Florida Urban Homestead

Tomatoes are by far the most popular thing grown in the backyard garden and they really are easy to grow if you start our right from the beginning.  First off you need to get the soil ready for planting.  If you are planting directly into the ground it is a good idea to test the soil first.  Tomatoes do best in  a neutral to slightly acidic soil with a pH range of 6.2 to 7.0. If your soil is to acidic, you may need to apply some lime, if to alkaline, a great way to boost the acidity is to mix 1 part vinegar to 4 parts water and spread over the garden bed a few days before you plant.   Tomatoes also  love plenty of compost so don’t be stingy with it.  You can buy compost from the store or make your own.  If you are going to plant in a raised bed you can make you own mix of soil.  I like to use 3 parts top soil, 1 part compost, and 1/2  part peat moss. You can start from seed a few weeks before you plant, or buy the plants as starts but you first need to decide what kind of tomato plants you want.  Although they are many varieties of tomatoes, the fall into just three basic

Tomatoes ripening

types:   Indeterminate, Determinate, and Cherry.    Determinate tomatoes grow to a predetermined size that is in their DNA and once they reach this size, the stop growing and produce fruit. Determinate plants fruit tend to come ripe all at once and stop producing.  Indeterminate plants keep growing until killed by frost or pests.  They blossom and fruit the whole season and the fruit ripens at different times on the same plant.   Indeterminate plants can become huge, so it’s a good idea to pinch them back once they reach as high as you can reach and they may need to be caged or staked.   The last kind of tomato is the Cherry.  The Cherry types are smaller plants that produce small tomatoes that can range from the size of a cherry, to the size of a plum.  These are popular in salads.  Tomatoes don’t just come in red either.  Look for yellows, pinks, purples, greens, and even stripes!  Once you have your plants ready, plant them in your garden deep, all the way to the last few leaves.  Tomato plants can grow roots anywhere along their stem so this provides a deeper root system.  I like to add some bone meal to the bottom of each planting  hole to prevent blossom end rot latter on. In any case, keep the soil watered enough to keep the soil slightly moist but not drenched.  Also, do not try to make up for missing a few waterings by dumping too much at one time as this can cause splitting of the fruit.  Feed your plants every 2 to 3 weeks with an organic fertilizer.  if you have a fish tank you can use the waist water from cleaning the tank, or you can use  compost tea.  You can make compost tea from compost steeped in water.  I use old socks or stockings and stuff them with compost and drop them into 5 gallon buckets of water to steep.  I then remove the teabags and pour onto the base of the plants.  If these aren’t your cup o tea, they are many commercial organic fertilizers available.  If the local pests start bugging you, you can use a product like Organocide, or make your own.  Just add a few drops of natural soap and a little sesame oil to a spray bottle of water.  You can also add garlic oil and pepper oil to the mix.  The soap breaks down the waxy coating bugs have and as a result, the dehydrate and die.  The oil also smothers some bugs, especially ones that breath through the skin. the spray wont hurt the plant, but it will kill the bugs and you can use it right up to harvest.   Also, just picking the little buggers off and killing them works well too.  Before long you will have some great tasting tomatoes ready for salads, sauces, and of course the sandwich.

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Organocide

What’s So Different About Florida vegetable Gardening? This is a question I get a lot from folks from up north. I have even got that “You must be able to grow stuff without even trying!” statement too. The truth is that we do have more seasons here in the sunshine state, but the heat of June, July, and August is a challenge along with the billions of bugs that thrive here.   We don’t get cold enough here to kill the bug population back, so they tend to build up over the seasons.

Green tomato destroyed by Hornworm

It is all that more important here to use crop rotation methods to keep those bugs in check organically.  I recently used Organocide, an organic insecticide and fungicide I found at Lowes.   I used it to try to control some stink bugs, hornworms and a few pickleworms.  I worked great for the most part.  It’s made up of fish and sesame oils and got rid of those hormworms with ease.  The stinkbugs are gone too, but it was only partly successful on the pickle worms.  I would use it again though.  The  Organocide along with cutting back the vines that are effected (Limp and hanging over) seem to be stemming the tide.  The problem is that the spray just can’t get at the worms embedded in the vines or fruit.  For now, I will add in my homemade spray that includes vegetable oil infused with hot pepper and garlic and a touch of natural soap, mixed with watter and used in a sprayer.  Yes it stinks!  lets hope the bugs think so too.

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It’s the middle of June now, and here in Central Florida, the highs are way up into the middle to upper 90s and the bugs are ever-present.  I had trouble with my tomato plants for a time, but after trimming the bottom leaves off, the are pasted that now.  My peppers are doing very well, what pests do attack it stopped after the application of compost tea.  I have talked about compost tea before, but for my new viewer it is simply compost from your compost pile, or from the store, made into a “Tea” by stuffing it into a sock or stocking and brewing it in a bucket of water.  The tea is then poured into plants as a fertilizer.  So what’s bugging me?  Well right now it’s cucumber worms, the Pickle Worm (Diaphania nitidalis) to be exact  who like to make a home in my cucumber plants or their fruit.  The first sign is a small section or branch of the vine will droop, vine and leaf, but not the whole plant.  This is due to the fact that the worm as drilled himself into the plant and the part that has drooped has been eaten from the inside out.  The worm will also get inside the cucumber fruit itself and ruin it.  split open the cucumber, or the drooped part of the vine and you will find a small worm that is green or white.  It is the larva of a moth that laid her eggs somewhere on your vine.  The eggs are amber to golden in color and in a cluster located on the base of a leaf.

Pickleworm

These little buggers have done more damage that any other pest in my garden.  I have tried my homemade spray and some organic spray I picked up from Ortho, but it only works if you hit them directly.  My only true means of control has been removing the effected sections of the plant quickly as I find them, along with the fruit that I find their little homes in.  I mean, all I want is some nice, fresh, cucumbers, only problem is that so do the pickleworms!  I try to respect all of nature and get along, but I will admit to some pleasure as I burn the effected parts after they have destroyed some beautiful cucumbers.   If you too have been under the air assault that the adult moths bring and have found an organic solution I would love to hear about it but if not, take heart, in a few weeks their breading season here in Florida will come to an end, and with it the damage to our pour cucumbers.  So keep cool as a cucumber as you fight these worms, better days are ahead.

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