Improving Chances of Gardening Success



Twisted Curly new Tomato Growth

Imagine that a new gardener in Tucson, AZ (USDA Zone 9a) buys some generic tomato seeds and plants all of them in mid-May. What happens? The few that grow quickly die because the odds of success are over 1,000 to 1. Will planting more seeds increase the gardener’s chances of success? Probably not much.

What will increase the gardener’s chances for success while decreasing his chance of failure is knowing and applying concepts about planting dates, climate conditions, soil conditions, what conditions help tomatoes grow best.

I recently had to pull out almost half of my tomato plants because of disease. I am hoping that, over the last few years I have improved my chances of success with growing tomatoes from odds of 1,000 to 1 to closer to 30 to 1. Meaning that I fail 30 times for every 1 time I succeed. Good thing most tomato seed packets contain over 30 seeds. My success rate is much higher with plants that grow well in Tucson’s climate.

Mottled and curled leaves from Disease.

Each time a gardener fails at something a more insightful learning is exposed.

Here are a few things I have learned through study or plain experience about a garden’s temperature and disease that have helped me.

Temperature:

- Radiant heat in winter is good. Radiant heat in the summer is bad. Walls, buildings, some trees, and plastic bottles can provide radiant heat.

- South facing slopes, walls or buildings in winter is optimal. East facing slopes or west side shade in the summer is optimal.

- Troughs or furrows in the garden keep plants cooler and wet in the summer while hills keep plants warmer and drier in the winter.

West Side Corn, Lowered Tomatoes while still needing radiant heat at night.

Disease:



More diseased tomato plants

 - Once a disease attacks, remove the whole plant immediately (roots & all). This will decrease the spread of disease and hasten the time when that vegetable variety may be grown there again.



- Composting diseased plant material spreads the disease. Don’t do it! Burn it or throw it away.

-Once disease hits do not plant the same plant in that soil for at least a year (or more depending upon extent of disease). Options to overcome this is to move next year’s planting location for that crop, growing other vegetable crops there, or using new soil that has never been used for growing that crop before.

- If you plant a disease-resistant variety in a diseased bed, it will most likely get the disease.

Disease can mangle a tomato plant

- Growing legumes next to other plants or before other plants helps to increase beneficial bacteria in the soil and may decrease the chances of disease (as a preventative measure). My best success with this has been to start the legumes a few weeks before introducing my main crop. As long as they are not competing for light, experience has taught me that growing a crop of beans near other plants has only benefited the nearby plant.

- Learn about each vegetable variety you plan to grow. Know its needs, its strengths, it weaknesses, and how to combat potential problems.

- It is good to occasionally take a break from higher maintenance crops so that you can appreciate your other plants.


-Do not treat disease as a bad thing. Learning about plant disease enables the gardener to adjust his gardening practices and increase his chances of future success.


Empty Spot where I pulled tomato plants out of the garden.

My chances of seeing my tomatoes live may be as good as 1 in 20

 

To anyone who lives in a climate where the odds are stacked against you – I feel for you. As you find out all you can about growing things you want within your climate you will be increasing your chances of success. Everyone fails at sometime. It is only those who learn from their failures who can cut their losses and improve their opportunity for success. The more I learn about my garden, the better I increase my chances of getting something right. As Thomas Edison once said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Does Soil Inoculant really work?

When I have problems with digestion I often benefit from eating yogurt that contains the Acidophilus bacteria. There are products that can help a plant’s roots, like yogurt can help a person’s stomach. These products are often made out of nitrogen-fixing bacteria (rhizomes) and are touted as helping legumes get good head-start. Products in this class are often loosely referred to as “soil inoculants”.

Yogurt contains beneficial bacteria.

At first I thought that rhizomic soil inoculant was some kind of propaganda marketed by gardening companies to lure gullible gardeners into spending more money on their products. However, a recent experience has taught me otherwise. A while ago I had been given a gift certificate from a family member to a large seed company. I could not find too many open-pollinated seeds in their catalogue so I chose to add soil inoculant to my purchase. I didn’t think the inoculant did too much the first time I tried it and I had nothing to compare it to. In hindsight though, my first crop of peas was better than any other crop I have had since.

Soil Inoculant contains beneficial bacteria.

I have been growing Chinese Long Beans the last few years and have noticed that they often take a while to sprout. Recently I tried soaking my Chinese Long Beans overnight, then draining the water and rolling the seeds in soil inoculant. Within a few days half of the seeds began sprouting. They continued to sprout again and again. I have never seen such high germination in this seed variety and can only attribute it to the soil inoculant. Since then the beans have continued to grow at an accelerated rate in comparison with growing them in years past. I don’t believe that using soil inoculant for legumes is the only thing legumes need, though I do believe the inoculant helps germination rates, increase plant vigor, and speed up the time between sowing bean seeds and reaping a crop.

Step 1: Soak Beans overnight

Step 2: Put soil inoculant in a container.

Step 3: Rinse out beans

Step 4: Mix inoculant with beans

Step 5: Plant beans with inoculant

Step 6: Watch your plants grow!

There are a variety of soil inoculants out there and I cannot speak to the effectiveness of any other variety than the one I used. Some have a few good bacteria varieties while others contain a host of beneficial organisms. One farmer even conducted an unbiased comparison of the affect of using inoculants (and some other things) in his soil. Given my recent success with soil inoculant I will definitely consider investing in these bacteria in the future.

Of Sparkler Radishes and Little Girls

Should you have the good fortune of meeting Reggie Smith, the owner of Westwind Seeds, she will gladly tell you about her experience as a child with Sparkler Radishes, which inspired her love of gardening and seeds. My daughter happened to be the fortunate recipient of some of Reggie’s Sparkler Radish seeds. From that time until I gave in, my daughter asked me again and again to plant her seeds. Though it took me some time to make a spot in my summer garden (the kids’ garden was being pasteurized) I eventually found a spot she could plant her radishes.



Daughter with Sparkler Radish Seeds.

To give you a background on Sparkler Radishes they are red, round, and are in the mid-spicy range for heat. Some of the radishes can be quite hot while others can be quite mild. In any case, they are your regular grocery-store type radish.



My daughter showing off her Sparkler Radishes



Within a few days of my daughter planting her Sparkler Radishes she came into the house shouting “My plants are growing, my plants are growing!” Each day she checks on the plants when she wakes up and when she comes back from school and each day she says the same thing.



A 2-week old Sparkler Radish - They grow quick!



So, what am I growing these days? Children. Well – more like raising them. And I find it much more rewarding then my garden will ever be. Gardening helps me to find correlations between my family and my garden like this: What is the similarity between Sparkler Radishes and little girls? They both grow up quick!



Little girls - they grow quick!

For the Love of Spinach

The pattern has endured throughout garden history…

The boys come along,

They meet up with the girls,

Love is in the air,



Male Spinach seeds releasing pollen

And seeds are formed.

Spinach Seeds being formed near the stalk.

For further questions, go ask your Mom and Dad.

It came as a surprise to me that spinach plants grow up to be either male or female, and do not have both the male and female flowers on the same plant. The term for this is dioecious, meaning two houses. One way you can imagine this is having all the boys in one house (plant), with all the girls in another house (plant). As long as they are in the same area, seed will be formed.

Seed to Seed recommends having a minimum of 4 female plants and 2 male plants to continue the vegetable variety without any detrimental inbreeding. I laughed at this, because you cannot determine which is male or female until the stalks grow. So the basic rule of thumb is the more the better. As spinach requires a large isolation distance to retain varietal purity, small-scale gardeners may find it easiest to save seed from one variety per season.

 

Seed to Seed

One of the things I enjoy about gardening is the vast amount of knowledge needed to grow just one vegetable. It is truly miraculous that, despite all of our blunders as gardeners, a plant will sprout, grow and - at times - flourish. The last book I read by Carol Deppe about Breeding Your Own Vegetable Varieties sited the book Seed to Seed as having information that I really wanted to know about growing melons. Seed to Seed turned out to have all of that information and so much more!

 The book Seed to Seed is written by Suzanne Ashworth in collaboration with the Seed Saver’s Exchange. The first part of the book is a wonderful read that overviews the importance of seed saving, explains how botanical classification works, elaborates on pollination and flower structure, gives ideas on maintaining varietal purity as well as proper techniques for cleaning and storing seeds.

The second (larger) section of the book goes over all the major vegetable families and gives information about many common and rare vegetable varieties. Each plant section contains an introduction to the plant, its botanical classification, a section on pollination crossing and isolation, a section on seed production harvest and processing, and seed statistics. The individual plant sections also contain recommendations from master gardeners in each region of the United States. These gardeners suggest appropriate planting dates and often elaborate on how to care for the plant in the specific area.

So, here is a little of what I learned from reading this book:

A perfect flower contains both the male and female parts of the plant in one place and is able to pollinate itself. An example of a perfect flower is a tomato flower.



Ozark Pink Tomato Blossoms mutate in Tucson's late-summer heat



A monoecious plant is one that has two separate flowers for male and female on the same plant. Two examples of monecious plants are melons and cucumbers.



Cucumbers and melons exhibit monecious flowers



A dioecious plant is one where each plant has either male or female flowers and both are needed to pollinate. An example of this is spinach.

 

Dioecious  female spinach requires a male spinach plant



 A self-incompatible flower is one in which requires bees or people to pollinate it, as the flower is perfect but will not form seeds if pollinated by itself. An example of a self-incompatible flower is broccoli or cauliflower.

 

Brocolli flowers are self-incompatible



Additional fun things I learned included the word “rouge”, which means to remove off-type plants and guidelines for using hot water to kill pathogen on seeds. Reading about the vegetable varieties made me eager to try out some new vegetable varieties such as the Jelly Melon.



Seed saving is a valuable skill worth developing!


Saving seeds from your garden can allow you to become more self-sufficient. Perhaps your local nursery won’t be as happy about you producing your own seed, but your finances will, and along the way you can develop skills that will enable you to be prepared for things to come. As I harvest my own seed my hope is that, if I had to, I could support my family from the food I grow.