GB 177 Container Tomatoes. The Call Garden at Fort Ross TRANSCRIPT
Farmer Fred 0:00
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Farmer Fred 0:20
Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot.
Farmer Fred 0:32
If you have a small yard, or crummy soil or even just a sunny patio, you can grow tomatoes…in containers. If you have an area around the outside of your home that gets six hours or more of sun a day during spring and summer, you can be serving garden-fresh tomatoes at meal time. However, there are some tomato varieties that are better suited for growing in large pots. Our favorite retired college horticultural professor, Debbie Flower, offers us tips on choosing the best tomatoes for containers. Planning your first vacation in awhile for this year? If a car trip along the scenic northern california coast is in this plans, we have an amazing garden for you to visit. And it’s part of an old Russian fort. And it’s a state park. It’s the Call Garden at Fort Ross. And we’ll take you there on this edition. We’re podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in Suburban Purgatory. It’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Pots. And we will do it all in under 30 minutes. Let’s go!
Farmer Fred 1:43
We like to answer your garden questions here on the Garden Basics podcast, a lot of ways to get them in .Speakpipe.com/gardenbasics. E-mail? Sure, Fred at farmerfred.com. You can phone, if you have a phone, you can phone it in with a question: 916-292-8964, 916-292-8964. But I got to tell you, SpeakPipe has better audio quality. speakpipe.com/garden basics. And again, you can always do the e-mail, Fred at farmerfred.com. Or social media. And that's where this question comes from, on the Farmer Fred Facebook page, where I was talking about tomatoes, about good, award winning tomatoes to plant in your garden. And a reader had the question, what are the best container tomatoes? That's a good question. Oh, Debbie Flower is here. Our favorite retired college horticultural professor, Debbie, maybe some general guidelines for tomatoes in containers, I would think they need to be small.
Debbie Flower 2:44
That would be the number one criteria. They're not going to get too big, some tomatoes can get 12-15 feet tall, and spread four or five feet wide. And that's not the tomato that you want to grow in the container. Use a big container, a 15 Gallon Container. You'll read, in some places, they say you can do it in smaller and you can for a while, and then your tomato will peter out. So if you want a good, long season out of that tomato, use a 15 gallon. A half barrel would be really good. Make sure there are drainage holes in the bottom. And then you pick the tomato. And in your tomato list, Fred, you put a tomato vocabulary. And that's a very useful thing to have. Because one word you in particular want to look for is determinate. Determinate means the tomato will stop growing at a certain size. They're often used in the canning industry grown in the field. They don't always need to be caged or staked, and they produce a lot of fruit all at once. But they do continue to produce. So it isn't a once and done kind of plant. So you will have a long season of growing, you'll just have a whole bunch of tomatoes right at the beginning. And then you'll have continuous production after that, a little bit slower production. a little bit slower.
Farmer Fred 3:54
However, it does pick up late in the season. It's like you get a big crop early in the season, then a few along the way. And then towards the end of the season. Another big crop.
Debbie Flower 4:04
Yeah, and I can speculate why that would be, but I don't know for sure. Weather? weather, right. That's what I was thinking. Cooler weather. It's very expensive for a plant to produce flowers and fruit. Because the flowers and fruit do not photosynthesize, they do not make their own food. And so they have to rely on the other green parts of the plant to produce food for them. And so that first heavy crop on the determinate plant can really take it out of the plant and it needs some time to recover, collect more nutrients, collect enough extra sugars, make enough extra food in its green parts to produce another crop. And have the right conditions. Yes, and then the weather cools off. At the end of the summer it's hot and yucky and the plant is just sitting around trying to keep itself cool. And then things start to cool off naturally and it has the extra energy to make some fruit. So determinate is one word we're going to look for. Another is Bush. Bush tomato plants are typically determinate. But they're often the small end of the determinate scale. There are some determinate plants that can get very large.
Farmer Fred 5:06
Most of the bush tomatoes are probably around two or three feet tall.
Debbie Flower 5:11
Using those terms, you've got the Bush all star, the Bush champion, the early girl Bush. There are some plants that are even named things like patio tomato. So that gives you a hint that the plant is really meant to be in a container. For a sauce plant, if you want tomatoes for sauce, really meaty tomatoes. The Roma is an old reliable determinate plant. And so if you're going to Google, use these terms, use "determinate Bush", look for those other names that indicate that it would be kind of small, like a patio, you can get some really small tomatoes, ones that only grow about a foot by a foot.
Farmer Fred 5:49
It's not the fruit.
Debbie Flower 5:50
THE PLANTS. Yes, yes, yes. So you get some really small tomato plants that only grow maybe a foot by a foot, and they're fun, they take up less space than most and they are productive. So that may be really beneficial for you. There are some vining ones that do well hanging, do a little bit of research, but use those terms we talked about,
Farmer Fred 6:08
if you remember blogs... Remember when blogs were popular? Mine still exist out there in the blogosphere, the "Farmer Fred Rant" blog page, and one of the more popular posts is called "Fall and winter tomatoes from your greenhouse". I spent a couple of years attempting to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse during the winter. And you obviously have limited space in hobby greenhouses. So I was growing them in five and 15 gallon containers. And I was choosing determinate varieties that would ripen fairly quickly, usually within 55 to 65 days, which for tomato is pretty darn quick.
Debbie Flower 6:45
It is very quick.
Farmer Fred 6:46
But there are plenty of varieties available. Among the ones that I planted that I had success with, as you mentioned, Bush early girl, the Bush beef steak and some heirloom tomatoes like Grushovka, Manitoba. Others like Oregon Spring, Pilgrim. Two of the ones of the smaller tomatoes, that actually really did quite well, Polar Baby and Prairie Fire. One more, the 506 Bush also did did quite well. Now, the problem with growing tomatoes in the greenhouse in the wintertime in a greenhouse that you keep above 60 degrees or so: you got the energy bill to think about. The taste? It's a notch above supermarket level. do you want to do that much work?
Debbie Flower 7:33
That's a lot of work.
Farmer Fred 7:33
...to get something that's just slightly better than a supermarket tomato, but the thing is, you grew it yourself. Right? And the other thing is, you're gonna get white flies.
Debbie Flower 7:42
Well, yes, yeah. I was gonna ask you about that. Notice that a lot of the names of the tomatoes you mentioned, not all of them, but indicate coldness. Manitoba, Polar Baby, Siletz,, which is a place in Oregon and Siberia. There's another term I don't know, didn't check if it was on your list. Parthenocarpic. Parthenocarpic means producing without pollination. It's like a navel orange, never gets pollinated. It just produces fruit. It's like a false pregnancy.
Farmer Fred 8:11
So it's a perfect flower?
Debbie Flower 8:14
They do flower, navel oranges, but they don't get pollinated. They just produce a fruit. It's like a false pregnancy. And there are parthenocarpic tomatoes or parthenocarpic. Cucumbers. They won't have seeds in them. And they don't need to be pollinated. So, so you don't have to have bees in your greenhouse to produce the fruit.
Farmer Fred 8:34
I had a fan to move it around.
Debbie Flower 8:37
Shook the table? Yeah. Tomatoes can be self pollinating, meaning that if temperatures and growing conditions are right, the pistil and stamen will pass each other at just the right time to transfer pollen and cause fruit to form.
Farmer Fred 8:52
I used to use old battery operated bedroom toys for pollination purposes. and it works. You can actually see the pollen move around.
Debbie Flower 8:59
Electric toothbrushes, those things?
Farmer Fred 9:01
Yeah, sure. But yes, there are a lot of good container tomatoes of a good size. You just got to shop carefully.
Debbie Flower 9:09
You do. You got to read the seed packets, or read the description in the catalog. It's so hard to be disciplined looking at those catalogs.
Farmer Fred 9:17
I think from a container plant, the biggest tomato that you might get might be an eight ounce tomato, which is not bad. That's a half pound. Most of them are 2-3-4 ounces. They're small tomatoes. But hey, you grew it yourself. Hmm. So yeah, go for the containerized tomatoes. Now, one warning about the list: I read you those lists with very cold sounding names of tomatoes. How are they going to do in a hot environment in the summertime?
Debbie Flower 9:18
I would not grow some of those. I wouldn't even attempt to grow some of those in our hot environment. I would expect that they would suffer.
Farmer Fred 9:54
However, in the season before the hot season, you could probably be successful seeing how they mature in 50-55 days or so or towards the end of the season, too.
Debbie Flower 10:05
You could have them maybe in February. Yeah, start and grow them indoors and be done by May.
Farmer Fred 10:12
Well, you could move them out probably by April. Mm. They could finish off their life outdoors. Right. And, and produce a lot. But yeah, and there's a lot of, as you said, tumbling varieties of tomatoes that look great cascading from their container. Yes. So you got all that going for it. containerized tomatoes, sure. Give it a try. Just make sure it's a good sized tomato.
Debbie Flower 10:35
It's a determinate.
Farmer Fred 10:36
It's a determinate. Bush, maybe. Yep. And it gets water.
Debbie Flower 10:41
Yeah, you gotta watch that, they're going to need more attention to watering in particular, than something that you put in the ground.
Farmer Fred 10:50
One way to get around that sometimes too. And it can also maybe buy you a few extra days when the weather gets warm, is to take that five or 15 gallon container, stick it in a bigger pot so that there's an airspace between the outer pot and the inner pot and that keeps the sun from directly hitting the pot that you have the tomato growing in.
Debbie Flower 11:09
Right. And if you don't have that bigger pot, fifteens are quite large. The other bigger pot would have to be even larger, perhaps a 30 gallon. Wrap the outside of the pot in aluminum foil. Yes, wrap it in aluminum foil so that the light reflects off it. Light hitting a black pot, takes 30 minutes and heats the media up to 140 degrees and that kills the roots.
Farmer Fred 11:32
And of course put a sign on the outside of your aluminum foil wrapped pots, saying, "Do Not Disturb - UFO research in progress". We learned a lot about containerized tomatoes. Thank you Debbie Flower.
Debbie Flower 11:43
Oh, you're welcome Fred.
Farmer Fred 11:44
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Farmer Fred 13:40
Have you taken a look at the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred Beyond the Basics newsletter yet? It’s a deeper dive into what was discussed on the podcasts, along with more great gardening information. It really is, going “Beyond the Basics”. In the edition of the newsletter that comes out Friday, March 18, we chat with renowned chef and Master Gardener Andi Macdonald, who was cooking up vegan gumbo out at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center on an open garden day for the staff. A gumbo, of course, can use up a lot of what you harvest from your garden. After all, you grew it, now eat it! That gumbo smelled so good, I want to share it with you in Friday’s Beyond Basics newsletter. Of course, they haven’t installed digital aromas…yet…so, besides talking with Andi about her vegan gumbo recipe, we’ll have the recipe, as well, in the newsletter. It’s what’s cookin’ in the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred newsletter, Beyond the Basics. Find a link in the podcast show notes; or, at Farmer Fred dot com; or, by going to substack dot com slash garden basics. Think of it as your garden resource that goes beyond the basics. It’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred newsletter. And it’s free. Please subscribe and share it with your gardening friends and family. The Garden Basics with Farmer Fred newsletter, Beyond the Basics. And thank you for listening.
Farmer Fred 15:12
I know many of you are planning a vacation, perhaps your first vacation in two or three years, you're anxious to get out of the house and do some traveling. Well, maybe you're going to come to California or you're already here and you want to maybe do a nice tour along coastal California, especially north of San Francisco. There are a lot of interesting horticultural wonders in that part of California. And over the next few months, we'll be talking about some of them. One of them is a Russian fort that also has a beautiful private garden. It's in a beautiful location. And it's called Fort Ross. A few years ago, we paid a visit to Fort Ross and got the lowdown on the Call Garden.
Farmer Fred 16:02
Hi everybody, Farmer Fred,, Fred Hoffman on the road in Sonoma County at Fort Ross, a Russian fort. Yeah, really, the Russians used to own a piece of California. But what they didn't own was the garden I'm standing in, and what a beautiful garden it is. With me is Ranger Heidi Horvitz who works for the state park system here at Fort Ross and Heidi, it's a pleasure to have you on the program. Tell us a little bit about Fort Ross.
Heidi Horvitz 16:30
Well, Fort Ross was established in 1812. And run by the Russian American company. Its goal for its 29 years was to provide food for Sitka Alaska for the Russian American company. And while they were here to have the Alaskan hunters, hunt, otter, which was a good source of income for the company, also they it was a trade route stop. So many things passed through here on their way to and from China. They also created things to sell, and ship away in boats and materials that could be used in other areas.
Farmer Fred 17:07
One amazing thing about Fort Ross is its location in one of the prettiest spots you're going to find on the Pacific Ocean. Well, where we're sitting is maybe 50 feet from the ocean itself, on a beautiful bluff. And we're in a garden. The Russians didn't have this garden, did they? Who ran this garden?
Heidi Horvitz 17:26
Well, even though the Russians came here to do agriculture and grow food, they soon found that the climate wasn't conducive to the wheat they needed to grow because of the summer fog. And in 1841, with problems in Russia, and the company not making money down here, they left. They sold the fort to John Sutter, who was supposed to pay $30,000 for the materials because the Russians did not own the land. When they left, John Sutter took the things back to Sacramento: the livestock, the milled wood, the materials he could use. His last job foreman was a man named Bennett. And his family or he and his business associates ended up buying the land and starting to ranch here. That began the ranching era of Fort Ross. Another owner in between, in 1873, George Washington Call, bought this land. He had met a young woman, he was 36, and she was 15, while he was traveling in Chile. He took this orphan girl, married her, and they had nine children together. They lived at Fort Ross, though it was to be a weekend home or a business venture. His wife Mercedes loved the area so much they ended up raising their nine children here in this house. After George died in 1907, she was allowed to turn the front yard into her dream garden. And part of what you see here today is remnants of what she would have had here. And our goal is to make a garden pretty like she would have liked it.
Farmer Fred 19:07
Yeah, we should point out that the Calls did not live in the Fort itself, but in a house and it's a pretty nice farmhouse, behind the fort, with this beautiful cottage garden that overlooks the Pacific. I guess we're looking sort of south southwest, and there's nothing to protect this garden from the elements. It has to get pretty nasty here in the wintertime.
Heidi Horvitz 19:27
As people get to know the land they build accordingly. The one thing that's very obvious about the front of the house is there's very few windows, they didn't take advantage of the beautiful view. They built so that they could get out of the weather. He had planted lots of cypress trees and eucalyptus trees around the outside of the house. The grandchildren, who are 86 now, the daughters or the granddaughters that still help here at the park, tell about a ship coming and bringing In young cypress trees, and when the Call children were young, their job was to nurse these trees through the harsh summers and mild winters, to get them to grow large enough so it could buffer some of the winds that come from the north. Those winds could just blow this area away. So in the summer here, and in the spring, especially when the winds are blowing, you can stand in the Visitor Center up above us in the parking lot and be blown by 30 mile an hour winds, but come down here in the garden and enjoy the protection from these large cypress trees.
Farmer Fred 20:34
That is amazing. Yeah, it is a very protected spot and this front porch is gorgeous. In fact, why don't we stand up and take a look at the garden because from the front porch, you can look down, it's about six steps up to the front porch. And you can look down and see this beautiful garden below us with the Pacific Ocean, like I say, maybe 50 feet away. What were some of the plants that they had in their garden that are still here today.
Heidi Horvitz 20:57
She liked a few things more than others. She talked a lot about pelargoniums, fuchsias and roses. Also in pictures are dahlias. She specialized in things from her native land in South America. And we now still today have remnants of datura that grow to tree size, and the fuchsias. Unfortunately, those met their demise in the early 80s with the fuchsia mite. So we have a few that are hardy and seem resistant to the mite. But we don't like to use any sprays here. So we've had to shy away from the fuchsias. We do have some pelargoniums and geraniums she would have grown. And we've snuck a few things in that are natives like the Hooker's Primrose, but the Echium, and scented geraniums, roses, a few other things, especially the spring bulbs that do so well here along the coast.
Farmer Fred 21:54
Now what is this fuchsia-like shrub in front of us, with the red tubular flowers.
Heidi Horvitz 22:00
It's the fuchsia. As you can see from the tips, it's suffering from fuchsia mites. But it still blooms well enough. If we stand here, you will probably see within a few minutes about 10 dives from the hummingbirds that like to feed off of it. I'm not sure of the variety of that one. It's small red, fuchsia,
Farmer Fred 22:17
Oh, but for anybody who lives in the valley, that's a big fuchsia! It's a shrub that's is probably three and a half feet tall. And it looks gorgeous. Now one shrub I see here that I wouldn't think would do well here because I know it can't take the harsh Valley winds is the princess flower, the Tibouchina urvilleana. And yet, there it is, in all its splendor. It's about six and a half, seven feet tall, with beautiful purple flowers.
Heidi Horvitz 22:41
There's a funny story about that. We garden here with two of the granddaughters and both are in their mid to late 80s. And that bush right there actually is slated to be pulled out because it was not here when Mercedes Call lived here. So we decided one day sitting on the porch that it was to go. So with my volunteers approval, I cut it down to about shoulder height with full intent of pulling the whole thing out. I got home that night. And they all called me independently and said we love that bush, please don't take the bush out. We know it's not historically accurate. So the bush got the worst pruning job anybody could imagine. And it seems to be the most luscious and healthy that it's ever been.
Farmer Fred 23:27
You know, it's amazing with the windbreaks that were created here. The microclimate that has developed in this area to allow these plants to really thrive, though.
Heidi Horvitz 23:38
The one thing we do have a problem with is roses. We get the summer fog and we're trying to choose roses that she would have had and that also don't suffer with balling, as the fog makes them do along the coast. It seems to be some of them do really well like "Safrano" that's right in front of us. But others just ball up and turn brown and just don't look good like "Souv de la Malmaison" which is along the fence, "Veilchenblau" which is a single beautiful purple flowering rose, we have in both corners. We actually get two blooms out of that and it's a purple single rose. And here on the coast I've seen it in Duncans Mills I've seen it in other areas that are old logging towns, which makes me think that perhaps the wives of the area passed them back and forth. Because they're very common and very healthy. And for some reason, the deer don't seem to bother them as much as other roses.
Farmer Fred 24:38
Ah, so the deer do make it down here.
Heidi Horvitz 24:40
Yes. We have the one thing definitely not historic, the seven foot deer fence that we've had to string around the garden. During the times of the Calls, they would have definitely had dogs and guns to keep the deer out of the garden. But we don't have either dogs, they aren't allowed right in this area of the park. And the visitors frown on us shooting the deer, we tend not to do that as an eradication. We also we trap gophers occasionally. We seem to not have as much problem with gophers as the Russians did. Because the gophers was one of the things that sent them away.
Farmer Fred 25:17
Is there any record of when the Calls were planting this garden if they amended the soil or is this the native soil that they used?
Heidi Horvitz 25:23
The one thing about the soil here is: it is it's like gold, it is in the garden here. They had amended it, she must have brought in the manure from every animal in the area. They raised pigs here, and cattle and sheep and chickens and rabbits. So the soil here you can dig down as deep as you can go, and you don't hit the the nutrient-poor soil like you would 20 feet outside of this garden. So here it's particularly it's very rich and wonderful to work with.
Farmer Fred 25:57
So this is what Sunset means by a well-drained soil.
Heidi Horvitz 26:01
Very well drained, we don't have clay. If you want clay, just step out of here, get 20 feet out, and you'll hit that really poor soil.
Farmer Fred 26:09
Did the Calls have a vegetable garden as well?
Heidi Horvitz 26:12
They grew everything. They had apple trees, they had many, many acres of apple trees up to 1200 trees at some point. They also had just the regular gardens that they would use. If you think about it, the store here was only accessible easily by ship. And they could go over land, but it was rarely done. Most of their produce was exported, as in the apples via ship that would come in the cove here. They would load lumber, and then top that off with things like butter that they had made here, or apples or other exportable goods that they produced. So all the gardening was done here. It was done by the family and you can, because of the mildness here, you can garden through the year with beets and other winter loving vegetables.
Farmer Fred 27:01
And I imagine you have some flowers that do pretty well in the winter too for blooms.
Heidi Horvitz 27:06
You can pretty much come here any month of the year and there will be things blooming. We have a real early show of Narcissus in December into January, leading to daffodils and our favorite out here, oxalis, sour grass, the weed, we've decided that you can't beat it because it's so it's so rampant in this garden, that we've decided to have the Oxalis Appreciation Day among the volunteers because we can't get rid of it.
Farmer Fred 27:34
It is a beautiful garden. And folks, if you're driving Highway One in Sonoma County, just a little north of Jenner and you decide to stop at Fort Ross State Park. Hey, take a walk around the back of the Fort and take a walk out towards the ocean. And you're going to find a beautiful little farmhouse and in front of that farmhouse, just the prettiest little cottage garden you could find. The Call Garden and it's part of the Fort Ross State Park. And Heidi Horvitz, thanks for spending a few minutes with us and telling us all about this little gem of a garden tucked away, behind a Russian fort.
Heidi Horvitz 28:04
Thank you. And the Call House is now open. Volunteers run the Call House Saturdays and Sundays the first Saturday and Sunday of the month from one to four. And you're welcome to not only tour the garden that day, but venture inside the house and see how it's been open and refurnished and repainted and ready for a tour.
Farmer Fred 28:24
The Call Garden, The Call House, and Fort Ross, right here in Sonoma County. Come on and pay it a visit.
Farmer Fred 28:34
Garden Basics comes out every Tuesday and Friday. It's brought to you by Smart Pots. Garden Basics is available wherever podcasts are handed out. And that includes Apple, Iheart, Stitcher, Spotify, Overcast, Google, Podcast Addict, Cast Box, and Pocket Casts. Thank you for listening, subscribing and leaving comments. We appreciate it.