The Quarter-Acre Farm Read online

  Louis wasn’t so sure. He feared I would whittle down to nothing. To allay his fears I went to my doctor for a consultation. I sheepishly explained that I was taking her time away from the truly sick and injured patients because I had hit my ideal weight and felt great. As she checked me over, I explained to her what I was doing on the Quarter Acre Farm.

  Somewhat quizzically, she congratulated me on my health as she went out the door to deal with someone who truly needed her.

  Since I’d found yet another reason to celebrate the lofty zucchini squash, I decided to plant even more zucchini the following season. It occurred to me, however, that if the popularity of zucchini grew, it could actually crush the holiday it’s named after. For once discovering the wonder of zucchini, who in their right minds would give the magic vegetables away? Perhaps on August 8, we might instead leave seeds on our neighbor’s porch, or collections of recipes. And maybe every so often, just because they’re so awe-inspiring, a giant zucchini candelabra.

  Recipe

  Grilled Zucchini

  This is my go-to recipe. One that allowed me to remain well fed and among the living while waiting for the other plants on the farm to start producing. The recipe is easy and good enough to eat several nights a week, though every single day for a month may be pushing it.

  I use as many zucchini as I’m hungry for and use any size available. If I’ve got zucchini coming out my ears, I try to harvest them while small, with the blossoms still attached, and grill them halved lengthwise. If the zucchini are on the other end of the spectrum, really big guys, I cut out the seeds so that just the firm flesh and the green skin are left.

  Ingredients: • 8 six-inch zucchini

  • 2 TB honey

  • 1 TB olive oil

  • 1 TB finely minced rosemary

  • 1 TB finely minced orange peel

  • 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper

  • salt to taste

  Cut the zucchini into pieces 3 to 4 inches long and about the girth of your thumb, making sure each has a side with green skin.

  Place the trimmed zucchini into a big bowl, drizzle with honey and olive oil, and then scatter the finely minced rosemary, orange peel, and cayenne pepper over that. Stir until an even coat of the seasonings adhere to the surface of the zucchini. (This is why you must finely mince the rosemary and orange peel. Too-large pieces will not stick.)

  When I’m doing this at home, I heat my embarrassingly grungy-looking grill (it’s seasoned) to medium-high heat in order to cook the outside of the zucchini fast while keeping the inside a little crispy. I put the sticky zucchini on the grill until they get a nice brown color on one side (merely heated is not good enough; they need to be brown—it is this caramelization that makes the zucchini so good). Using tongs, I turn them over and sear the other side, and then remove the zukes to a plate. The rosemary and citrus notes of this lightly spiced grilled zucchini is lovely and makes this dish great as a side—even if you don’t want to eat them as your entire meal.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SADISM IN THE GARDEN

  “Most plants taste better when they’ve had to suffer a little.”

  —DIANE ACKERMAN

  In a not-so-funny twist, while the zucchini looked bad but kept up production, my tomatoes appeared fantastic—the Chippendales of the garden, sporting strong limbs and good color, throwing blossoms left and right, and seemingly bursting with virility—but they were giving me no satisfaction. There was nary a tomato on most of the plants.

  This was a matter of great embarrassment for me. Tomatoes are, of course, the reason to garden. Even my gardening-phobic friend tries, every other year, to grow her own tomatoes. Tomatoes are the most common homegrown vegetable in the nation.

  To make the humiliation worse, the area where I live is not only the tomato capital of California but also a hotbed for the slow-food movement (whose members support the heritage, tradition, and culture of food that is good for the people who eat it and for the people who grow it, while being good for the planet.) These two facts pull the local tomato-growing population in differing directions. Slow food people enjoy a tomato with a lumpy physique as long as it tastes great, while commercial growers, on the other hand, would love to have the best tasting tomato in the world but often have to sacrifice this for profitability. They need to grow large quantities of tomatoes in uniform shapes and sizes that fit into boxes, are tough enough to ship well, and still look good displayed in the grocery store—if some taste must be sacrificed, so be it. The former faction prefers heirlooms and the latter hybrids.

  I knew what kind of farmer I was going to be. I was eschewing pesticides and herbicides and living the organic life—I was going for the heirlooms.

  The trouble is, growing any kind of tomato isn’t as easy as it would seem, despite evidence to the contrary: the vast fields of tomatoes around my town and the mountains of knobby, striped, spotted heirlooms gracing the aisles of the farmer’s market, with romantic names like Arkansas Traveler, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, and Noir de Crème. No, growing tomatoes can be downright difficult.

  By the time I had decided to live off my quarter acre, I had already grown lots of tomatoes over the years. Or at least some tomatoes on a lot of tomato plants. I even remember my mother growing tomatoes back when I was a kid and thought heirlooms were cracked dishes and tarnished silver. She would plant her tomatoes in June then pull the plants in early September to protect them from frost. She’d hang the plants by their roots in the basement hoping some of the immature tomatoes would ripen. The acrid green smell would rise along the concrete walls and make my mouth water.

  Relocating from Wyoming to California had extended my tomato-growing season a great deal. But even with an extra four months of growing time, my plants never produced enough tomatoes to make a winter’s worth of spaghetti sauce, soup, and sun-dried tomatoes.

  With the Quarter-Acre Farm project, however, I planned to leave mediocrity behind and become a great tomato farmer. I planted several different kinds of heirlooms and then read everything I could on how to raise them.

  I searched the Internet for tomato advice until my eyes felt like they’d been sandpapered. I asked friends, family, and neighbors for tomato secrets. I was laved with advice. The trouble was that some of it was non-advice, the equivalent of a recipe with an ingredient missing, “I just pop them in and they grow!” Or sometimes the advice I got from one source seriously conflicted with the advice from another. And each expert was so certain.

  The flowers would fail to set fruit, I read, because they got too much water. Another source claimed it was more likely there wasn’t enough water. If the days were too hot, the plants would fail to produce, but they’d also fail if it was too cold. When I rode my bike around the tomato fields, I could see that the commercial growers let their tomatoes grow with the vines slumped onto the dirt, though I had just heard that was a definite no-no. Some people let their tomato’s foliage grow rampant to encourage photosynthesis, while others trimmed flowerless branches (or “widows,” as my friend Emily called them) to allow better circulation, or to ensure energy would go to the fruit rather than the leaves.

  It seemed that every gardener had her own particular tomato theory, which I allowed made sense. Each gardener, after all, had their own particular garden, their own types of plants, soil, climate, air, and light conditions. It was not only true that what worked for a gardener in California was not going to work for my mother in Wyoming, but also, clearly, that what worked for someone on the north side of town may not work for someone living on the south side.

  In light of all this, and feeling a little like a flower child, I decided to let my tomatoes grow unpruned, unfettered, and free. This worked fine for weeks, and the plants grew bushy. But when I noticed that the sow bugs (which are so numerous on the Quarter-Acre Farm I’ve thought of trying to eat them and kill two birds with one stone) were, instead of me, freely enjoying the few tomatoes flopped on the ground, I knew I had to change my strategy. />
  I tied the prone plants up to some rickety cages I bought at the hardware store, but this helped only until the plants grew a little more, at which point the cages toppled over. I tried several different methods of support, including rolled construction fencing, which I didn’t notice had holes too small for me to stick my hand through until it was too late. For me to reach the tomatoes, Louis had to cut bigger holes in it using wire snips.

  I also tied tomatoes up to peeler poles pounded into the ground. This worked quite well but was a little messy because the plants had to curve around the single pole, and searching for tomatoes in the resulting riot of foliage was difficult. Also, the poles had a tendency to rot in the damp ground. After the first season, the eight-foot poles only had five useful feet to them.

  I found my ideal support in four-feet-high by eight-feet-long galvanized steel wire panels, which have a smaller grid (2” x 4”) toward the bottom and a larger grid (4” x 4”) at the top. I could get a twenty-by four-foot livestock panel for thirty dollars and grow a row of plants along it. These panels are virtually indestructible, look good, store easily, and work great for growing peas, beans, squash, and melons as well.

  As my tomatoes grew tall and verdant, I thrilled. When all the flowers fell off, I panicked. I thought perhaps my plants were in need of more fertilizer; after all, isn’t food always welcome in times of stress? When the fertilizing didn’t help, I did a little research and found I had done exactly the wrong thing. When soil temperatures rise, the tomato plant drives its roots deeper into the cool earth. Adding fertilizer forces plants into a foliage growth mode when it should be focusing on getting its roots to a cool spot instead. What I could have done to help the plant to that end was mulch. Three to four inches of mulch can keep the soil five degrees cooler and the plant producing tomatoes.

  So I mulched. My plants still dropped flowers. I decided to take a trip over to see my friends, Alan and Emily, and get some advice. Their tomato plants looked great and had lots of fruit hanging on the pruned vines. Maybe, I mused, tomatoes were like children and needed boundaries rather than complete freedom. I described my tomatoes and growing process to Alan (the tomato guru). He thought I might be watering my plants too much. When I wailed, “How can anyone tell what the right amount is?” He said, “You let them suffer. Hold off on the water until they just start to wilt—and then you save them. Suffer and save.”

  Quite an uncivil attitude, especially from my kindly friend Alan, but he loves tomatoes even more than I do, which is scary, and I was going to take his advice. By the time I had blundered through all this, however, it was getting late in the growing season. As it goes in the Central Valley, while the nighttime temps were cooling alarmingly fast, whispering in my ear with a chill breath, “You are going to be soooooo hungry in February,” the daytime temperatures were still torrid.

  The temperature change was also problem in tomato growing. Not only do heated soil conditions signal a tomato to stop producing, but chill soil temperatures do as well. Air temperatures above 85 degrees do the same. Further, hot-dry means difficulty in pollinating, and as a result, no fruit will set. So I got up early each morning, and whilst still in my ratty bathrobe, I flicked tomato blossoms, hoping to shake pollen from one important part of the flower to the other.

  Feeling a bit like an S&M tomato pimp, I spent half an hour every day shaking the tomato plants down and thumping the heck out of the blossoms. I got a few more tomatoes as a result, but only on certain plants. I had to face the fact that I was, once again, a tomato dilettante—except, strangely enough, for my success with the cherry tomatoes. I am not usually a cherry tomato fan. I figure why spend extra time picking twenty little tomatoes when you can pick one giant tomato instead? But before I had decided on the Quarter Acre Farm experiment, I had planted two plants, supposedly as a treat for Sam (though he was now prohibited from eating them.) These two plants provided me with a plethora of fruit.

  Each day, I would pick the tomatoes straight into a Ziploc bag and toss them into the freezer. They froze beautifully into what looked and felt like gorgeous red marbles. When I wanted to make sauce or soup, I’d take the bag and pour the “marbles” into the saucepan or blender and cook them up. They were a lifesaver, preserving me from certain tomato sauce withdrawal during the winter months.

  In November, the embarrassingly barren tomato plants shriveled and blackened from the cold and I pulled them from the beds. That’s when I noticed the bumps on the roots. The usually thick straight roots off of which the fibrous lateral roots grew were distorted and studded with nodules, or knots. When I uprooted tomato after tomato I found that most of their roots had the same strange lumps. Rightly sensing these nodules might be a clue to the poor showing of my tomatoes, I took my sinking feeling inside to search for information. To my horror, I found the nodules were symptoms of nematodes.

  Nematodes are the most numerous multicellular animals on the planet with over 20,000 species of the critters. All are structurally simple “worms.” The best description I’ve found is that they are a tube (an alimentary canal extending from the mouth to the tail) within a tube. All nematodes are not created equal. There are good nematodes and bad nematodes. Just as if they were characters in a fairy tale, the good ones are very good and will kill your dragons (or at least cutworms) for you, and the bad ones have black hats, fetid breath, and lay waste to the kingdom. Actually, it isn’t their breath that is a problem, it’s their destructive saliva. The bad nematodes burrow into the roots and inject their saliva into the plant to fashion feeding cells. Not only does this residence restrict the ability of the roots to conduct water and nutrients (kind of like parking a Volkswagen in a water pipe), but the galls can split and allow soilborne disease-causing microorganisms into the plant. The next thing you know, your tomato plant has bacterial spot, speck, canker, wilt, pith necrosis; or loses vigor, yellows, and produces smaller and fewer fruits while everyone else has bragging rights to Cherokee Purples the size of bread loaves.

  I was stricken. It was like finding out my garden had cancer. Indeed, the “cure” for nematodes is elusive. One hopes only to manage them. Large farms that have a nematode infestation allow acres to sit stripped and fallow so the nematodes starve, dry out, and die. Fallowing and soil solarization, even if one was willing to let everything in their garden die for a year, generally only reduces the nematodes in the top foot of the soil, and worse, is effective for only about a year.

  Louis, Sam, and Jesse tried to comfort me as I faced a future without homegrown tomatoes. I resisted their cajoling, knowing it was only a matter of time before my yard would be a desolate plat of shriveled plants, my Quarter Acre Farm experiment a total bust. After a few days of moping, I stiffened my wobbly spine and did still more research. I eventually found that ammonia and nitrogen-rich fertilizers might depress nematode growth. Well, the ducks, chickens, and geese were doing their parts there. I also learned that certain plants had a tendency to repel nematodes with antagonistic phytochemical exudates. Phew. This meant that plants like the French Single Gold marigold, Burpee’s nemagold, and blanket flowers make stuff that protects them against the worms, much like flavenoids and lycopene protect us against cancer. I put marigolds on my to-buy list.

  Chitin, too, depresses nematode numbers because fungi that eat chitin also eat nematode eggs. You could get that at a gardener’s supply shop along with red plastic sheeting to lay over the planting surface. Red plastic doubles nematode-infected tomato yields by reflecting light, which encourages above-ground growth over root growth, making the plants less susceptible to soilborne infection and infestation.

  I was already feeling much better about my garden’s future when I ran across a list of nematode-resistant tomatoes. I jotted down the names, including Park’s Whopper Improved, Better Boy, Beefmaster, Miracle Sweet, and Celebrity. I had grown many of these in the past and had, now understandably, much better success with them than other cultivars. The cherry tomatoes I had planted had been (luckily) a type
of nematode resistant hybrid.

  Apparently I would have to remove the green H for Heirloom from my breast and replace it with the scarlet H for Hybrid and plant all resistant breeds from now on. At least until a nematode resistant heirloom made itself apparent.

  I felt bad about this but for two things. One, the relief that I was going to be able to grow tomatoes at all; and two, because of an article by agricultural scientist Brendan Borrell stating that heirloom tomatoes are feeble, inbred products of centuries worth of breeding experiments.

  It wasn’t that I felt heirloom tomatoes were the sinus-challenged pugs of the tomato world. What gave me solace was Borrell’s claim that heirlooms tasted good not because of genetics, but because they were ripened on the vine and their lower numbers of fruit per plant made for a juicier, tastier product.

  It was the nurture, he was saying, that made the difference. And certainly, if I couldn’t plant heirloom tomatoes, I could treat the tomatoes I did plant with the same care. Though I was quite certain that the taste of certain heirlooms was not entirely nurture, at least I knew now that all was not lost for the Quarter-Acre Farm.

  The following spring, invigorated by a winter’s worth of anticipation and planning, I planted again, mulching with red plastic. My tomato starts, all nematode-resistant varieties, went in on April 1, the day Alan recommended. I hoped this would give the plants enough time to establish and set fruit before the Central Valley’s killer heat hit us in July and August (when I would apply several inches of mulch to keep the dirt temperature moderated). I followed the “suffer and save” watering dictum, and I became a pincher and a pruner to boot. (My plants were of the indeterminate variety that had no predisposed stopping point for their growth. Determinate tomatoes, which grow only to the point that a flower cluster forms at the terminal growth point, should not be pruned, because pruning curtails its fruit production.) I pinched off widows, and though my tomato plants didn’t look very Chippendale pretty at first, I trimmed all foliage away, beginning from the ground and moving, twelve to eighteen inches up the main stem.