a few things now, waiting a couple weeks, and then planting again. For home gardeners, this is a very good strategy for most vegetables.
Peppers and eggplants will be with you for a long time. Some peppers don’t really begin producing in earnest until mid-summer, but then keep going and going and going right into November until a hard freeze finally blasts them.
The exception in the warm months is tomato’s close solanaceous cousins, peppers and eggplants. They also grow well from direct seeding, but they like really warm soil and can’t be seeded until May. They also take a long time to develop. Gardeners will do best by starting them indoors and planting them out when the soil is nice and warm. If you put them out on April 15, take the Wall’o’waters off the tomatoes and pop them over the peppers and eggplants. Or, be patient and wait to set them out until May Day.
Eggplants and peppers are both very pretty plants, suitable for combining with flowers in edible edgings. An especially pretty combo, beloved by Ros Creasy, is old fashioned black-purple eggplant (I like the variety Opal) combined with white petunias. The only fly in this stunning ointment is flea beetles, which unchecked, chew loads of tiny holes in eggplant leaves, leaving them looking like a lawyer after hunting with Dick Chaney. To my surprise, good ol’ diatomaceous earth (various brand names) has given surprisingly good control if applied at the first sign of problems.
The squashes also do best with an early start and Wall’o’water again is handy. Though I habitually direct seed squash, they can be finicky about transplanting, and those doggone little peat pots only make things worse by drying out if you turn your back. Dr. David Bradshaw at Clemson taught me to set out at least a half dozen patty pans and summer squashes right on Tax Day or even before. I use Wall’o’water, but Bradshaw simply lets the seedlings be protected by the warmth of the soil.
To pull this off, though, you’ll have to break a deep habit of organic gardeners. Don’t mulch around your squash. Violates every rule you know, right? There’s a reason for the earliness and the non-mulching. We have a local pest, the squash borer, a big vigorous moth that lays eggs near the base of squash plants. When they hatch the larva steal a page from Alien and chew up the plant from the inside. Suddenly, your big healthy squash deflates like a flat tire.
Borers typically have two hatches per year, one in late June or early July. So, if your squash gets a good start, they will begin producing before the borers arrive, and sometimes be strong enough to withstand their onslaught. Why no mulch? You want the soil to get really warm, and the moths like to bury down in the dark to lay their evil eggs.
One last bit of advice before we all run outside to plant.
Buy a bag of organic black-eyed peas at Harris Teeter, the store brand. Whenever you have a hole in the summer garden, plant some, like you would green beans. Instant cover crop—plus you can eat the snaps! It doesn’t hurt to buy some buckwheat too. That’s another good summer cover that grows very fast and is covered with delicate flowers that nurture beneficials.
Cover crops aren’t just for farmers anymore.
Gardeners with an eye toward sustainability (and beauty) use them to protect the soil, out-compete weeds, and add nutrients. Don’t let areas of your garden sit empty, after the spring veggies are done. It’s taxing for the soil. © Don Boekelheide 2010 all rights reserved
Don Boekelheide
For the past five years, Don Boekelheide, has taught a hands-on food gardening class at Central Piedmont Community College, modeled on his Peace Corps training. Don holds a Master of Science degree in agriculture from Cal Poly and formerly served as a Peace Corp Ag teacher in Togo. He is a former Extension Master Gardener volunteer for Mecklenburg County, NC.
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