GROW YOUR GARDEN "UP" AS NATURE INTENDED

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But for the greatest yields and best eating, I look for a packet of Tom Thumb red cherry tomatoes on seed racks in a grocery or hardware store. I start the whole packet and select the strongest seedlings. (Like all open-pollinated varieties, the seed varies greatly in seedling vigor). This old variety produces veritable bushes that are loaded with hundreds and hundreds of small, tasty salad tomatoes produced in clusters of three to nine. If kept picked, Tom Thumb will produce till after frost too—as the bushy outer leaves protect the fruit ripening inside through early chills.

Even with frost protection, the plants will succumb eventually, leaving quarts of green and semiripe fruit. Be sure to harvest before the fruit are frosted (and turn soft and translucent). Any unfrosted fruit with a blush of color will continue maturing if stored in a warm place and placed on a sunny window sill for final ripening. Even if grown to full size, hard green fruit won't ripen, but they do make grand pickles.

Tom Thumb is scarce in seed catalogs these days. It is overproductive if anything and too robust for most suburban gardens. Plus, if you grow it once, you have it forever, as the superhardy seed will make "volunteer" plants in the spring—even after spending winter on the compost pile or tilled into the garden soil.

Low-Lying Vegetables

Best with all open-pollinated varieties—not just tomatoes—is to save seed from the biggest fully ripened fruit from several of your most vigorous and productive plants. Dry seed on paper towels, let it chill—but not freeze—over winter, and start early the following spring.

Out in front of the "up"-trained plants in the garden come half-high varieties, which no amount of support can keep from spreading over two to nine square feet of garden area. First come brussels sprouts that can grow a yard and more high, then broccoli and cabbage, eggplant, and others that don't grow more than two feet high.

Next, toward the front of the garden, I plant greens, root vegetables, and all the other low-growing varieties—letting them grow as they will. Not much point in training carrot tops or Swiss chard.

But I do train sweet potatoes—a root crop that is normally planted in long ridges like elongated white-potato hills. A dainty but vigorous vine with bright green arrowshaped leaves and purple stems, the foliage will cover the soil for a yard on each side of its mound. If you catch the vines as they emerge (and keep after them) they can be tied or looped around lattice or wire on a vertical support the same as squash and cukes. Indeed, I plant sweet potatoes and cucumbers or summer squash together ...along with New Zealand spinach (or Tetragoneria) that provides cooking greens through the hottest summer. Insidestarted plants of the three varieties are alternated eight inches apart in front of the 4' x 4' wirefence frames.

Competition among these totally dissimilar plants seems to encourage vigorous growth and and confuse the predators of 'em all. It is satisfying to harvest ripe cucumbers or squash and "summer spinach" and know that sweets are developing in the soil underneath.

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