Wild tomatoes
for guests
May 7, 2006
Here’s a clump of wild tomato seedlings with the exploded tomato skin still attached to the roots like a busted balloon. They’re popping up everywhere in my kitchen garden, and to think I wasted all that time fussing with the foetuses and a propagator when they can grow themselves all by their lonesome. From now on I’m just going to let a few tomatoes dry on the vine and let them dump themselves on the ground. I may just be getting the hang of the Masanobu Fukuoka style of gardening!
These are currant tomatoes, a wild variety that produced zillions of little berry sized fruit and which pretty much scattered itself throughout my kitchen garden end of season. This is the one I use as my ‘guest tomato’, planted at the ends of the rows so that visitors can have something to nibble on and I can put lingerers to work on an obsessive compulsive harvesting task.
- Wikipedia on Masanobu Fukuoka
- More Masanobu Fukuoka on Seedballs
- Even more Masanobu Fukuoka on Organic dot com
debra at 10:02 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us
Note to self: search for suitable acronyms
May 6, 2006
CCLPSGGCWPMC or backwards, CMPWCGGSPLCC. In the last row (covered in hay): courgette (gold rush), cukes, luffah, pumpkin, spaghetti squash, gourds, galia melon, cantaloup, watermelon, poblano pepper, marconi pepper, corn. At this stage in development, I’m having trouble telling the gourdy, cukey, melony plants apart and even had to label them. I prefer to keep notes in a muddy garden notebook to labeling a plant, the idea being that the dangling cucumber should tell me the plant is a cucumber. But in the meantime, the plants are babies, and like all babies, they sort of look alike.
On the ‘right bank’: amaranth, buckwhat, alfalfa. ABA.
In the ‘bean rows’: sunflowers, dill, soy, soy, adzuki, chickpeas, red night kidney. No acronym necessary since the plants are so different looking.
CoCuLuPu
SpaGoGa
CanWatPoMaCo
Grow, You thangs!
debra at 11:53 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
Pest control
May 5, 2006
The scales are tipping at the allottments, the organic gardeners are in the majority! Although our numbers are too small to make a real statistic, the demographic of the organic group is thoroughly mixed. In the image above, Sidi AlGouche, not exactly an organic gardener, has decided not to spray his potatoes to get rid of these bugs. Instead he spends an hour each day picking the potato beetles off by hand and indulging in a fair amount of tri-lingual cursing. Afternoons Sidi AlGouche stops cursing and puts his daughter Aqima (9) to work. Aqima is too much of a pistol to spend her afternoons bug-picking and usually puts in a solid twenty minutes before wandering off to hunt frogs with the kids across the waterway.
debra at 11:39 | Comments (2) | post to del.icio.us
