I’ve already shared my love for the new-fangled, brightly-coloured tomato cages that I’ve seen in the garden centres around town. What I don’t love about them, however, is the price tag. I have ten tomato plants in the garden this year, not including volunteers. At $9.99 each, that would be about a hundred bucks in tomato support I am just not willing to spend. (I’d rather buy more plants…)

I decided to mimic the effect of the painted tomato cages with my tomato stake project for the vegetable garden.

For this project you will need:

• Sturdy lengths of wood. The pieces Graham picked up for me at Home Depot are made of pine and they are about 3/4″ x 2″ by 10′. Each length makes up two stakes. Count up your tomato plants or other plants requiring staking and do the math to determine how many pieces your garden will need.

• Brightly coloured paint. I checked out the mistint section of the paint department at Home Depot first, but there was nothing bright enough for me. Instead, I grabbed these small tubes of paint from the craft aisle at Wal-Mart. They were about two dollars each, so I could try several different hues.
• A good paint brush.
• A work bench or set of saw horses to lay the wood on while painting.
• A saw for cutting the painted lengths in half.

I placed the wood on the work bench and painted each piece in a different colour. I had to let one side and edge dry before flipping them over and doing the other side and edge.

When they were dry, Graham cut the pieces in half on a diagonal to create a sharp point for driving into the ground.

Graham installed the stakes by pounding them into the ground about 4″ away from each tomato plant with a mallet.

I like the effect a lot! And I sure like the cost. The whole project came in under $25 for all ten stakes.

Other ideas for this project:

If you have children, allow them to paint the stakes, adding swirls of colour or designs on the wood. Nate is still a little bit young for this kind of involvement, but he “helped” with the installation.

Add weather-proof stickers to the stakes or stencil on shapes.

Use pretty lettering or calligraphy on each stake to indicate the variety of tomato planted at each one.

I like using stakes much better than tomato cages. I simply pinch out the suckers as the plants grow and tie them to the stakes to support the growing plants and keep the ripening fruit from the ground.

The first vegetable to be harvested from the garden this summer is (drumroll please…) the Zlata Radish!

My friend Gayla shared these yellow radish seeds with me and they were one of the first sets of seeds to be sown this spring. They germinated very well, and I only had to fill in a couple of “gaps” with some French Breakfast Radishes, which are quickly catching up to these beauties.

The Territorial Seed Company describes Zlata:

This flaxen, soft-skinned beauty comes to us from Poland. Zlata is a silky yellow, medium-sized, round to plum shaped radish with a crisp, bright white interior. Its crunchy texture and excellent, mildly spicy flavor will add zing to any relish tray or salad. Great for growing in spring and autumn, and resistant to bolting and splitting.

Radishes are one of those vegetables that I never buy in the grocery store. I only eat them when I grow them, which is most summers. They are so wonderfully peppery when fresh out of the garden, and this bunch was no exception.

I sliced them thinly and tossed them into a pasta salad I made over the weekend.

Nate, however, couldn’t wait until then to taste them.

I love to mulch the vegetable garden with straw. The first time I used straw to mulch, I was uncertain about the aesthetic quality of the stuff. It changed the entire look and feel of the garden. For a moment I hated the way it looked; I missed the rich, dark hue of the freshly turned earth I knew was tucked away, hidden, it seemed, beneath the grassy straw. Eventually, I learned to love straw mulch, and not just because it is an excellent way to keep the weeds in check.

I also love using straw to mulch the vegetable garden because:

1. Straw just smells good. Spreading it onto the garden around the plants makes me think about going to the fall fair, walking around the barns looking at horses and cows and prize-winning vegetables. When I smell straw, fresh from the bale, my inner 4-H girl is channeled.
2. Straw is clean, cleaner than earth. You can kneel down in the middle of the vegetable garden on the straw and when you stand up again, there is no tell-tale sign of the garden left behind on your knees.
3. Straw is cheap. A farmer nearby sells bales of straw for three dollars each. Two bales covers my entire vegetable garden as well as a couple of other small beds where I grow food.
4. The look of straw spread on the vegetable garden breaks up the monotony of the lawn in the yard. When the straw is spread on the garden there is a clean line where the lawn hits the edge of the garden, and the contrast in colours is striking (although this does fade throughout the summer as the sun bleaches the straw).
5. Straw breaks down over the winter and is tilled into the soil in the spring. It adds organic matter to the soil. When your garden is situated in the middle of a suburban subdivision, improving the soil is so important, making straw a good thing.

I don’t usually like tomato cages, but I love these brightly-coloured epoxy-coated tomato cages. $9.99 each at Kingsway Greenhouse in Oshawa.

(Not a sponsored post, I just think these cages are really cool, and they’ll serve as inspiration for a little project I have in mind.)

I’ve decided to revive Playing in the Dirt! I’m still writing about my family’s life over at Hearts into Home but I see that a lot of folks are still visiting this site in search of gardening-related posts and information, so I’m going to start writing here again. I’ve also begun as a Master Gardener in Training, and I’m taking my first course as part of the educational component of this designation (Introduction to Plant Identification through Ridgetown College in Guelph, Ontario), and I look forward to sharing my learning here, as well.

The perennial garden is filling in nicely this year, but I’m a wee bit behind in getting things started in the vegetable garden. I have a nice little flat of assorted plants that I grew in the basement hardening off outside, tucked into a corner of the fence at the side yard, near the hostas, and I’m hoping to get them into the ground over the next week.

As you probably know, in Canada this is the long weekend that most gardeners devote to planting, and with yesterday’s mid-twenties temperatures and sunny skies, I have no doubt that the area’s garden centres were full of anxious customers willing to hand over their hard-earned dollars for greenhouse-grown annuals and perennials. Today would have been a better day for planting, though, with overcast skies and a few drops to top things off. I managed to plant my asparagus crowns and a small row of ‘Zlata’ Yellow Radishes (thanks for those seeds, Gayla) before the rain got too heavy and we headed into the house.

While I sorted through my seeds, Graham sorted through the compost bin, tossing tough and fibrous pieces of garden debris into the next bin, and leaving a nice mound of “black gold” usable compost behind.

We are only just beginning the season here in Southern Ontario! Let the growing begin.

(Please stay tuned while I putter around the place, sorting out menus and layouts and whatnot…in the meantime you can still follow me on Twitter @Playinthedirt. A new Facebook page is also in the works.)

Over at the You Grow Girl forums, some of the members have begun to talk about their 2010 grow lists. I’ve never officially made a grow list. I always have a few plants that I consider to be absolute must-haves in the garden, but I like to keep things loose and just buy and plant whatever seems appealing at the time. Of course, this gets me into trouble on occasion.

Outdoor seeds sown, May 2007.

This year, I’ve decided to start and maintain a grow list. I will be amending this post as I go, so I’ll pin it to the sidebar for the season!

So far:

The Tribe of Tomatoes

Black Plum
Green Zebr
Kellogg’s Breakfast
Red Grape

The Pack of Peppers

Quadrato D’Asti Giallo
Mini Chocolate Bell

Glorious Greens

Lettuce, Red Salad Bowl (courtesy of McKenzie Seeds)

The Squash Family

Black Beauty Zucchini
Butternut Squash
Squash Moonbeam (a pattypan squash, courtesy of McKenzie Seeds)

Others

Black Beauty Eggplant

Do you have a grow list yet?

Another gardening-related contest arrived in my inbox today!

5 people will win tomato seeds by leaving a “nice” comment on one of the posts on Cynthia Sandberg’s beautiful blog, Grow Better Veggies. Five people will be chosen at random to with a three-pack of rare tomato seeds from TomatoFest.com.

As Cynthia says in her latest e-mail newsletter, TomatoFest.com is

a fabulous on-line resource for over 600 different types of heirloom tomato seeds.

Sounds like a great contest to enter!

Oh, dear, it’s been over a MONTH since I posted here! I can’t believe it. My only excuse is that I’ve been busy gestating. Our baby is now officially three days overdue, actually.

There hasn’t been much action out in the garden since early autumn. My husband, Graham, helped me out a lot this year in getting things cleaned up out back. We actually managed to clip back all of the perennials and he helped me pull the finished plants from the vegetable garden after we harvested the tomatoes.

This year we didn’t keep all of our harvest to ourselves, preferring to keep things simple and give a lot of it away to friends and family members. (Although we did, of course, manage to roast several big baskets of tomatoes and froze four large ziplock bags of roasted tomato sauce.) Our next-door-neighbour traded us some nice little potatoes that he grew for some of our tomatoes, too.

Baskets of homegrown tomatoes, peppers and eggplant for our friends and family.

That little veggie trade had me thinking, actually, that since there are three of us now in a row on my street who grow vegetables, we should try to co-ordinate a little bit, and share our harvest.  We could collectively grow more food than we could individually.  I’ll have to give this some thought over the winter!

But now here it is, late November, and it’s been an unseasonably mild autumn this year, for which I’m grateful. Now there is the potential for snow flurries this coming week, the same week our new family member is expected to arrive (we have an induction scheduled for Monday).

I hope that although we’ll be busy with the new baby, I’ll have more time in general to devote to writing online over the coming year. We’ll be sure to post when the baby comes!

Graham and I went to the Orono Fall Fair yesterday afternoon with our friends, Andy and Kelly and their daughter Sophie.  It was a beautiful early autumn afternoon, and since it was Friday afternoon, there weren’t too many people on the fairgrounds, yet.  There were a lot of school groups there, though, with little kids learning about how to milk cows and all about tractors and growing crops.

Pumpkins at the entrance to the agricultural exhibits.  The big white squash on the right was the winner!

One of my favourite things to do at any autumn fair is look at the agricultural displays, including the vegetables that are grown locally and entered for prizes.  There seems to be a real fascination with vegetables that are either freakishly large or just…freakish.

Look at the size of these beets!  They were each about a foot long.

This tomato won a prize for Most Oddly Shaped Vegetable.  It looks a little like a purple calabash tomato to me, a variety that does grow in very strange, “lumpy” ways. (See my purple calabash harvest from a few years ago.)

And finally, here is everyone’s very favourite large vegetable, the giant zucchinis.

To give you some perspective, you can see the giant beets in the background.

I’ve always wanted to enter some home grown tomatoes into the fall fair, but have never committed to it.  Maybe next year!

I bought several varieties of peppers for the garden this year, and of course when it came time to harvest them, I didn’t remember which ones I planted where. This isn’t usually a problem because although peppers are similar, at maturity they are different enough to be able to identify. However, I think I bought mild AND hot banana peppers which was just silly of me. You know what this means, don’t you? Yes, we had to taste the pepper in order to know which one was ready for harvesting first. I was the guinea pig. And yes, these are hot!

Graham and I threw one on the barbeque to roast it and mellow out its flavours, chopped it up and ate it on some nachos we had for dinner that night.