Dear Helen: I鈥檓 puzzled over a聽piece of information I heard recently about tomatoes. A man I聽met told me that his food gardening is聽now restricted to growing tomatoes, which he does very successfully. His habit is to pick the tomatoes fully sized but still green and to ripen them indoors. Does this make any sense to you?
L.L.
This practice makes sense at聽the end of the growing season, when it cools down enough to make vine ripening unlikely. Then, sized up tomatoes can be ripened indoors. And commercially grown tomatoes are sometimes picked green, before they ripen and soften, for shipment to stores.
In home gardens, at the height of the tomato season, in my opinion, it is folly to pick the fruit still green. It seems to me that the whole point of growing tomatoes at home is to enjoy freshly picked, vine-ripened tomatoes at the peak of full flavour and nutrition. These tomatoes have up to three times the vitamin C of store-bought tomatoes.
The riper a tomato, the more nutritious it is, at almost four times the vitamin A of a fresh green tomato. And for the fullest possible flavour, pick tomatoes in the late afternoon on a sunny day, when the sugar and flavour chemicals are most concentrated.
For peak quality, harvest tomatoes within five days of the聽fruit becoming evenly red (or yellow, orange, dark purple or pink according the the variety).
Dear Helen: Some of the leaves on my tomato plants look as though they have been bleached. I transplanted late last month, just before the hot weather.
H.E.
The sudden change in the weather late last month was hard on some plants, mainly newly transplanted ones. My young tomato transplants are similarly afflicted but they'll survive: The growing tips remain healthy. Yours likely will too.
The issue is sunscald. Even strawberry leaves have shown signs of it in some gardens. Strawberries this year are especially vulnerable to sunscald because the leaves are larger and somewhat softer than usual, thanks to the cool, wet weather for most of the spring. Then the heat wave struck, affecting the soft new leaves. A cooling down period that followed gave plants a chance to recuperate.
This year鈥檚 fast shift from a聽winter/spring almost straight into summer weather gave us a small taste of conditions prairie gardeners routinely face. They are not commonly blessed with the long, slow easing from聽season to season that we 鈥� the pampered darlings of the Canadian gardening world 鈥� normally enjoy.
Dear Helen: In my garden this spring, I聽keep coming across a really weird looking, light reddish brown, oblong spider under boards in garden beds and聽in other damp, dark places. What is聽it, and is this spider dangerous?
N.N.
Befriend this native spider. It feeds on sowbugs and pillbugs and is known commonly as woodlouse spider (Dysdera crocata).
Like you, I鈥檝e seen more of these spiders than ever this year, perhaps because the long, wet spring nurtured high numbers of the woodbugs that are the spiders鈥� food supply. They both are聽found most commonly in damp, dark places.
I didn鈥檛 manage to take a decent photo of this spider, but you can find one online.
GARDEN EVENTS
Plot exchange. The Victoria Horticultural Society鈥檚 allotment garden co-ordinator will facilitate connections between gardeners without gardens and home owners with unused vegetable plots. The aim is聽to promote greener communities throughout the Capital Region. Email [email protected].
Floral art. The Mid Island Floral Art Club meets Thursday, 2 p.m., in St. Stephens United Church Hall, 150 Village Way in Qualicum Beach. The demonstration will be聽on聽Floral Jewelry.
Small trees. Douglas Justice, head of horticulture and curator of collections at U.sa国际传媒 Botanical Garden, will speak about small trees for residential gardens at Sea Cider Farm and Ciderhouse, 2487 Mt. St. Michael Rd. on the Saanich Peninsula, on Wednesday, June 21, at聽7聽p.m. with cider tasting at 6. The talk is one of the Russell Nursery 25th Anniversary Speaker Series. Tickets at $25 are available at the nursery, 1379 Wain Rd. in North Saanich, or at russellnursery.com. Space is limited. Tickets need to be purchased in advance.