Succession planting of squash, beans, and tomatoes

As I'm harvesting garlic and the final bit of lettuce in the main beds, I'm thinking about what to plant next. The peas are just about finished, too, and one of the pea trellises will need underplanting with beans or a climbing cucumber or squash. (The other already has tromboncino squash ready to replace the peas). I suppose if I were more orderly and less into having fun in my vegetable garden, I'd had have already planned out my rotations.

And I really should think about preserving the harvest, too (wait, I'm still determined to enjoy the process) -- Barbara Damrosch in her revised Garden Primer talks about freezing whole tomatoes, then rinsing off the skins in hot water before using them in sauces in the winter. That's my idea of a great approach.

We've had a nice bit of rain today, after some unusually hot weather that's now moderated, so it's a good time to put out more summer squash, beans, and a few new heirloom tomato transplants that I acquired last weekend.

I also thought I'd experiment sowing some more seeds of specialty peppers (Corno di Toro, Ashe County Pimento, Numex, Sweet Red Cherry) and tomatoes (Black Russian and Super Marzano hybrid) to transplant later on. Peppers do their best in the warm days of fall here, especially if summer turns out to be especially hot. And tomatoes will keep growing until whenever frost comes.

I'll have the potato beds to swap out, too, probably in the next couple of weeks. I've already harvested some new potatoes around the edges, but will wait until the shoots start dying back to harvest the rest.

The soil in my vegetable beds work hard, so I'm trying to add LOTS of homemade compost (rather than commercial) at each rotation, as clearly I'm not replenishing my beds as much as they might need. A Thai eggplant planted in a container filled with this compost is huge, the biggest eggplant I've ever grown, witness to the power of nutrients! I'll have to see if the plant produces many fruits. I did see a tomato-sized eggplant last fall (the plant), growing in a large container in a Portland urban garden -- whoa! I'm not sure any of mine will get that big.

Growing tomatoes

In a warm summer climate, with plenty of sun, tomatoes are almost a given in a vegetable garden. Even non-gardeners may stick one or two tomatoes in the ground, just to have some fresh ones. One of our neighbors has two staked tomato plants at the side of her house, in otherwise a sea of lawn.

a 'Beefy Boy'

Garden centers, nurseries, and local 'feed and seed' stores usually offer up the traditional hybrids: Big Boy, Better Boy, Roma, and Sweet 100, with some recent additions of Brandywine, Mortgage-lifter, and other well-known heirloom varieties. There are hundreds of different varieties of tomatoes, with varying levels of acid and sweet, shapes and sizes, colors, and stripes.

I've grown different sorts from seeds, too, and tried unusual types bought at horticultural student plant sales, and have just about come to the notion that growing ONLY disease-resistant tomatoes in my Southern soil is productive, and any non-disease resistant (heirlooms) need to be in containers. I love the diversity and history of heirlooms, and they're wonderfully delicious, too, of course.

This summer, the VFN-resistant varieties have been the clear winners. The so-called Amish paste tomatoes (actually a striped heirloom of some sort) have declined due to nematodes, the non-resistant Sweet 100's haven't lasted long either, and a couple of heirloom peppers have had some sort of sudden wilt, bacterial, I think. Hhrmph.

I haven't always been so scrupulous with rotations, and of course, that's the first line of organic management of common plant diseases like fusarium and verticillum wilt, and buildup of Southern root-knot nematodes (they LOVE the roots of non-resistant varieties of tomatoes and peppers).

Using rotations with French marigolds, canola, sesame, grasses, and cole crops are other ways of reducing nematode populations, along with solarization in mid-summer - I'm going to give those a try, too.

I'm quite tired of yellowing tomato leaves and sad-looking plants!