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DAVID BENTLEY'S WEEKLY COLUMN |
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TOMATO PLANTS
I have a tomato plant. It was a gift from a group of women to whom I'd given assistance with several projects. I've grown tons of tomatoes in my life, having been raised in a family that always had a small vegetable garden. We often produced two crops of tomatoes during the long summers of the Deep South where we lived. It is exciting to be growing tomatoes again, even if I'm only tending a single plant. From childhood, I remember starting tomato seeds in milk cartons of potting soil placed in my bedroom window. When the seedlings were large enough, I transferred them to peat pots and sold extras to neighbors and family friends for a quarter. My own plants were put into the garden with cardboard rings around them and marigolds between them to ward off nematodes. I kept the plants watered and checked them weekly for suckers, those secondary shoots that grow at the juncture of branches on the main stem. My grandfather taught me that the more energy the plant spent supporting those suckers, the less energy it had for producing tomatoes. So it was important to pinch them off before they grew too large. He also taught me to bury a good portion of the stem in the soil when planting my tomatoes. The buried stem produced additional roots to make the plant stronger. It has been many years since I grew vegetables, and my new tomato plant resides in a large pot rather than a garden plot. However I tend it exactly the same way that my grandfather taught me all those years ago. As I consider his advice for creating a good root system, keeping energy focused on producing fruit rather than offshoots, and using companion plants to ward off pests, it seems like pretty good advice for how we humans ought to live, too.
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