TIME IS RIGHT TO PLANT HEAT-LOVING VEGETABLES
From juicy tomatoes to piquant peppers, a bountiful buffet beckons gardeners
Well, this is it. Right across our country, Victoria Day weekend is the official kickoff to the garden season. Now the days are longer and the night temperatures are more consistently near 10 C, so it’s time to plant the majority of our heat-loving vegetables.
If your garden is not ready yet, or if where you live is still too cool at night, hold off and concentrate on cool-loving vegetables until you are comfortable with setting out heat dependent vegetables like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and squash. There’s still plenty of time.
All transplants needing these higher temperatures should be acclimatized. Whether you’re growing your own starters or using purchased ones, they need at least three to four days outside in a dry, shaded location, out of the wind, to harden up before they go in the ground.
Another way of sheltering soft plants is to put some protective covering around them once they are planted. Pre-packed tomato bags, for example, work well.
Soil preparation is critical. Your plants will need good, rich soil with lots of organic matter down deep (18-24 inches, 45-60 cm) to get them off to a great start. If you wish to apply a liquid root starter after planting that’s all right, but hold off using any fertilizer (organic or otherwise) until the roots are established. Once the plants are settled in, you can then side-dress with nutrients around the outside base of the plants.
Set tomatoes in deep because they stem root, which means they sprout roots along the buried stem resulting in stronger plants. Sprinkle some lime around the base of each tomato plant to provide some of the much-needed calcium that prevents blossom-end rot when the fruit ripens.
Cucumbers need to be situated high and dry with good air circulation, so plant them shallow in mounded soil. There are so many great varieties today, but the Japanese burpless types, like Burpless No. 26, Tasty Green and Tasty Emperor are easy to grow, and their fruits are long, sweet, crunchy, seedless and yes, burpfree. The exciting new varieties are the European short gourmet types, like Perseus and Picolino, which are ideal for salads and snacks. If you’ve been happy with your older favourites, stay with them, but the Japanese burpless types get my vote.
For container growing, there are wonderful sweet cucumber varieties that do well in small spaces, like Patio Snacker and Bush Pickle and novelties, such as cucamelons, also known as Mexican sour gherkins, that have cukes the size of robin eggs and look like miniature watermelons.
Peppers are today’s hotties, and I do mean hot. Hot peppers need a longer season to mature. Jalapenos of all types, hot Hungarian wax, red cayenne and Anaheim types are the leading mildly hot varieties. The super hots and those off the Scoville heat scale like ghost chili, Scotch bonnet, habanero and Caribbean Scorpion, are often in demand for Asian recipes, but you really need to be careful with these guys because even the foliage can burn you. Be sure to handle with gloves. Edible ornamental peppers, like Basket of Fire and Loco are ideal for container growing and are still fairly hot.
Delicious sweet bell peppers contain more vitamin C than an orange. They come in many sizes and shapes and have a crazy colour range from chocolate and purple to all shades of yellows and reds. There are mini bell types like Hungarian Cheese that are perfect gourmet treats for stuffing.
Squash, particularly summer squash, have come from the back of the garden to the front of our culinary dishes. Zucchinis, with their many shapes and sizes, still rule. Bush types like Patio Star are well suited to small spaces. Golden Yellowfin and round Eight Ball are tasty novelties. Spaghetti squash is also taking centre stage because, when scooped out, the inside fibres are like spaghetti noodles and are delicious served with tomato sauce. Scallopinis are wonderful in stir-fries and add a flavourful crunch to salads.
Small sized winter squash are also enjoying a resurgence because they make a perfect serving for two. The acorn or Table Queen varieties are the most popular and now come in green, yellow, white and multicoloured, as in Festival. Sweet butternut and buttercup are huge hits in the garden and on the table. There’s a growing demand for Delicata squash and for novelties like Shokichi and kabocha squash. They all keep well into winter in a cool, dark location.
Starter plants of some varieties will give you finished squash in about six to seven weeks — two weeks later when started from seed. Squash has the best flavour when the flowers are still on the fruit.
Don’t forget the melons. Smaller and early-ripening varieties of watermelon, like Sugar Baby and Yellow Doll, need a really hot spot. Cantaloupe transplants, like Halona, will provide delicious fruit in about 75 days. Honeydew can also be grown if you have a warm spot in your garden. To grow these delicious melons in West Coast gardens you need to have larger starter plants for success, and if you get two, three or four fruits, you’ve done well.
Tomatillos and sweet ground cherries are still a novelty but growing in popularity. They need heat, but it would be great to have your own supply of these unique gourmet vegetables.
Sweet potatoes are newer additions to West Coast gardens. They need lots of hot temperatures, and they should be planted in mounded soil topped with black plastic for extra heat. Georgia Jet will produce nice purplish sweet potatoes in late summer. You’ll find them as starter plants in some garden stores, and they are well worth a try. Once harvested, store them upright in egg containers in a cool dark area. In a short time, the starchy tuber will turn into a sweet, flavourful edible.
Eggplant, okra and other culinary specialties can also go in now. They will add interesting flavouring to many dishes. Our gardens are all about fabulous organic foods that provide optimum flavour and nutrition. Now is the time to plant these wonderful vegetables for a delectable late summer harvest.