Growing Desert Perennial Tomatoes and Peppers: Supporting Vegetable Plants with Recyclables

Growing Desert Perennial Tomatoes and Peppers: Supporting Vegetable Plants with Recyclables

Brenda Barnes, Home Grown Food Network President

March 9, 2008

Yesterday I was doing some cleaning in our enclosed porch that we made into an indoor-outdoor dining room. I came across half of a large white metal bird cage that had been covered with a red tablecloth to become a skirted side table. It was good as that, but I’ve decided to open up more floor area in that space, and last week Peter moved a big rectangular dining table with ten chairs from the workshop for me. There’s no room for side tables and an extra seating area as there was with our old plan with a small circular dining table to seat only six. Therefore, I moved the bird cage and tablecloth to the former carport we have enclosed as a recreation room on the other side of the house, to decide later how to use them.

This morning I was out singing to the tomatoes in the garden and noticed a clump of vines with tomatoes on the ground that needed tying up, so I moved the half bird cage out there and tied the vines to it with recycled twisty-ties we save from thrown away supermarket vegetables. I noticed how much better that works than the true tomato vine support I have right next to that vine.

The round open galvanized metal graduated cone-type thing they sell for tomato vine supports just does not work well. Vines have to be trained into the middle and then tied on the sides, which is fine when the vines are small, but when they are big you break half of them trying to get them to go into the middle. It’s much better to have something open on one or two sides so you can tuck the support behind the vines that need tying up, and then tie them along the rectangular metal.

Also, they sell those cone things in two or three sizes, all of which are either too small or too large at various times while the tomatoes are growing. If you get the big one, you’ve got a tower of metal with a small bottom section of vines near the ground much of the time. If you buy the small ones the vines grow out the top right away, and then you have no support for the tomato vines to stay out in the air and sun and not clump together. With recycled things, you can just keep tying another one onto the top of what you started with—which you can pick to be the right size for whatever height the vines have grown to when you decide to tie them up—as the vines keep growing. Now I can hardly see any of the supports we have put into the garden, and most of the time I couldn’t, since they were the right size when I put them in and kept growing as the vines did. The only exception is one bird cage that I put in a really open area where no tomato vines had grown and then kept transplanting next to it tomato vines that broke off (even with recycled things as supports, I sometimes do break a vine because they’re too clumpy by the time I decide to tie them up). Nothing has taken root there, so the poor little bird cage looks lonely and bare still. We’ll see. It’s the most shaded area of the garden, so maybe it’s too shady for tomatoes.

Another way I’m using recyclables to support the tomato vines is letting a few jacaranda trees grow from the thousands of seedlings that germinated in the garden from seed pods blown over from a neighbor’s tree. The seed pods from jacarandas are amazing. You could have thousands of trees from one. They’re more invasive than most weeds, at least here in the desert in the conditions in our yard. I was pulling out jacaranda seedlings by ten or twenty a day for months and throwing away hundreds of pods I could not use for mulch because of the seeds, contrasted to one or two things people call weeds. And if I hadn’t pulled them out when they were small, jacarandas get a taproot that makes you need a shovel and loads of work to get them out when they’re only two or three feet tall, I learned last summer on the other side of the back of the house. However, this year at first I transplanted seedlings where I wanted trees, and they always died. Then I realized I could just wait until one grew on its own where it would be good to shade the tomatoes and our house in the summer. They know where they want to grow, apparently. The ones that started on their own are doing great.

The pepper plants I grew all over from supermarket vegetables we ate like to be supported by round plastic things, both around the plants coming up, and on the limbs where peppers come. I put some kind of threaded black plastic plumbing thing I found, about eight inches in diameter and six inches tall, around a growing small plant, and it just took off when I filled the thing with mulch and buried a soaker hose under the thing, next to the plant. It seems like the pepper plant likes the refected heat of the sun. Then when peppers came out on the limbs of the plant, they surrounded several PVC pipes stored on a ledge next to them. In other places where I don’t support the plants, peppers have fallen off before they are ripe and been wasted. Interesting how plants teach you what they like, just as children do, if you let them, and how easy it is to find things to give them to help them grow.

What a great life growing—and eating–naturalizing vegetables in the desert!

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