A journey in gardening

By Rennie Phillips

There isn't much in a garden that I don't like to eat. Some things I like more than others, but I don't think I've tried anything I don't care for. But there are some veggies I rank right at the top.

Two of these are tomatoes and cucumbers. I like to eat zucchini dipped in egg and cracker crumbs and fried. But even fried zucchini gets old after so much.

Cucumbers and tomatoes don't. I can eat both of these all day long, day after day, and not get tired of them.

So when we first moved out of the city onto a small acreage, I began to work on growing tomatoes and cucumbers.

Every year, I'd go through gardening catalogs and read about different kinds of tomatoes and cucumbers. If one sounded almost too good to be true, I'd have to try it.

I'd order several kinds of each and grow them and sample them. Most were OK, but nothing to write home about. But then some were just a cut or two above average; these I continue to grow. One problem I faced was growing the tomato or cucumber or even a zucchini before Mother Nature said I could.

The common practice here in Missouri in Zone 6b was to wait until about the end of April and then plant your tomato plants. I usually planted zucchini and cucumber seeds in the garden. One could figure on getting that first ripe tomato about July 4. The first zucchini and cucumber was around June 1 to 15.

There had to be a better way. I read an article in a gardening magazine about how a lady in Kansas used Wall O' Waters to grow her tomatoes. She claimed you could plant your tomatoes in these Wall O' Waters six weeks before the last expected frost.

This would be somewhere around March 15 here in Missouri.

But there was a problem. There weren't any tomato plants available around here to transplant in the middle to end of March. So I began to grow my own plants.

One plant intrigued me. It was Stupice, which is a potato-leaf variety from Czechoslovakia that tends to be fairly cold resistant. Stupice is not a large tomato variety, with tomatoes getting to about 8 ounces at most. And so my journey began.

My first transplants were tall and leggy, so I had to learn how to grow them under grow lights. These grow lights work for a while, but at some point, the little tomato plants need direct sunlight. I couldn't afford a greenhouse, so I had to learn about hothouses.

A hothouse is simply a small structure with a glass or plastic surface the sun shines through, warming up the interior. It can be as simple as a box made of hay bales with old glass windows laid over the top.

My first hothouse was a lean-to against the south wall of my shop. I used plastic to cover the outside to allow the sunlight to shine through.

The hothouse offered a great place to grow my tomato seedlings. On hot, sunny days, I'd have to open up the door and allow it to cool down, or it would get too hot. On cold nights when frost or freezing temps were forecast, I'd put a heat lamp in the hothouse to raise the temp. If the forecast was for really cold temps, I'd cover the hothouse with a canvas painting cloth and use the heat bulb inside it. There were times when I didn't get the door open and my plants baked to death. Other times they froze or frosted. But the hothouse worked.

I'd start my Stupice tomatoes so they were ready to transplant into Wall O' Waters by the end of March for sure. This usually took nine or 10 weeks. Instead of picking the first ripe tomato around July 4, I could pick my first one the end of May or first week of June. Now we were getting somewhere. So I tried it with cucumbers and zucchini.

I didn't use Wall O' Waters, but I'd start the cucumber and zucchini seed in my shop under grow lights in 3x3-foot containers. Once they were up and growing, I'd move them into my hothouse where they got direct sunlight. When the small seedlings were about a month old, they were ready to go into the garden.

Most of the time, the seedlings were blooming when I set them out. In about 30 days we were eating zucchini and cucumbers. (I picked our first zucchini on May 13 in our outside hill garden.)

Since that time I've built a couple 24x48-foot high tunnels and a 12x24-foot greenhouse. I start my seedlings in my shop under 4-foot fluorescents. When they are growing good, I move them to my greenhouse.

When freezing temps are forecast, I heat my greenhouse with a small electric Milkhouse Heater and, if needed, a couple small propane spot heaters. Then as April 15 (which is the average last frost in our area) approaches, I check the 10-day forecast. If the weather looks good, I start planting in my high tunnels and in our outside gardens.

There are several key components. The first key is starting your seedlings so they are ready to plant as soon as the weather allows in the spring. I figure eight to 10 weeks from planting the seed to ready to transplant.

The second key is the hothouse. At one time, I had three hothouses, with each of them being about 3x8 feet. I made two of them out of 2x8s with a gabled roof on both of them. One is a lean-to I made out of plywood. All three have plastic doors or covers. It is better to simply set your transplants on the ground inside the hothouses. The soil will add warmth when it's cold outside, but it also will add cooling on hot days.

The final key is each of us. We have to have the stick-to-itiveness, and this probably isn't a word, but we have to keep trying. Several years ago I had planted about 50 early tomatoes in one of the high tunnels. They froze. Just in case, I had 50 extra early tomatoes to replant. This year I lost almost 60 plants that got too hot. But I still had about 75 early tomatoes ready.

Keep trying and happy gardening!

Until next time.