Six years ago, I visited Burpee’s Fordhook Farm in Pennsylvania as part of the International Master Gardener Conference. We toured their trial garden, and one of the crops I noted was a direct-sow tomato plant. This is an exciting innovation to vegetable gardeners, because it means not having to start seeds indoors and raise your tomato plants under lights until it’s time to transplant them outdoors. You could just plant the seeds directly in the ground and still harvest your tomatoes at the same time as conventionally grown ones. I decided I had to try this when the seeds were available.
Well, it’s 2025, and the seeds have appeared in Burpee’s catalog, so I bought some. Here’s the lineup: two tomatoes and three peppers. I got seed for the Rain Drops tomato, a cherry (claims 70 days to maturity from sowing), and the Sow Sweet snacking pepper (60 days). Here’s how growing them went for me and what I thought of the results. (Note: this is nothing like a real field trial, but rather one small-scale gardener’s experience in one year.)
It’s the beginning of May, so it’s time for my annual appeal to hold off on planting out your tomatoes and other cold-sensitive crops. I think the plea may fall on deaf ears this year, because looking ahead at the 10-day forecast here in upper Montgomery County, I see only one night that might fall below 50 degrees F., and only barely below. Days are nice and warm. It feels like tomato-planting time.
Let’s just state a few caveats, though, and then I’ll let you go about your business.
In many recent years, we’ve had a substantial drop in temperature in mid-May, even after summerlike conditions had already taken hold. That may not happen this year, but it still could.
It looks like we are finally going to get some rain coming up—hurray!! We really need it. But a rainy period isn’t the best time to put tomatoes in the ground, not because you get wet, but because the plants do. Wet leaves and splashing mud will make them more susceptible to fungal diseases that could be lurking in the soil. If you do plant during or before a lot of rain, make sure the soil is covered by mulch.
Most importantly, the air temperature at planting time matters less than the soil temperature, and at least where I’m measuring, the soil temperature is far below the ideal 60 degrees F. that tomatoes prefer. Get yourself a soil/compost thermometer and stick it in the ground where you intend to plant; see for yourself. Cold soil temperatures hold back the growth of plants that like it warm, and fruit may be poorly formed.
My tomato and pepper plants are still inside under lights. They’ll venture outside to start hardening off this weekend, so that in another week or so, if the forecast looks good, I’ll be able to consider putting them in the ground. But I’m definitely going to check that forecast and stick that thermometer in the soil.
If you’re in a hurry, and are ready to jump in and protect your plants if we have a mid-May frost, I can’t stop you from planting. You may end up with plants that produce much earlier than mine. Or they may sulk and get diseases and make misshapen fruit. Sometimes the bet pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t. I like to play it safe.
By Erica Smith, Montgomery County Master Gardener. Read more posts by Erica.
One of the most common questions asked by novice vegetable and herb gardeners is “How many?” That is, how many of each plant to put in, so that the harvest will be enough to make dinner but not so much that you’re frantically trying to find homes for a major surplus. When you plan an ornamental border, there are design guidelines that talk about groups and masses and specimen plants, but food gardens (although they can be beautiful) are not planted with aesthetics primarily in mind. So how to make these choices?
You can find plenty of guides online for, say, planning a garden for a family of four. These tend to assume that your garden is large and that you want to supply all or most of your needs from it. Which is great if that’s your goal, but I don’t find that many of the busy urban and suburban gardeners I talk to mean to skip the supermarket produce section entirely. The online guides will also measure the planting in feet of row; if you grow in the square footage of raised beds, you’ll have to do some recalculation. Growing in these kinds of high volumes probably also requires food preservation, whether by freezing, canning, or some other method.
Your garden does not need to be planted in long, long rows to be productive
Most of us find the answer to “How many?” through trial and error, and frankly you probably can’t avoid that entirely. You’ll err on the side of not enough for some plants, and too much for others, and will serve some salads featuring a handful of lettuce or one small cucumber, or get to know your neighbors when you have tons of extra tomatoes. But there are ways to plan.
As Dr. Spock famously said about parenting: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” This is equally true about gardening, even for beginners. People sometimes ask me when they should pick vegetables, as if it was a total mystery, and I generally reply that they’ll know it when they see it, especially if it’s a crop that’s commonly available in markets and grocery stores. If not, a quick online search or a look at the seed packet or catalog may enlighten you. Yours may not achieve the shiny perfection of the catalog models, but it’ll be recognizable. There are exceptions to this easy-to-tell model (melons are notoriously enigmatic) but mostly it’s not so hard.
Being ready to pick and eat, however, is not the same thing as being ripe, and this is a matter of great confusion among even some experienced gardeners, so I’ll plant a few ideas here that might help. Or make you more confused. I don’t know, I can’t think in this heat either.
Just a quick post this month to shout out the virtues of the first tomato plant to produce ripe fruit for me this year: ‘Veranda Red’ patio tomato.
This little cutie is only 18 inches high, and in fact would be shorter if it was growing in full sun instead of the partial sun on my deck. I have other plants with green fruit ready to turn red that are less than a foot high, and the container team at the Derwood Demo Garden has a plant only about six inches high that has ripe fruit.
Patio tomatoes as a group mature at less than two feet, and grow well in smaller containers like window boxes or gallon pots. The larger the pot, the larger and more productive the plant will be, but they will be loaded with flowers and fruit even in a small container. Most varieties are cherries, though a few make larger salad tomatoes.
‘Veranda Red’ is a relatively recent hybrid, but some patio tomatoes have been around for years. A few varieties I found in a quick search include ‘Tiny Tim,’ ‘Micro Tom,’ ‘Tumbling Tom’ (and the rest of the Tumbling series), ‘Orange Hat,’ the ‘Patio Choice’ series, ‘Red Robin,’ and there are many others. Try doing a search on ‘patio tomato’ or ‘micro dwarf tomato,’ or check your favorite seed catalog. You may also find plants at a garden center (I know Bonnie Plants has their own variety and others are likely available – just read the tags carefully to make sure you’re getting a dwarf plant).
These tomatoes are a great option for folks who don’t have much growing space, maybe a balcony or window box or a postage-stamp sunny patio or yard. They don’t produce as much as a full-size plant, but more than you would think!
Now, I have a bunch of full-size tomato plants already growing in my community garden plot, none of which have ripe fruit yet, but they’re getting there. Why bother with patio tomatoes? Well, sometimes a plant, like a person or a pet, just fills a particular spot in your life. Fifteen months ago I inherited a cocker spaniel named Freckles who used to belong to my mom and stepfather. She’s made a new home with us and definitely found a home in our hearts. Freckles loves many fruits and vegetables and is especially fond of tomatoes – she can sniff out the plants well before they have any fruit and will drag us to them. Last year she hunted for fallen cherry tomatoes around our neighbor’s big potted plants and alerted me to some volunteers that sprouted in unexpected spots in my landscape. So I thought it would be nice if she had her own tomato plants closer to home. We make a stop on the deck after a walk to see if any new ‘Veranda Red’ cherries have appeared. She approves!
By the way, I did get to eat one of the tomatoes myself, and can report that it was very tasty. Recommended, even if you don’t have a tomato-eating dog.
By Erica Smith, Montgomery County Master Gardener. Read more posts by Erica.
2024 is Grow It Eat It’s Year of Heirloom Tomatoes! We’re going to have lots of resources available soon to help you celebrate these delicious and historic vegetables (botanically fruits), and we hope you’ll participate by planting a few in your garden. I thought, as an enthusiastic heirloom tomato gardener myself, I’d take a moment to make some introductions.
First of all, what is an heirloom tomato? Well, I think we know what a tomato is; what puts it in the same category as Grandma’s topaz necklace or Grandpa’s grandfather clock? They’re all handed down through the generations. “Heirloom” doesn’t have any single definition when it comes to vegetables. It can mean that the origin of a particular variety goes back more than 100 years, or 75 years, or that it was first grown before a certain date. Many people use World War II as a marker, because the growth of hybrid crops boomed in the subsequent decades, and a lot of older varieties disappeared from seed catalogs. Varieties grown in a particular community or culture, or through several generations in a particular family, are also considered heirlooms. Family names are often part of a variety name, which makes you feel like a cousin when you grow them!
Hi all! It’s time for check-in #3 on my summer gardening efforts. Overall, things are going well, but there have been big ups and downs.
The new raised bed we built is doing well. Krysten planted corn in the center one, and a couple cucumber seedlings in the rightmost one. The cucumbers have been slow to develop and grow. I think this is because of the extreme heat. In the last week or two, one’s growth has accelerated and it’s finally growing one nice cucumber. I may harvest it and slice it up to use as an ingredient in a nice summer cocktail drink tonight (It’s Friday as I write this draft!). Do a web search for “porch swing” cocktail recipes.
Corn
Cucumber is growing!
Since we got the fencing up that encloses the whole space, we have had 0 evidence of animals munching our crops! Huzzah! However, we DID see one deer in our yard and it was eating our hostas elsewhere on our property (and has continued to; the hostas are mostly gone now). So, we DO have deer, but they haven’t been interested in our vegetables (yet). I wonder if they don’t like walking on the gravel we have down?
Tomatoes
We have been harvesting a lot of tomatoes! One of our plants grew very large and tall and ended up flopping over the tomato cages we built in the last update. We needed something taller! We were worried that the tropical storm in the first week of August was about to topple the biggest one completely, so we hurriedly built an extension. We found some scrap wood in the garage, attached it vertically to the sides of the raised bed, and strung twine around nails in the boards back and forth from board to board. This seems to hold it up well and while the tropical storm wasn’t too bad here, there was no damage afterward. We need to do the same for our second largest one this weekend.
Taller tomato support
The early blight issue I spoke about in the last update has seemed to be controlled by pruning more heavily and keeping air flowing. However, our smaller tomato plant has been slow to fruit and has some holes/spots on the leaves. After perusing the HGIC site, my guess was that it was Septoria leaf spot which is a fungal disease, however as a couple knowledgeable HGIC coworkers proof-read this post, they said it was actually most likely from flea beetles. It may sound like I’ve got the inside connection with experts, but everyone can send in questions to our Certified Professional Horticulturists for help like this!
Flea beetle damage on my tomato plant
There are prevention and control directions on the HGIC page for flea beetles, but since the damage isn’t large at the moment, I think we’ll leave it as-is now, and plan to clean up and remove garden debris to reduce overwintering sites for the beetles when we wind down the growing season this year.
Overall though, we’ve been harvesting more tomatoes than we know what to do with, so we’re happy with our tomato efforts here! I’m considering making a whole lot of sauce.
Tomato harvest
Squash and zucchini
In the last update, I mentioned I suspected squash vine borer larvae to be killing my zucchini plant from the inside. I did the surgery and discovered I was right.
See the white larvae in the center, lower third of the image?
I remember reading on the HGIC site at some point that in general with cucurbits, you can cover parts of the plant that grow above the soil with soil, and they will begin to root. I cut the plant to disconnect the borer-infested segment (which was pretty much down into the roots) from the good parts. I ripped out the roots and infested stuff, then planted the remaining stuff back in, mounding soil over it.
Main zucchini plant disconnected from infected portion of plant.
Re-planted zucchini
For a few weeks, things seemed promising. Most of the large leaves did not make it, but some younger and new leaf sprouts were growing strong, and a small fruit started growing. This suggested to me that after some time, we’d likely have this zucchini plant back from the dead and producing again. However, that little fruit died and rotted, and the leaves and stems suddenly showed damage.
Zucchini plant is not doing well
Zucchini leaf with what looks like Downy Mildew
Our squash had been doing great. It kept producing great fruit at a rapid pace, and kept expanding. It was healthy; not showing damage from squash vine borers or cucumber beetles like the zucchini had. It expanded outside of the raised bed and sometimes those leaves would appear wilted. We assumed it was because of the extra heat from the gravel and the hot sun.
All was going well until a few days ago – it began wilting everywhere and wasn’t recovering. Fruit production stopped. We took a closer look, and we’re seeing the same squash vine borer type damage we saw with the zucchini! Noooo! It looked pervasive. I wasn’t about to do more larvae extraction (it was gross, and squash isn’t my favorite vegetable).
So, we called it on both the zucchini and the squash plants. 2:35 pm, Friday, August 10th, 2020. We ripped them out and tossed them far from the garden. We’re making space for some sort of cooler season crops (the planning hasn’t started yet).
Zucchini plant has been pulled and the squash plant is next.
Wilted portion of squash plant outside of raised bed
There are likely squash vine borer larvae in there
There are likely squash vine borer larvae in there
There are likely squash vine borer larvae in there
To prevent egg-laying, wrap a collar of aluminum foil around lower stems or dust or spray lower stems with spinosad or pyrethrum.
Cover plants with floating row cover until flowering.
Plant early to lessen injury. Use transplants instead of seeds. Or, plant squash seed mid-June.
Butternut and cushaw are resistant; yellow crookneck less susceptible than zucchini.
Green beans
We’ve been harvesting a few green beans from the mature plants that survived the rodent massacres that happened before we got the fence up, but it wasn’t enough to make a meal out of. Several weeks ago, I planted more seeds to replace the eaten ones and those have grown and should be fruiting soon. I hope that we can have some dinners with roasted green beans soon; they are my favorite of our garden veggies after tomatoes (and since tomatoes are fruit, I could say that green beans are my favorite veggies).
The zinnia we planted in the center of the green beans has gotten large and is crowding them. We will likely try to tie it up to keep it more vertical than horizontal.
There are a couple bean leaves with holes munched out of them from some insect, but nothing to be too concerned about yet.
Our zinnia and green bean bed. Heavy on the zinnia.
Some beans available for picking
Minor insect damage on bean leaves.
Moving forward
We’re still having fun with the garden. It’s great to be done building for the most part. Krysten has been adding a few pots on the outskirts with flowers in them which makes the space look nice. I think in the next season, we’ll probably add more flowers in pots and save the beds for the vegetables. The flowers have overcrowded vegetables in some instances in the raised beds, and we should be able to attract pollinators close enough to the vegetables via potted flowers.
I’m looking forward to more tomatoes and our first meal with green beans. Perhaps in the next update, I may present our plan for cool-season crops.
