Country Lore - Readers’ tips to live by

Image Gallery Homemade tomato protectors Joe White

Issue #215, April/May 2006

Build Better Tomato Protectors
Sow Beans for Summer Shade
Grow Borage for Bees
Great Reasons to Dry Your Laundry in the Sun
Easy Birdbath From an Old Satellite Dish
Make Your Own Pest-repelling Mulch

BUILD BETTER TOMATO PROTECTORS

For the past 15 years, my wife, Edna, and I have lived on a 40-acre farm in the foothills of the Ozarks, in a little Missouri town with the Osage name of Neosho. Each year, starting in January, I receive lots of seed catalogs in the mail; my favorite is Tomato Growers Supply Co. They have a great selection of tomatoes, and each year I try three new varieties. My favorites so far are ‘Jetsetter,’ a large, early and prolific red tomato, and the hybrid ‘Big Beef’ that also is prolific and very solid with a wonderful flavor. I start the seeds in my woodstove-heated garage under grow lights.

My farm neighbors and I compete each year to see who can have the first ripe tomatoes. In order to beat the freeze and get my tomato plants in the ground early, I built a set of panels to shelter the plants (see photo). Each plastic-covered panel is 30 inches high by 15 feet long. It took 10 panels to cover both sides of the rows that contained 55 tomato plants.

In the past, I have used plastic jugs to cover each individual plant, but this was not always successful. For example, last spring we had a hard freeze after the tomatoes were planted — the plants covered by plastic jugs succumbed, but the ones protected by the panels all survived.

Joe White
Neosho, Missouri

SOW BEANS FOR SUMMER SHADE

To create a shady spot in the garden and make picking our green beans easier, we bent a 4-by-16-foot metal-mesh cattle panel (available at farm supply stores) into an arch over the path between raised beds. We anchored the panel to the ground with stakes so the wind wouldn’t blow it over and then planted pole beans at each end of the panel to make a green bean archway.

To shade the house during the hottest months, we planted purple hyacinth beans. We nailed strings to the eaves every couple of feet, making sure they were long enough to reach the ground. Then we planted the beans, one or two per string. Some of the seeds did not germinate, but because the vines spread so well, this was not a problem.