Seed and Bean

It’s often been my experience that my most successful projects have been ones where the constraints have been clear and immovable – such as a small budget or a difficult site. When it came to coming up with some way of elegantly supporting my tomato plants, I was definitely constrained by a limited budget (having already spent a goodly amount on the lumber to build the beds and the gravel to cover the paths). So I quickly discarded the idea of using copper piping (so sad – how gorgeous would the patina-ed copper have looked?) and, I soon discovered, plain old metal piping wasn’t much cheaper (it would have cost $120, at least, to have supports for only four beds). Plastic piping wasn’t the look I was going for so, in the end, I settled for bamboo – a slightly more rustic aesthetic than what I aspired to but it was well within budget and I learned a new skill.

I’ve previously used metal spiral stakes to support my tomato plants, curving the stem around the stake as the plant grew. The problem is that my stakes aren’t tall enough for the cherry tomato varieties and not sturdy enough for the heavier fruiting varieties (they tended to lean during the more prolific seasons). The concept for the new supports is the same except that string is used instead of the spiralling metal – a technique used by commercial tomato growers that’s easily adaptable for a residential kitchen garden.

All I needed was a way to support the string and that’s where the bamboo came in (and my knowledge base expanded).

The first step was connecting two bamboo poles together to form an upside-down vee.

Shear lashing is used to connect two bamboo poles together.

A search on the Internet revealed that the best way to do this is with a shear lashing. I calculated how high I wanted to hang the string and marked the height on the two poles. Making sure the tops of the poles were level, I connected them using the shear lashing with some regular garden twine at the location of the height markings.

The second step was installing the vees.

Two of those vees were pounded down onto either side of a bed, making sure that the distance at the base of each vee was the same. A fifth pole was laid horizontally between the two vees and eyeballed to see if it was level – if not, the vees were adjusted up or down.

Bamboo vees installed and levelled.

The third step (and the most time-consuming) was attaching the string.

Using the same garden twine that was used for the lashings, I tied a length of twine to the base of each vee. Then I connected those lengths with another piece of twine (paralleling the horizontal bamboo pole at the top of the vees). Lastly, I tied a length of twine (one per tomato plant) to the horizontal bamboo pole and secured it to the bottom piece of twine – not too tightly because you need this supporting string to have a little give so that you can easily twist the tomato stem around it.

It took me an entire day (including researching knot tying) to build enough supports for 8 beds. The grand total for 36 eight-foot lengths of bamboo and a ball of garden twine cost me $49.93, including tax.And the new supports appear to be more than adequate for the dizzying heights reached by my cherry tomatoes and the heavy fruiting stems.

The vertical support string is tied to the horizontal bamboo pole.	The vertical support string is tied to the horizontal base string.
Twine is tied to the base of each vee pole.	The finished result: the tomato is (gently) twisted around the vertical supporting string.

Best of all, the supports make the kitchen garden feel more like a garden room, although they are visually light enough to not make the small space feel constricted. Birds have taken to perching on the poles and, in my more eccentric moments, I imagine hanging tea light lanterns on them and tenting them with billows of fabric (maybe not at the same time though unless I like all my vegetables to be grilled). Definitely another case where constraints made the project.

In another case of “if life gives you lemons”…the too-tall Genovese basil that I couldn’t get hardened off got pruned back to a reasonable size and I made pesto with the clippings.

Genovese basil is my favorite basil to use in the kitchen.  The leaves are large enough to roll up and slice into a chiffonade and small enough to use whole in my favorite Thai chickpea curry.  Along with mint, basil is one of my quintessential summertime herbs, and, just like mint, I find it easy to grow.  I like to do two sowings a season: the first sowing is done indoors in the early spring, about 6-8 weeks before the last average frost date into newspaper pots, and the second sowing is done in the garden after transplanting the first group of basil.  I do this kind of succession planting because once the heat hits, basil starts to flower which alters the flavor of the leaves.

I usually plant basil around the edge of beds that contain tomatoes – they combine as well in the garden as they do in the kitchen – and they have the same sun, water, and soil requirements.  They both like more than 6 hours of direct sun a day, never let them dry out, and give them a compost-rich, well-draining soil.  The basil gets fertilizer when I feed the tomatoes, a couple of times during the season, with a fish and seaweed organic liquid fertilizer.  And that’s about it, except for harvesting regularly to prevent flowering and to keep the plant bushy.

Which is why, even though I hadn’t managed to plant them out, I was making pesto in May…

The raw ingredients about to be transformed.

The finished product...now comes the fun part of deciding what to eat it with.

Basil Pesto

• 4 c. basil leaves, firmly packed
• 1/2 c. pine nuts, toasted
• 2-4 cloves of garlic (or to taste), sliced
• 1/2 c. parmesan cheese, grated
• 1/2 c. olive oil
• 1 tsp. salt (or to taste)

Combine basil, pine nuts, and garlic in a food processor or blender; pulse mixture until the basil leaves are a bit chopped up.  Add rest of ingredients and process until the mixture is the desired consistency.  Can be stored in the fridge, covered, for about a week (the flavors will intensify but the color will darken).  It can be frozen but leave out the cheese and blend it in when the pesto is thawed.

I tossed it with some pasta and shredded roast chicken but I also like it drizzled over boiled potatoes and steamed asparagus as a warm salad.  It works well as a garnish for tomato-based soups, including minestrone.  And my friend, Ilene, introduced me to the fantastic flavor combination of pesto and pretzels.

So my first harvest of the season is one I usually have to wait until mid-summer to appreciate.  Here’s to being an impatient gardener who starts her seeds too early!

Over these last couple of weeks I’ve been reminded that surviving an Edmonton winter is nothing compared to surviving an Edmonton spring!  A week of warm weather that prompts the pulling off of sweaters and putting on of shorts is abruptly terminated by a week of temperatures barely hovering above the necessity of a parka, and I, along with my tomato, tomatillo, pepper, basil, cucumber, and zucchini plants, are all struggling to adapt.

Zucchini blossoms

Tomatillo blossom

Tomato blossoms

Lemon basil cold damage

I admit, the plants are having a tougher time hardening-off than I am.  Because we have yet to create sweaters for basil plants, some have leaves that are slightly blackened in spots (a sign that temperatures have been too cold for them).  Two out of the four lemon cucumbers I started informed me, in no uncertain terms, that they were unhappy by quickly wilting and then, just as quickly, by dying (wimps!).  The peppers won’t let me know for a while whether they’ve been affected – if they have, they’ll delay blossoming until they feel they’ve met their heat quotient and, if I’m lucky, push out a few fruits before the temperatures drop again.  My heart goes out to the tomatoes and the tomatillos though – they’ve been so eagerly growing, pushing out flowers, clearly anticipating their new life out in the garden (in the newly renovated beds we recently constructed).  But they’re weathering the disappointment the best of all of them except maybe the zucchini; they’ve started to open up some exuberant, relentlessly cheerful blossoms, optimistically hoping for, I guess, a winged pollinator to stop by – but it’s too cold for even a house fly. 

So the hardening-off process will have to start all over again – when the nightime temperatures don’t fall below 10 deg. C.  Usually I start hardening-off my plants by putting them outside in a shaded spot for about four hours when the day time temperature is about 15 deg. C.  I gradually extend the time the plants spend outside and, by the second week, when I start leaving them outside overnight, I move them into a sunnier spot during the day.

If only I could toughen myself up in a similar way…please let spring arrive soon!