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Pastimes : Gardening and Especially Tomato Growing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (606)	5/31/1999 12:35:00 PM
From: Tommaso	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3496

six-foot lengths of galvanized electrical conduit can be used as tomato stakes. Not the cheapest thing, and twine tends to slip on them, and not very picturesque, but good for 20 years. And they can be hammered into clay soil. Green iron fenceposts are another and even more expensive possibility. I hope your planting method works; maybe the roots will get down through the turf, but you may have to watch for drying out. I have a horrible confession to make for all organically-minded gardeners. I use black plastic mulch--and seldom have to water anything and never have to weed. I tried straw two summers ago and it was a terrible mistake. It was full of wheat seeds that were sprouting all summer long, and also it let wild morning-glories get an unstoppable foothold. Everything is flourishing in my vegetable garden (under the black plastic is compost-rich dirt more than a foot deep, and this year I plowed a second time). Last year El Nino drowned many things and compacted the soil. But I already have blossoms on my Japanese egg plants (two types, one of which is quite obscene). About a dozen tomato plants are about to put on blossoms (a mixture of old favorites and new hybrids supposed to resist everything bad). I have a little zucchini and yellow squash--but about 25 pepper plants of about six different sorts: sweet banana, sweet bell, pimiento, jalapeno, Hungarian wax, cayenne, and something else hot. A tomatillo, which I have never grown before. And we have two herb gardens--one perennial and the other annual (right outside the kitchen door, parsley and basil and cilantro).