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Growers take note, this week is the fourth and penultimate week of the vegetable gardening installments. That’s right folks, we’ve got one more week about veggies before we move on to a new topic.
This column will, I hope, be helpful in offering assistance to those who may be just starting out in this wonderful gardening endeavor and also a bit of a refresher for those who may have let the vegetable plot go fallow for too many years. If you missed any the previous installments, simply use the online functions of this paper and go back through the archives.
This week, the topics covered will be onions, peppers, peas, radishes, spinach, potatoes and tomatoes.
Onions can be an easy and successful garden crop so long as you grow the right ones. They can be grown from seeds that are started in February or onion sets purchased at garden centers or by mail and planted when the soil warms.
Be careful when choosing the onion varieties that you limit your choices to long-day or day-neutral varieties. The biggest mistake in growing onions is when gardeners mistakenly choose short-day varieties such as Texas supersweet or vidalia which simply won’t grow here.
Also consider the purpose of the onions you will grow as some are much better suited to storage than fresh use. For example, Walla Walla is a great long-day sweet onion but does not store well. On the other hand, first edition is an excellent long-day onion that stores well and can be used in both cooking and baking.
Onions can be harvested at various stages of maturity depending on the size and use that you need them for. If you have a garage, shed or barn, you can harvest and store the right varieties and they will last for as long as four to five months. Insect and disease problems are few and like garlic, onions are said to have some repellency toward garden insects.
There are literally hundreds of varieties of peppers that can be grown in the garden. From sweet-eating peppers to stuffing peppers, to peppers that can be hung and dried and guaranteed to burn every cell in your body—they come in a wide variety of shapes, colors and sizes.
Peppers are long-season crops that thrive in the heat and resent being planted in cold soil. They are generally planted after May 15 as starts, or they can be started indoors from mid-February on depending on the type.
Although related to tomatoes and eggplants, the plants tend to be somewhat smaller and they tend to have fewer disease and insect problems.
There are a number of seed companies that specialize in peppers, especially peppers used in sauces and for drying. And if hot peppers are your thing, you can gauge their heat severity by knowing their Scoville score ... a long accepted scale of pepper hotness.
Peas are an early crop that are fun, easy and nearly (nearly!) foolproof. They are one of the earliest crops planted in the garden and require little to no care other than staking or trellising.
Like many of the other vegetables that we’ve looked at, peas are categorized by their intended use. There are those that are used in stir-fry recipes, some that are eaten fresh off the vine—pod and all—, those that are shelled and eaten fresh and those that are best for cooking and freezing. The seed catalogs and descriptions will tell you which ones are suited for each use.
Unless you are planting several varieties, your peas will tend to mature over a short period of time so successional seeding can counter this to a small degree. Peas are virtually disease- and insect-free and once finished they leave garden space for crops such as tomatoes, peppers and eggplants.
Radishes are also among the earliest garden crops. They generally mature in 35 to 50 days from sowing unless you use the longer maturity, deep-rooted Oriental types.
Radishes are generally easy—the young foliage is tangy and can also be added to salads—and there is only one serious radish insect, the radish maggot. The easiest way to avoid problems with this insect is to move your radish crop every year and occasionally skip a year.
Radishes grown earlier in the season tend to be more mild but if left in the ground too long, become pithy and tasteless. They are available in various sizes and in a number of different shapes other than the ping-pong sized globes you find in the market. Do some research to find the variety that best suits your needs.
Spinach is grown much like lettuce, and also like the lettuce it tends to be an early cool-season crop unless you specifically grow the heat-tolerant types which are not nearly as tasty. But, the spinach season can be extended by starting some plants indoors and seeding the rest directly into the garden.
Spinach is very cold-hardy and once hardened off, can be planted into fairly cool soil. It will also do well as a late garden crop and will hold well into the fall and even early winter if properly mulched.
Like the leaf lettuces, spinach can be harvested by removing leaves from each plant every few days (just a few please) or by letting the plant mature.
Potatoes are planted as cut pieces of a parent tuber and are referred to as a seed. You generally buy the potato and cut it into sections and then plant the sections.
As potatoes have been grown on the East End for so long, I’ve tended to stay away from them as the potato beetle is an endemic problem. Nonetheless, the beetle can be controlled fairly easily and if you want spuds unlike any you’ve ever tasted from the market, usually the only way to get them is to grow them yourself.
The soil here is great, the climate is perfect and you may want to give potatoes a try this year. Seed potatoes are usually available at local garden centers or from specialists like Ronninger Potato Farm at www.ronnigers.com.
And last, but by no means least, there are the tomatoes. Lots and lots and lots of tomatoes.
There must be a thousand varieties of tomatoes available from various seed vendors now and the temptation is to grow them all just to find that one perfect “mater” that your mouth waters for. Resist!
Most gardeners grow way too many varieties and come August, are flooded with them. The best types of tomatoes are probably grown at home and started indoors as the varieties available at garden centers are the same old same old with only a couple of new types added each year.
If you’re just starting out and want to pick up a dozen plants, this may be a perfect option. Keep in mind that as your taste and desire become more sophisticated, you’ll begin to look for heirlooms and open-pollinated varieties that you can get only by mail or online.
For starters, tomatoes have their disease and insect problems but don’t ever let this stop you from growing them. Both are avoidable by watching for the bugs and by growing disease-resistant varieties. That information is noted on the seed packet and in the catalogs.
Know that tomatoes come in colors from red to orange to yellow to black and from the size of a raisin to as large as four- or five-pounders. Some are grown only for eating while some are grown mostly for canning and sauces.
As for planting, there are early, mid and late season types and there are determinate (they stop flowering and fruiting at maturity) and indeterminate (continue to flower and fruit until frost) types of tomatoes.
These vegetables are heavy feeders and need to be watered regularly. Heres a tip, if you water them from above with sprinklers or wands, I can guarantee disease problems. Tomatoes do not do well with wet foliage and this is the fastest way to encourage the diseases that destroy them.
My favorite is still Sweet 100, a small mouth-popping sweetie—but I do still have dreams of the half-ton Beefmasters that my father grew 40 years ago.
While tomatoes are heat lovers, most gardeners don’t realize that on the hottest days of the summer when the daytime temperature reaches the mid 80s, tomatoes will stop flowering and setting fruit. Again, pollination is critical so bees are encouraged along with other flowering plants that might attract them when the tomatoes are flowering. Pollination can also be accomplished by gently shaking the plants when they are in bloom.
Okay, you’ve got plenty of work to do between now and ground-breaking. Remember to check out Cornell’s site where home gardeners have ranked their favorite veggies at www.vegvariety.cce.cornell.edu and become part of the program by inputting your information. Keep growing.
Andrew Messinger has been a professional horticulturist for more than 30 years. He divides his time between homes and gardens in Southampton, Westchester and the Catskills. E-mail him at: Andrew@hamptongardener.com. The Hampton Gardener is a registered trademark.
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