Growing Your Own Vegetables: An Encyclopedia of Country Living Guide (17 page)

Continue to monitor the harvest, picking regularly to keep plants producing until frost. Cut the pods rather than plucking them to prevent damaging the plants. When okra gets too tall to harvest in midsummer, southern growers cut the plants down to about 18 inches. The plants quickly grow up again and provide another crop!

Peppers

Peppers (
Capsicum
sp.) are members of a huge and varied family. Native to the Americas, peppers have been cultivated for at least 7,000 years. All peppers are tropical perennials that must be grown as annuals except in subtropical climate zones. They come in all sorts of shapes, colors, uses, and flavors ranging from mildly sweet to scorching hot. In the garden, as in the kitchen, peppers are divided by sweet and hot varieties. They have more vitamin C than citrus as well as good amounts of vitamins A, E and B1, making peppers a nutritious and flavorful addition to the table.

Hot
peppers, also called chili or chile peppers, produce smaller fruit than sweet peppers on larger plants with a greater overall yield. Young fruit is green, maturing through yellow and orange stages; most end up some shade of red. The colorful plants with their peppers in various stages of ripening are often grown as ornamentals as well as for their fruit. The hotter the growing conditions, the hotter the chili; even when growing the same variety, cool northern gardens will yield a milder chili.

Hot peppers offer a range of heat from the mildly hot or semisweet to hotter hot and searing hot, all the way to the incendiary hot of the Tepin pepper, whose round, red, ¼ inch fruit, as tiny as a fingernail, is known as the hottest pepper of them all—with a Scoville rating of 600,000 units!

SCOVILLE HEAT SCALE

Food scientists and commercial food processors use the Scoville heat scale, created in 1912 by Wilbur L. Scoville, to measure the comparative spicy-hotness of foods. The scale ranges from 0 or no heat units for sweet peppers of every kind up to 600,000 units for the Tepin, the hottest pepper of them all. The chemical that makes hot peppers hot is an alkaloid called capsaicin. What the scale is actually measuring is the amount of the capsaicin present: the more capsaicin, the greater the number of heat units.

Your taste buds register sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, but when chili lovers speak of the “burn,” they’re being precise. The body’s pain receptors perceive the literal burn caused wherever capsaicin touches the body. You “taste” hot peppers via the pain receptors in your mouth rather than the taste buds. Many chili lovers, or “hot heads,” attest to experiencing euphoria similar to a “runner’s high” when they eat the hottest chilies. Researchers have noted that pain receptors stimulated by capsaicin cause the brain to secrete endorphins, the same natural morphine-like chemical that is responsible for the runner’s experience.

Sweet
peppers come in many varieties beyond the familiar blocky bell peppers, including heart-shaped pimentos, tomatoshaped“cherry” types, and long slender tapering peppers; all have unique flavors that are delicious fresh as well as baked, stuffed, sautéed, or pickled. Green peppers, if left on the plant, will ripen to red (or yellow, dark purple, white, or brown for unusual varieties) and gain in sweetness as they mature.

PLANTING:
All peppers do best with warm growing conditions. Take care to not overfertilize plants, as too much nitrogen in the soil produces tall, dark green plants with little fruit. In temperate zones, start peppers indoors about 50 to 70 days before your frost-free date, sowing seed ⅛ to ¼ inch deep. Soil temperatures of 75 to 95°F are ideal for germination; young seedlings can handle 70°F day temperatures and as low as 60°F at night. Water plants with warm water to avoid a possibly fatal cold shock. Wait to place transplants into the garden until they are at least 5 to 6 inches tall, 6 to 8 weeks old, and the last frost date is a week or two in the past. Thin seedlings or space plants 1 to 2 feet apart in rows 2 to 3 feet apart. Night temperatures below 60°F and day temperatures above 90°F will inhibit fruit set. 75 to 90 days to maturity for sweet peppers; 65 to 75 days to maturity for hot peppers.

HARVESTING:
Pick peppers to keep plants producing at full capacity; hot peppers gain in heat with maturity. When frost is imminent, pull up the whole plant, bring indoors, and hang upside down to continue to ripen the fruit.
Note: Wear gloves when harvesting or processing hot peppers. Whenever working with cut chilies, keep your hands away from your face, especially your eyes. Keep all chilies—whole, cut, or ground—out of reach of small children!

Tomatoes

Tomatoes (
Lycopersicon lycopersicum
aka
L. esculentum
) are fruit, botanically speaking. In 1893 the U.S. Supreme Court applied its solemn expertise to the problem of tomato classification and decided that henceforth the tomato would legally be a vegetable rather than a fruit. In the end, tomatoes are a versatile fruit/vegetable with many delicious applications and are the most popular garden vegetable grown in the United States.

A tropical native of South America, tomatoes perform best with a long, hot growing season, but through rigorous selection and hybridizing seed companies have developed varieties for nearly every climate, zone, and garden condition.

Tomatoes come in red, orange, pink, green, or white, with fuzzy or smooth skin. They range from super-sized beefsteak tomatoes, which can weigh in at 1½ to 2 pounds, to cherry or tiny currant-sized fruit, some of which are as small as a marble or a pea. They can be sweet or sour, round or oval, open-pollinated heirloom varieties whose garden history goes back 100 years or more or brand-new, heavy-yielding hybrids. Early varieties set fruit well even in cool weather and mature quickly; mid- and late-season tomatoes bear the largest individual fruits but take longer to mature.

PLANTING:
Prepare a bed in full sun with fertile soil. Tomatoes need a soil temperature of 60 to 85°F for best germination. If you live in the southern part of Florida or Texas, you can plant directly into the garden, sowing seed ½ inch deep; plant generously and thin to the strongest plants. In temperate zones, start tomatoes indoors 6 to 8 weeks before your frost-free date. Sow seed ¼ inch deep and cover pots or seed flats with newspaper, plastic, or glass to maintain high humidity and darkness. Maintain a temperature of at least 70°F and keep the soil moist with a fine spray. When seedlings emerge, remove the cover and provide lots of light.

When the seedlings are 3 to 4 inches tall, repot into a deeper container, setting plants down in the soil right up to the leaves. Depending on the weather, plants may need to be repotted once more before being thoroughly hardened off and set into the garden.

With some form of protective covering to retain heat, tomatoes may be transplanted into the garden 3 weeks before the last frost date. Water seedlings well and plant in trenches to make the most of the warmth in shallow soils. Pinch off the lowest leaves and set the plants horizontally in shallow furrows 4 to 6 inches deep, with only the tops of the plants protruding from the soil. These buried stems will develop roots along their entire length; a bigger rootball means a larger and sturdier plant with a greater yield. Set plants 2 to 6 feet apart depending on your chosen training method; do not mulch until the soil is thoroughly warmed, unless you are using black plastic.

If tomato disease is a problem in your growing region, select varieties that are resistant to verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, or nematodes, indicated by V, F, and N codes on seed packets. To avoid disease, rotate your tomato crop in the garden each year and wait 3 years before planting tomatoes in the same place or in a place where peppers, potatoes, or eggplants have grown.

Tomatoes are fairly pest-free in the garden, save for those parts of the country that must deal with the tomato hornworm—a very fat, 1½- to 3-inch-long, hairless green grub with one horn sticking out of its tail. A truly remarkable sight and a pest that can wreak great damage on your tomato plants; control by picking early in the day when most of the grubs are concentrated deep within the plants. You’ll have to look closely as they may be utterly camouflaged by their bright green color, which blends with the surrounding tomato foliage.

Tomatoes are self-fertile and insect-pollinated. If the crop is grown under cover, gently rustle the plants with your hand to encourage their “perfect” flowers, which contain both male and female parts, to self-pollinate and increase yield.

TRAINING TOMATOES

Tomatoes are categorized by their growth habit. Determinate varieties are stout bushy plants, 18 to 30 inches tall, that flower and bear fruit all at once. Indeterminate plants are large vines to 6 feet that continue to grow, flower, and set fruit until frost. These large vines may be allowed to sprawl over the ground or more typically are caged, staked, or trellised to conserve garden space and expose the ripening crop to the sun.

Staking plants entails training 2 to 3 strong “leaders” or stems up a single stake placed in the ground near the tomato at planting time or against the support of a trellis or fence. Gently tie the vines to their support as they extend, taking care not to damage the stem. Prune to remove excess foliage and suckers that emerge from leaf axils; this helps expose ripening fruit to the sun. Individually staked plants do not produce as heavily as caged or free-rein plants; however, they may be placed at closer intervals in the garden for a good yield per square foot overall.

Caged plants are encircled with a cylinder of wire fencing (or a commercial tomato cage) and plants are trained up through the cage with their branches supported by side rungs. Cages should be about 2 feet in diameter and 4 feet in height; stake cages on either side to secure them, as mature plants are heavy and you don’t want the cages to topple.

HARVESTING:
Vine-ripened tomatoes are such a treat—true edible perfection! Fruit will color up and begin ripening in late July or August depending on the variety and your growing conditions. Pick them as soon as they are ready, and the plants will continue to produce until frost. Plants may be shielded from light frost if draped with protective plastic sheets. When the weather turns for good and the season is over, dig up the plants, bring them indoors, and hang them upside down to continue to ripen the fruit.

GREEN TOMATOES

Tart, crunchy green tomatoes star in their own tasty recipes and are a southern tradition. Light, selective harvesting of immature green tomatoes will grant you two crops from a single planting, but fall frosts usually leave at least some immature tomatoes in all gardens. To test, slice a green tomato with a sharp knife and try to cut one of its seeds in two. Tomatoes that have matured have seeds suspended in a jelly-like juice that will shift away from the knife so the seeds don’t get cut. A tomato that hasn’t matured its seed will not ripen off the vine and is best prepared “green.”

Other nightshade family vegetables

Ground cherry
(
Physalis peruviana
), also called strawberry tomato or husk tomato, is not a true tomato. This low, bushy plant bears round yellow fruit about the size of a small cherry inside a thin, paper-like husk. Native to the Central and South American tropics, there are several wild and domestic species, but the most flavorful is generally referred to as the giant ground cherry or cape gooseberry. Ground cherries have a delicious sweet fruity flavor often likened to pineapple. They will grow in poor soil and need little care; follow procedures for planting and growing tomatoes. Harvest ground cherries when they have turned yellow and become a little soft. Expect about 75 days to maturity and about 2 pounds of fruit from each plant.