From the ripe and ready Univest studios at Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem PA, it is time for another lycopene-rich episode of chemical-free horticultural hijinks You Bet Your Garden!
Tomatoes are America's favorite fruit, right?
So they must be the easiest to grow.
Wrong!
Tomato treachery lurks behind every hot pepper.
I'm Mike McGrath, and on today's You Bet Your Garden, we'll discuss the number one cause of tomato troubles and how to easily avoid it.
And we'll take lots of your fabulous phone call questions, comments, tips, tricks, suggestions, and furiously fine fulminations.
So keep your eyes and your ears right here, cats and kittens, because it's all coming up faster than the next door neighbor yelling, "Don't plant there!"
right after this.
- Support for You Bet Your Garden is provided by the Espoma company, offering a complete selection of natural organic plant foods and potting soils.
More information about Espoma and the Espoma natural gardening community can be found at... - Welcome to another thrilling and brand-new episode of You Bet Your Garden, broadcasting from the Univest Public Media Center.
I am your host, Mike McGrath.
Before we get into too much extra trouble, I want to mention that I will be back on the road for a very short period of engagements in June.
So if you are interested in seeing what I look like, God bless you, but we'll have details on those coming up.
In the meantime, what are we doing this week?
Tomatoes?
Tomatoes.
If you have done everything right and your tomatoes have turned out terribly wrong, we can help you.
Although we can't help you forget the previous 20 years of your not knowing it!
At any rate, we're also going to take lots of your fabulous phone calls.
Bruce.
- Hello.
- Hi, Bruce.
- Mike, um, I've been growing Brandywine tomatoes for about ten years.
And the greenhouse that I initially bought them from just went out of business.
So I grew some from seed and some from, uh, you know, little stores that sell plants.
But I've never gotten the same type of plants or quality.
I mean, the first time I ever had a Brandywine I thought I was in heaven.
It was so wonderful.
Uh, so my question really is, so I went on the internet and did some searching, and I found out about that there was a Sudduth strain of Brandywine tomatoes.
- Say it again?
- Sudduth.
S-U-D-D-U-T-H. - OK. - Strain of Brandywines.
- Is that an Amish colony or something?
- Oh, I don't know.
They had said it was a strain, and if you bought this strain, it might, um... ..it would be better.
For whatever reason, and I was just wondering if you had any experiences in that, uh, because my real question was, uh, it's...
I'm not so sure that, you know, when I grew these Brandywines from seed, I was getting quality seeds.
You know, there's like seed exchanges, etc, that...uh, there's a lot of them out there.
And so I guess maybe, uh... And I don't know that you can't even mention it on the air... - Go ahead.
- ..of one company over another, but... - I got nothing left to lose.
Oh!
- No, I bought my seed, one of them, which I thought was...
It was called the Seed Exchange.
- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The Seed Savers Exchange.
- Yeah.
- Which was originally formed a long time ago as an exchange of rare seeds.
And it eventually built itself into a major company.
They have doomsday vaults for preserving great seeds and everything like that.
So, go ahead.
- So, any event, I still didn't get those results, you know, I'll say that first, uh, two years or so, uh... And I was just disappointed.
I mean, I've grown them each year.
I hope for outstanding results and don't get them.
- OK. - And so... - Now, um, you started out with seeds from the Seed Savers Exchange?
- Well, that was probably about... ..say, my fifth year that I was growing this.
You know, after failure, after failure, I thought, Well, I'm going to go and look on the internet and see.
What's supposedly is a good place that I can buy quality Brandywine seeds, and, uh, so anyway, I just didn't get it.
And, uh...
I don't know what I what I was doing wrong.
- Wait a minute.
Yeah, my father was a homicide detective.
OK?
So you can wander all over Baltimore and when you come back to my spot, I'm still going to say you did not answer my question.
When you originally grew this ambrosia tomato... ..you grew it from seeds from... - No, the first two years I bought plants from this bankrupt, uh, who is now bankrupt.
Uh, and so, you know, it just said Brandywine.
I got them, and it was just...couldn't believe the quality.
And then I had no place to go, you know.
They weren't there.
And then I just I think I bought, uh, like a Burpee one year and then I went to the Seed Savers Exchange.
- OK, OK, OK, listen, what color were the tomatoes?
- They were dark red.
- Yeah, it's not a Brandywine.
True Brandywines are big and pink, and the pink displays the extra sugars that are inside.
So you may have been growing a generic Brandywine which pleased you immensely.
There are red ones, there are pink ones.
There are all sorts of things.
Now, if you... How old are you and where do you live?
I live in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and I'm, uh, I'm old, I'm 78.
- OK. Um... And you're... Are you proficient at starting seeds?
- Oh, yeah, yeah, I've done it for many years and I grow them in my front window.
And the only problem is you just don't get enough light there and the plants get spindly.
- You will never get good tomatoes that way.
If you go to youbetyourgarden.org, click on previous Questions of the Week or Answers To All Your Garden Questions, in all of the seed-starting pieces, we explain that you have to have light.
If your starts are tall and spindly, garbage in, garbage out.
- Yeah.
- So, if you're going to do this seriously, you need a proper seed-starting set-up.
First, I want you to get a catalog called Totally Tomato.
- Oh, OK. - And then I want you to go back to the Seed Savers Exchange.
I would also recommend... ..Amy Goldman's book on tomatoes.
That may help you find the right variety, but if you raise them in a sunny windowsill, they're never going to taste as good as tomatoes that had a good early childhood.
You know, you can't cheapen your way to a perfect tomato.
OK?
- I will do that, yeah.
- OK. Goodbye for now.
Glen!
Welcome to You Bet Your Garden.
- Thanks, Mike.
Hi, Mike.
- Hello, Glen, how are you?
- I'm very well, Mike.
How are you?
- I'm ducky!
Even Galactus is afraid of Ducky.
Who knows what his powers are.
Where are you, man?
- I'm in Lexington, Michigan.
That's a little town on the southwest shore of Lake Huron.
- Mm-hmm.
What can we do for you?
- Well, last week you talked about re-using potting soil, and I think you said that you use yours for a millennium, is that correct?
- I'm so glad to hear from... Did I talk to you then or was it somebody else?
- No, it was not me.
- I thought after the show that I had bollixed that one up.
So, and... Are you calling specifically about the danger of verticillium wilt being carried over?
-I am calling about that.
Yes.
- OK. All right.
- I have a specific reason I'm asking you this, but that's what I'm calling about.
- Verticillium and fusarium wilts are naturally occurring soil-borne pathogens.
They live in every inch of every soil just about everywhere.
But luckily, they have a group of susceptible plants and a group of plants that do not react to their presence in the sale...
Soil?
Sale?
Soil for sale!
My theory has always been, with potting soil, which many old timers used to call soil-free mix, that if no garden soil is ever introduced to a container... ..where's the verticillium coming from?
Last summer... Um... Renee Shepherd of Renee's Garden called me up and said she had discovered the world's greatest tomato.
I said, OK.
So I grew them out from seed in pure potting soil and, oh, my God, these things were ridiculous.
They were three feet high and they had like 25 pounds of big tomatoes on each one.
And they were the dark tomatoes.
You know, they call them black, but they're actually deep purple.
And people went nuts for them.
And then she told me they're heirlooms, that the only reason these Tasmanian Chocolates exist is because people saved the seed.
So what my assistant Mel and I are doing right now, so we're emptying out all of the old pots, anything that had soil in it.
Now, some of that just goes into the garden to fill in holes or, you know, bring the soil up to the surface.
But once we get a wheelbarrow close to full, then we open up a virgin bag of organic seed-starting potting soil mix, and we mix that in and that becomes... You know, that freshens it up.
Obviously, we always had perlite.
I have a perlite disorder, and we're always adding perlite to the mix.
And, you know, so far, so good.
I also have to say that in my garden I don't see a lot of verticillium wilt, which is weird because I never keep records.
And, you know, generally I'm tired.
"Alright, a good place for a tomato."
"No, no, not here.
Not here."
"Oh, come on.
Grow up."
- Well, you're telling me what I want to hear, because I never grew anything before.
I'm a garden helper.
But I decided I was going to grow tomatoes last year from seed.
And I decided I was going to grow them on the second deck of my house to 18-inch pots.
And I had to haul this gardening potting soil up there, and I don't want to do that every two or three years.
So are you telling me perhaps I can go ahead and keep reusing that?
I did add home-made compost.
- OK. - That's the only thing.
Plus, perlite.
- I think that's the aces, man.
I think that's exactly the way to handle this situation.
- It sounds great.
- Less work for Mother.
Yeah.
You take care.
- I appreciate your advice.
Keep up the good work.
- Thank you, sir.
Well, it is time for the Question of the Week.
And before we go into it, I want to mention that, yes, with the seed starting and now the tomato planting, we're going back to kindergarten.
Although many people didn't go to kindergarten!
So we're really trying to lay out a path for success because it seems that we have... ..one third of our audience is newbies every year and that audience is growing.
The old ones aren't going away.
So we figure it's very important to get them off to a good start so they think this gardening thing is easy.
Question of the Week.
Same with the twist.
Tina in Woodbourne Kentucky, writes... Hmm.
Maybe!
First, a reminder of the easiest way to resolve most of your questionable issues is to go to the show's official website youbetyourgarden.org and click on the archive of Frequently Asked Questions.
You will magically be transported to a page of unicorns, mermaids and previous Questions of the Week that Gardens Alive kindly maintains for us.
I just went there to check it out, and tomato rotation typed into the search box yielded no results.
Wha...wha... Then I thought, keep it simple, and just enter the word tomatoes, and up came over a dozen recent articles, most of them including warnings about the all-important three-year rotation.
I will now plunge into the details.
Otherwise, this article will turn into a treatise on how to use a phone book.
Ask your parents or grandparents about phone books.
Their response will keep you enthralled for a good 20 seconds.
Anyway, there are soil-borne wilts - that's the real name - in just about all of our dirt.
Verticillium is prominent in cold climes, with fusarium taking over in the south and west.
These wilts occur naturally and really nothing can be done about them.
They are pathogens in the soil that attach themselves to the roots of susceptible plants, especially, as we have all sadly learned in our gardening careers, tomatoes!
Boy, they were doing great last year.
But not just tomatoes.
The Morton Arboretum in Illinois reports that some trees are also victimized, including maples and magnolias.
Luckily, they also include a nice long list of naturally resistant trees.
These pathogens attach themselves to the roots of susceptible plants and essentially plug up the pipes that transport water throughout the plant.
Here's how it works with tomatoes.
Year one, in soil that had not previously grown tomatoes.
Let's designate the area in which you will intern this first tomato seedling as Planting Spot X, because it just sounds so cool.
The first season in Spot X should be problem free unless you or the hornworms manage to screw it up.
Or should I say, seem to be problem free?
Underground, the pathogens are already getting to know those attractive roots and begin to colonize them.
By the end of this first season, you may notice a little bit of yellowing on the lowest leaves of the plant.
No problem.
But make sure to remove any discolored leaves promptly.
It may slow down the progression.
More importantly, it makes your neighbors think you're a better gardener than reality might allow.
"How come their tomatoes don't have any yellow leaves?"
Well, because they have many fewer leaves, but none of them are yellow.
At the end of the season, remove the entire plant, being sure to get rid of all the roots.
Trash at all.
Do not compost it.
Now you have to remember where that first Spot X was for the following season.
If you're growing indeterminate tomatoes, these are tall plants that grow all season long and can reach 14 feet or higher, I strongly recommend welded wire tomato cages supported by several metal stakes or lengths of rebar.
Always remember, stake the cage, not the tomato.
I'll go into more cagey details next week, but, in brief, you cut six foot lengths of welded wire fencing, not chicken wire, in your driveway.
Form them into cylinders.
Place one of these cylinders over each baby plant and then secure them with your stakes.
Yeah, they're tiny now, but each adult plant could still be loaded down with 40, 50 pounds of fruit by August, so make sure that cage don't blow over in the wind.
Double bonus.
Each cage that is built to our precise instructions is approximately two feet wide, which is perfect for a tall tomato plant.
Allow a full foot of open space all around the outskirts of the cages, and you have an intensive planting with enough room for good airflow between those plants for disease prevention.
We move on to October.
Getting frostbite is not gardening.
Pull up your plants and, one, just leave the cages in place and, two, fill the non-empty cages with shredded fall leaves so you'll have the world's finest mulch in the spring.
Let's go back to this priceless Spot X in season two.
I say, go for it, grow them!
Empty out the cages and reserve the leaves.
Plant this year's tomato right on X marks the spot, being careful not to nick or otherwise injure the plant.
Be a little heavy handed with water as the plants are now impaired in their ability to drink it.
Pull discolored leaves promptly.
There's going to be a lot more of them this season, which is good.
Removing discolored leaves at the base of a crowded plant allows more precious airflow to the base, where all things happen, and your neighbors will be even more jealous.
Mulch heavily with the shredded leaves you collected and plan your move to the next new X season.
Nobody gets away with three years in a row.
You plant them there and they're dead by July, so pick a new spot at least three feet away and use heavy-duty stakes to remind you to plant something else.
Well, that sure was an exhaustive look at proper tomato planting now, wasn't it?
Luckily for you, you can read this masterpiece over at your "leesure" or your "lesure", because the Question of the Week always appears in print at the Gardens Alive website.
Just click the link for the website, which is still and will forever be... Gardens Alive supports the You Bet Your Garden Question of the Week, and you'll always find the latest Question of the Week at the Gardens Alive website.
You Bet Your Garden is a half-hour public television show, an hour-long public radio show and podcast, all produced and delivered to you weekly by the Univest Studios at Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, PA. Our show is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.
You Bet Your Garden was created by Mike McGrath.
Crazy Diamond Mike McGrath was created when he defied Pink Floyd's instructions not to stare at the sun.
Yikes.
My producer is threatening to spread verticillium on my Romas from Venice if I don't get out of this studio.
We must be out of time.
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I'm your host, Mike McGrath.
And if the folks on the second floor keep playing golf, I'll see you again next week and the week after that and the week after that and the week after that.