Backyard Wisdom

Pondering the Compost Pile

The rain has come and gone. The temperature is in the 50s. Unlike parts of the nation, the weather is seasonal for Alabama. But still too soggy to really get out and work in the garden. So about the only thing I can tinker with at the moment in the garden is the compost pile.

The other day I took some kitchen scraps to add to the compost pile. As I was piling maple leaves over the sad scraps of tea bags, egg shells, and strawberry caps, I got to wondering about just what you could add to a compost pile. Well, besides the things that leap to mind like leaves, kitchen scraps and the like.

Well, the garden blogosphere had an answer for me the next morning. Check out this post by Theresa Loe at her blog, Garden Fresh Living. Have to admit I never thought of watering my compost pile with the water we take out of the aquarium when we do water changes. Here’s another good list from the University of Florida’s Online Composting Center. Makes you think that maybe there are more things you can compost instead of sending to a landfill, doesn’t it?

More on Tomatoes

In my last blog post, I talked about the different traits found in tomato varieties. Tony Glover and Chip East, who are both regional horticulture agents with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, have developed a great list of tomato varieties. It breaks each down by fruit type and size, growth habit and disease resistance.

On this list, you will find several varieties that say “heat set.” These varieties have been bred for tolerance to high day and night temperatures common in the summer and early fall.

Flowering in tomatoes is sensitive to temperature. When temperatures get above 85 degrees F during the day and 72 degrees F at night, tomato flowers will drop off the plant. The longer the plants are exposed to high temperatures, the more serious the effect on flowering. Older or heirloom home garden varieties are more sensitive to high temperatures than many newer hybrids.

Here’s another list of tomato varieties from Cornell. It also includes which seed companies usually carry particular varieties.

Time to Order Tomato Seeds

Tomatoes are probably the most popular vegetable in the summer garden. But in most nurseries and the garden centers of most big chain stores, only a few varieties are available. What are you to do if you want something different from Better Boy or Sweet 100? Well, if you want to sample the bounties of the thousands of tomato varieties, you are going to have to grow your own transplants.

Photo courtesy of the Tulsa Master Gardeners

If this is your plan, you had better get busy and get your seeds ordered. Hopefully, seed companies will still have the varieties you are interested in. Also, you will be able to better time starting your seed with when you want the transplants ready to go in your garden.

But the big question is how do you decide which varieties to buy. The key is knowing some basics about tomatoes.

How They Grow

Determinate tomato varieties produce shorter branches ending in flower clusters. Sometimes determinate tomatoes are called bush tomatoes. They generally produce for a shorter harvest period -- about 4 to 6 weeks. Gardeners often prefer indeterminate varieties. They grow and produce fruit as long as growing conditions are right. But because they grow all season, indeterminates need caging or trellising to support the plants.

How Long to Harvest

Tomato varieties are classified as early season, midseason and late season. This means how many days from setting out transplants until the first fruit is picked. Early season varieties range from 50 or fewer days to 69 days. Midseason varieties range from 70 days to 79 days. Late varieties require 80 days or more to ripen fruit.

Most early varieties won’t produce well once summer temperatures begin to soar. You will also find the actual number of days it takes a particular variety to produce fruit may vary from garden to garden and year to year. Factors such as weather, soil temperature, date of transplant and amount of light available can affect maturity.

What’s The Final Use

Tomato varieties also vary by use. There are large slicer types—perfect for a tomato sandwich. There are paste types for people who want to make their own tomato sauces. Then there are the cherry varieties for salads and snacking. There are also types suited for canning and stuffing.

How Many Parents
Tomatoes are either open pollinated varieties or hybrid varieties. If a plant is open pollinated, planted in isolation and you save the seeds, those seeds will produce plants very nearly identical to the parent plant.

Hybrid tomatoes have different parents and are combined to create varieties with specific traits such as disease resistance, fruit size or growth habits. Saving seed from hybrid plants will not produce the original variety.

There is a lot of interest in growing heirloom vegetables, but the word heirloom can be confusing. An heirloom tomato is not a variety of tomato you can go to the garden center and ask for by that name alone. They are varieties whose seeds have generally been passed down from generation to generation.

Heirloom varieties are not hybrids like many modern varieties. They are open pollinated and have been around for at least 50 years as stable named varieties. They often come back true to the parent even when near other tomatoes because they don’t cross pollinate easily. This trait meant tomatoes were passed from family member to family member within a community over long periods of time relatively unchanged.

How Does It Taste

Some tomatoes are more acidic while others have a sweeter taste. There is no right or wrong —just personal preference. But by growing a number of different varieties, you may find you prefer the tase of several varieties instead of a single old faithful variety that you planted for years.

Is it Resistant

Some varieties of tomatoes have resistance to one or more common diseases. It is shown by one or more letters following the name of the variety. The most common letters are: (V) verticillium wilt, (F) fusarium wilt, (N) nematodes, (TMV) tobacco mosaic virus and (A) alternaria. You won’t find any varieties that are resistant to every disease. Also understand that resistance doesn’t mean that a particular plant won’t get a disease, but only that it will tolerate the disease better than a plant with no resistance

New Year's Resolution: Don't Pollute Our Waterways

To begin the new year, Backyard Wisdom welcomes a guest blogger, Chuck Browne. Chuck is both a friend and a colleague. While Chuck serves now as the Lee County coordinator for the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, the majority of his professional life has focused on gardening and home grounds.
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With the welcome rains we have had in the last few weeks, the state climatologist took Alabama out of the drought status we have been under for the last two years. Along with higher rainfall and increased water flows into creeks, rivers and lakes, comes the addition of some unwanted substances.

Many people are completely unaware that they contribute to water pollution in some way, however unintentional it may be. If your car drips oil in the driveway or someone dumps the liquid residue from a carpet steam cleaner into the storm sewer, it ends up in a creek or river somewhere, adding to the pollution of someone’s drinking water.

Sometimes gardening activities can cause surface water pollution. Recently, I attended a meeting about Saugahatchee Creek, its watershed and how everyday activities affect it. I found out that the two main pollutants found in this creek are sediment and phosphorous.

Sediment as Pollution

How sediment gets into the creek is obvious. Bare dirt, sloping land and rainfall, particularly heavy rainfall, will send sediment into waterways. Sediment negatively affects streams, creeks and rivers by damaging or destroying habitats for fish, aquatic insects, amphibians and reptiles.

Fertilizer Component as Pollution

What surprised me most was that phosphorous, a main ingredient in the fertilizer we use, was the other main pollutant in this creek. Looking at a map of the watershed, you see the headwaters begin on the north side of Opelika and Auburn and the watershed itself drains significant areas of both cities.
Another map I saw outlined areas where high levels of phosphorous were found in tributaries to this creek. Most of them came from residential areas. No specific places could be pinpointed as the source of the phosphorous. It could only be determined that multiple sites were contributors to these high levels.

Sometimes it’s easy to point fingers at others. Sometimes it’s harder to point the finger at ourselves. Overapplication of fertilizer, particularly those high in phosphorous, is contributing to a major source of pollution in Saugahatchee Creek.

Solutions?

What can we do? If the culprit was one or two, or even several sources, the problem would be easy to fix. However, there are literally thousands of property owners with lawns. Each of these have different levels of knowledge, ideas, expectations and experience when it comes to lawn maintenance and fertilizer application. The task of educating each one about proper application rate and timing of fertilizers can be almost overwhelming. But you are reading this blog so I am reaching you right now.

So what can we do? Obtain information on proper lawn care which includes fertilizing as well as other best management practices. Extension has numerous publications and fact sheets devoted to home lawns. These can be found at our Web site.

Soil test before you apply any fertilizer. Now is a perfect time to test your yard, garden or anywhere fertilizer may be applied. Extension offices have soil test boxes and instructions on how to take samples and how to interpret the results.

Each year, we all make New Year’s resolutions. This year, why not make an easy one we can keep? Let’s all become responsible land managers with respect to what we apply to our lawns and how we dispose of everyday household wastes such as cleaning fluid, antifreeze, oil and gasoline. All we do outside on our properties affects someone’s drinking water somewhere.
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Chuck offers great insight into some simple things we can do to reduce pollutants entering our waterways. We all should be more thoughtful about fertilizer use.

As he said, a soil test is the only way to determine if you need to fertilize certain areas in your home landscape. If you have never taken a soil sample, this Extension publication is a great how-to article.

In Alabama, you can get soil sample boxes and forms from your county Extension office. The folks at the Auburn University Soil Testing Laboratory also say that you can find the form here and send your sample in a plastic zipper bag to them. There is a $7 charge for each sample. A sample should contain about a pint of soil.

This Extension publication will help you understand your report and what you need to do to improve your garden’s fertility.