Winter Interlude
(Garden • Nature)
Real winter around here is determined by the pecans. When all their leaves have blown off (which occurred about a week ago), then it’s really winter.
Some years, like this one so far, the winter doesn’t amount to much more than a windy rest between growing seasons. So far we haven’t had a real freeze, but we no doubt will have at least two or three by the end of February.
Then things will warm, and the temptation will be to plant the spring garden. But real spring around here is determined by the pecans, too, and failure to heed their quiet advice is to invite freeze-burning your tomatoes. The pecan trees have a knack for never putting out leaf buds until after the last cold weather snap. I don’t know how they know, but they do.
Meanwhile, here at the One Acre Ranch it’s time to start tomato, pepper and eggplant seeds – actually, I’m probably a little late. I’ll start them in nursery flats filled with a light, fine potting soil mixture, water them lightly and evenly, cover them with plastic wrap and put them on top of plant mats – rectangular pieces of heavy plastic resembling doormats, which have electrical heat coils running through them. They’ll keep the seed soil about 15 degrees warmer than the air, which is especially useful in inducing pepper seeds to sprout.
I try to start the seeds eight weeks before I intend to put them into the ground – which would be somewhere around March 10, if the pecans tell me it’s OK by then.
Many respected growers in other parts of the country advise against trying to be the first one on the block to get your tomato plants in the ground. They correctly believe it’s a waste to put the plants into soil that hasn’t warmed up yet, because it can actually restrain growth.
But around here we’re not racing to be the first one on the block to show off ripe tomatoes – we’re racing against the sun. Some tomatoes (and quite a few sweet pepper varieties) will just stop producing, or stop producing very well, when the highs climb up above, say, 95 on a regular basis. That can happen by mid-June in south Texas, which means that for some varieties, you may have just 90 days or so from a mid-March planting until your crop is cooked.
So to get the most yield, Zone 9 gardeners along the Gulf Coast need to get their warm-weather vegetables in the ground as early in the spring as they can, but after the last frost, and after the soil has warmed just enough to let the pecans bud out.
Another thing you can do is grow varieties known to produce well in the heat. Celebrity, Solar and a variety of other hybrid tomatoes are sold on that basis. I’ll still plant one of my favorite hybrids (Big Bite), because we’re prone to fusarium wilt around here, and this one is very resistant yet maintains good flavor.
But this year I’m going to concentrate on planting a variety of promising heirloom and open-pollinated varieties. I expect to get a lot of great-tasting tomatoes, and I expect a lot of plants will succomb to the heat and disease by July. But I also expect that just a few plants will prove to be clearly superior to the others in our somewhat extreme growing conditions, and from those I’ll take one big fruit each, and save the seeds for the following year. Then I’ll select the best-performing plants that year, and save seeds from those plants.
By the third or fourth generation, my expectation is that I’ll have developed tomato plants that are much better adapted to south Texas weather, and our particular soil, than plants obtained from a nursery, or grown from seed purchased from my favorite supplier in Florida.
The same holds true of peppers, although many of the hot varieties seem to thrive right out of the box (or seed packet) here. I have some tobasco peppers that are four years old, having survived three winters (although they don’t produce much anymore).
As for eggplants, I’m on my third generation of an heirloom variety that is beginning to grow like a weed.
Meanwhile, the last of the lemons and persimmons have been picked, our young Satsuma orange tree isn’t producing fruit yet, and the loquats are small, green and hard and won’t ripen until April. So between now and then, with the possible exception of a couple of bunches of Raja Puri bananas, we won’t have any fresh home-grown fruit for awhile.
Unless I can find a really late-ripening citrus, I’m not sure how to fill that gap with anything fresh. We are, however, looking for a freezer, to preserve future big persimmon, blackberry and loquat harvests for winter days just such as these.
→ B.Dunn, Jan 10, 2009, 06 13 am
