Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
I found this flying around my garden a few months ago. Probably because I let it live, it’s now going to lay eggs on my cabbages resulting in them being eaten down to the stems. Anyway, I thought it was interesting enough to make a short post.
Happy New Years everyone!
This was a fun plant to grow this past year. I purchased seeds from Baker Creek, who highly recommended them.
It’s called a tomato, but is a totally different species and has little to do with normal tomatoes aside from the color of the ripened fruit. It should grow in almost any climate, and doesn’t have any special needs.
I suspect in a hotter climate the fruit is a little sweeter, but it was perfectly edible grown in my temperate garden. The fruits were a little on the seedy side, which makes for easier seed saving, but detracted from the taste.
The plants were not very productive, and honestly I would consider them more of a novelty than anything else.
The really pronounced feature of this plant were the thorns, covering nearly the entire plant. The fruits were enclosed in a sort of pod covered with thorns, which dried up and peeled away as the fruit ripened, leaving a luscious tasty fruit ready to be (carefully) picked. This plant really teaches you patience as a gardener, as attempting to harvest a less than completely ripe fruit can be a painful experience!
If anyone is interested, I have some seeds of this available.
This garden belongs to one of my fellow community garden gardeners. As a person, he’s a really great guy. As gardeners however, we are polar opposites. He buys everything from a garden center, his gardening techniques are chemical intensive and does not see the value in organic gardening. He also grows mostly flowers, which are very much a side activity for me.
He does however like to trade plants, and our gardening interests came together when I stopped by and offered him some of my Jerusalem Artichokes. I thought he might eat them, but he doesn’t like healthy food like that. Instead he decided to plant them, something that prompted an excited outburst of warnings from me that went completely unheeded. He said he liked the flowers, and had been looking for some to plant for a long time now.
So he planted them and, like he always does, doused them in chemical fertilizer. You can see the nearly 4 meter high plants, on the right side of his garden in front of the electricity pylon.
I went by in the fall while he was busy digging up the tubers in the ground, and warned him he better get as many out now as he could find, before spring came. I reminded him I warned him not to plant them. He pointed to another garden down the way, and said that gardener had asked for some, so next year they’ll be growing there too.
Underwood Gardens was recently brought to my attention as an independent seed company in the US specializing in heirloom/OP seeds. They’ve been around for a while now, and I’m not sure why I’ve overlooked them before. While I don’t have much experience with them, their catalog looks great and I always think it’s great to support family owned seed companies. I hope some people reading this will buy some of their seeds and report back on your experiences.
They have a blog with a domain name Terroir Seeds, and this is worth having a look at too.
There may be too many seed companies to list them all, but if anyone knows of independent seed companies/retailers specializing in OP/heirloom seeds, not in the list on my links page, I hope you will let me know about them. I’d like to include as many as possible.
It’s still sort of early days here, but this past year I began experimenting with nitrogen fixing trees in the garden. In this case I’ve planted a number of black alder trees, like the one you see pictured above.
Many gardeners plant nitrogen fixing plants like peas or beans, or a cover crop like clover. As a rule, these grow and leave behind more nutrients than they consume, especially in the form of nitrogen. By turning these plants under, you also benefit from the organic material they leave in the ground.
Nitrogen fixing trees however serve a slightly different purpose. Nitrogen fixing trees are perennials, and so keep growing in your garden. They also have deep root structures, allowing them to fix nitrogen far below ground level.
Most nitrogen fixing trees are very hardy and fast growing. They tend to tolerate frequent cutting back, and so the idea is you cut them back as they start to get in the way of other plants. As well as producing nitrogen, nitrogen fixing trees can also consume nitrogen, and cutting them back is important to minimize their using up their own nitrogen. In particular, producing seeds is very nitrogen intensive, so you should cut them back before they do this.
As well as fixing nitrogen in the ground for future use, in many cases nitrogen fixing trees can feed other plants when their roots comingle. This has often found to be effective with fruit trees, and I intend to experiment with this.
I expect to see the benefits of these trees more in the coming years. What I did notice was shortly after planting, as the trees started to grow, quite a number of weeds grew agressively around the base of the plant indicating the availability of nitrogen. As the trees became more established, this was less obvious, presumably because they were fixing the nitrogen deeper in the ground.
I’m hoping the trees will improve the overall nitrogen levels in my garden, which in general are a bit low now. I think the reason nitrogen levels are low is because of previous excessive dependence on nitrogen based fertilizers, which have now washed away.
