The Fink Farm Dirt

I can't stand the tell-tale signs of garden pests: the leaves with holes, the failure to thrive. I believe in early assault with organic deterrents. Kate has great faith in plants' commitment to survive.  She considers holes in leaves to be a mere cosmetic blemish. Like politics and religion, getting rid of pests in a garden is sure to cause a community donnybrook (or at least rapid words over ice water in the lounge chairs). To do organic warfare against pests means using one or more of these tools:

Next to composting, I'm entranced by companion plants. These are plants that when sowed together keep away pests that are harmful to one or the other of the companion plants. They are indispensable to the organic gardener. One of the best known pairings is marigolds and tomatoes. Marigolds keep away those monstrous horned, green worms that so love tomatoes. When you use companion planting, you never have to worry about whether the plant got entirely coated with pesticide or was washed off in the last rain.  Companion plants work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No worries about getting poison your harvest either. They work in a variety of ways from smell to chemistry to having mutually beneficial waste products or impacts on the soil. Here are some other common combinations for a companionable garden:

Our first green tomato is visible under the leaves inside the tomato cage. It always amazes me how quickly and dramatically a gardener can go from impatient waiting to an avalanche of harvest. Tomatoes especially arrive as genteel newcomers and grow into sprawling monsters. When the first crop of tomatoes start greening up, it seems almost scandalous to pick them for fried green tomatoes (or baked, which we discovered we preferred last year.  When they start turning red, there's no end to them. Until you start trying to can them or turn them into sauce.  Then it seems as if we should have just plowed up the entire backyard and planted "Fink Tomato Farms." This year, I've promised myself that I'm going to scout out the perfect tomato sauce recipe.

Well, maybe not acreage . . . but a very nice flower bed, indeed. Along the wall of the house, we planted hollyhocks and sunflowers.  If they grow as hoped, it will shade that wall this summer, keeping the den cooler.  But the wild cards in this vision are the fact that the sunflower seeds were old and the hollyhock seeds harvested from dead heads found along the streets on a dog walk last summer. The next row has zinnias and gallardias,which have never grown before at Fink Farms.  The zinnias are quick sprouters though.  We also planted a pot of coreopsis and a six pack of  gazanias.  We added in one small dill plant which seems to love its new location. Kate had a chance to use her favorite piece of gardening equipment, the Mantis tiller. An amazing chewer of soil, it is. She started down another piece of land on the north side of Karen's house, but there are mighty tree roots in that bed that will need more attention than we had Sunday. Meanwhile...

The first year that Fink Farm was in operation, we devoured Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening .  A 10-foot by 12-foot plot isn't much.  We pegged off one-foot measures on two adjoining sides, and rolled some pebbled pavers into position to give us places to stand amongst our soon to be thriving garden. But then things started spinning out of alignment. For starters, it became clear that running string across the dirt in one-foot increments was going to create one nasty arrangement for digging on any scale at all. All I could envision was a broken ankle from hopping over all that string.

Kate can't resist a garden center. A trip to CostCo. to use a coupon for printer toner for me ended up with a sharp left into the garden center. Before I could say, "Whoaaaaaa . . . " Kate was cradling a pack of three gallons of heirloom tomatoes and crooning to it. Last year we planted the common tomatoes that I remember from the Oklahoma summers of my childhood -- round, regular and red. Better Boy, Big Beef -- who knows what the plants' marketing names were. The tomatoes that Kate fell in love with are labeled heirlooms* -- Shady Lady, Bobcat and Monica. I've always loved the concept of heirlooms.  These are tomatoes that have pollinated in a natural way in an open garden. The gardeners who originally grew them, selected their seeds for specific desirable characteristics -- color of the fruit, flavor, disease resistance, productivity, etc. They often share the seeds with others. An heirloom tomato seed can easily have a documented provenance, just l...

The cabbages are balling. The scallions are bulging. The red chard is bolting.  The volunteer yellow grape tomato plant is filling out with tiny green tomatoes. Kate just put in some strawberries. The first distinctive leaves and tendrils are rising to attach themselves to the bamboo trellis we have for peas and beans . . .  It's a beautiful day in the garden.