It’s too early to plant, I know that, but we did anyway. The days have been gloriously beautiful. I was able to convince myself that the phrase “average last frost date” must mean that, at least sometimes, the last frost is MUCH earlier. Plus we know a trick or two to keep Jack Frost away. What convinced us to try was a stroll through the local farmer’s market where we found seedlings already for sale. We HAD to bring home a few.
We bought:
• a four-pack of “Early Pick” tomatoes, “Large fruits are excellent for eating or cooking, Indeterminate: MAT 62 days”
• a four-pack of “Better Boy (VFN)” “A vigorous indeterminate vine that remains productive until frost. Matures in 70 days”
The trick with tomatoes if you’re going to cheat Jack Frost is to make sure you plant indeterminate vining varieties. These will continue to grow and fruit until frost kills them at the end of the season. Determinate vines are easier to keep but once they grow to full height, they’re pretty much done bearing. You might win the “first fruit” contest with determinate varieties but for “most fruit,” I’d go with something indeterminate.
• 2 four-packs of “Italian Basil”
• one nice, stocky organically grown Brandywine tomato, an heirloom variety that we know to bear very tasty fruit on indeterminate vines.
The tricks for warding off Jack Frost at the beginning of the season include:
1) We started with the bed that gets the most sunlight. Last year we had great success here with a mixture of tomatoes and basil, plants that are good companions for each other and so we were glad to find those available.
2) CLOCHES or mini-greenhouses. We’ve written about these before but we use clear juice containers from cranberry juice. Just cut the bottom off and put them around the tiny plants. You want to remove them as soon as the weather gets nice though because they also can become little solar ovens.
3) Mulch around the cloches. I have absolutely NO scientific rationale for why this would minimize frost damage but heck, this is a pretty convenient time to lay some down. It minimizes the number of times that you have to disturb the beds too.
Ideally, I’ve heard it’s best to pull off the mulch that’s sat on the beds all winter and compost it, just to minimize the chance of parasites or bacteria getting too friendly. But I have a tendency to just add another layer onto the mulch that is already there. Since this particular bed has only recently entered our care, there was good soil but not yet a really deep layer of humus yet. I probably should have added a shovelful of compost to each of the holes… but I didn’t. I did however pull away the old mulch and I tried to put a bit of a moisture barrier down to minimize the old seeds from sprouting up through the mulch. I wanted to use newspaper for this barrier but I could only find a couple sheets that didn’t use colored ink. I’m probably being a worry wart, but I want to make sure that the ink that the newspaper uses is a vegetable dye and not something noxious. A quick raking of the mulch back into place and things looked good.
Oh and to keep records this is what everything cost:
2 four-packs of tomato, 1 four-pack of green pepper @ $1.50 each = $4.50
2 four-packs of basil @ $2.50 each = $5.00
1 stocky organic Brandywine @ $3.00 = $3.00
TOTAL = $12.50
