November Gardening Article
by Neil DeWitt
This month I will discuss a couple of topics beginning with another tip concerning soil quality. Last month I discussed how to improve your soil’s quality by the addition of organic matter. Not only do we need to know what to put into our garden soil but sometimes it's as useful to know what you shouldn't put in your soil or compost heap as it is to know what you should. Here's a list of no-nos. Some may seem silly, but you'd be amazed what people might consider.
1. Anything you'd use for a house-hold painting or refinishing project, including paint, paint thinner, paint remover, turpentine, varnish, and varnish stripper. Would you drink these? If not, don't put them in your garden.
2. Household chemicals, such as cleaners and drain un-cloggers.
3. Meats or animal fats. They attract rodents, dogs, cats, and other pests.
4. Table or pavement salt. Salt bursts plants' cells, making the plants look burned. In high enough concentrations, it can even kill them. (Many weed killers, both synthetic and organic-are salts.)
5. Dog doo-doo, used cat litter, or, heaven forbid, solid human waste. The droppings of any meat eating mammal can carry harmful pathogens.
6. Drywall. It has become popular in recent years to soak drywall in water, and then add it to soil to help break up clay. Not only is drywall's effectiveness as a soil amendment dubious, but it also can contain compounds you don't want your plants (especially edibles) to be taking up.
7. Pressure-treated wood, which contains arsenic, a toxic heavy metal.
8. Black walnut leaves, bark, or chips. Black walnut contains juglone, a chemical that inhibits the growth of many plants, especially tomatoes.
When the cooler weather draws near many of us are anxious to see the end to the summer garden, especially if we have been busy canning or processing our harvest for storage. However, I can attest to the fact that it is very satisfying to have tomatoes from the garden as part of our Christmas dinner. I definitely enjoy bragging about it to my family members who live up north having had their first frost in late September or early October. There are a few things that one can do to “extend” the harvest season of their tomatoes. One thing to do is to plant a few special varieties of tomatoes that are great for storage. Among these are “Ruby Treasure” and “Red October”, (available from Burpee). If you have storage tomatoes they can be picked green when their blossom ends lighten to a creamy green color. Regular varieties can also be picked green and used as they ripen during the weeks following a killing frost. Even these regular varieties can often make it to the holidays. Be sure to monitor the weather forecast to get your tomatoes picked before a frost damages them.
You can extend your tomato plants’ time in the garden by covering the plants at night with sheets or blankets. It really does not take too much to protect them if the temperature stays above 29 degrees. Even if some of the tomatoes around the fringes of the plant are damaged by frost, the tomatoes closest to the ground or on the interior of the plant will most likely survive without damage.
When a hard freeze is coming, gather your green tomatoes, wipe them with a weak bleach solution (1 tablespoon bleach per gallon of water) to kill any mold spores, and arrange them in a single layer on an indoor shelf or table. Some suggest individually wrapping tomatoes in a small sheet of newspaper to capture the gases they emit for the purpose of hastening the ripening process. However, I prefer to place them on the shelf on top of a sheet or two of newspaper (the paper will absorb any fluids that may come from fruit that is spoiling), and I then place a couple of additional newspaper sheets over them. This allows me to monitor the ripening process (or spoiling process) with a quick daily glance. Others prefer to pull the entire tomato plant and hang them upside down in the barn or similar place. A final suggestion is to plant some tomatoes in clay pots which are buried in a pile of compost in the garden in late summer (in time for the plants to fully “set” fruit), then you can dig up these pots and bring them indoors when cold weather stops their growth. This technique can be messy, yet rewarding; when you are the one WHO has vine ripened tomatoes in winter months.
Off-season tomatoes are not quite the same flavor as your garden fresh vine ripened tomatoes in the summer months, but they still are definitely better than some of those supermarket tennis balls that only look like tomatoes. And besides, there is much joy to be had when you share homegrown garden tomatoes from your garden as part of your holiday meals. The Gila Valley is a wonderful place to enjoy growing a vegetable garden that can continue to reward you even in our cooler months with fruit that hasn’t travelled thousands of miles, been sprayed with pesticides, and artificially turned red in color to look appealing in the supermarket display.
TIP: The best time to plant garlic is the fall.
