Dirty Business: Trimming Tomato Plants and Companion Planting

Every year, around this time, my tomato plants suffer from bacterial canker.  This is a particularly nasty disease which starts at the soil line and moves up the plant via contact with other infected leaves and branches.  If left unchecked, the blossoms will dry up and die before fruiting and the whole plant will die.  Unfortunately, there is no way to treat bacterial canker using either organic or non-organic means.  The only treatment is to try and contain the spread by cutting off all of the infected branches.  This is a pain in the arse for a lot of reasons:  it’s tedious, it’s time consuming, and you have to keep doing it every week because once the plant has it, all you can hope to do is slow down the spread.

So, here’s how one of my tomato beds looked before I took the scissors to it:

Look near the bottom.  See all those wilted and dried out leaves?  That’s what bacterial canker does.  Here’s what it looks like up close:

This is early stage, before the leaves have turned yellow, then brown, then dried up dead.

So, after about an hour and a half of trimming, this is what it looks like:

Even with all that, there’s still much more for me to trim, but I ran out of time that day.  I’ll have to find some time this week to try and get back to it before the stuff that I couldn’t trim runs through the bed like a brush fire.  I also have to be pretty aggressive in my cutting.  I go after any branch that even has a couple of brown spots on it because if I just leave it there, then it just spreads faster.  Mrs. Butcher disagrees with my method here, but she’s not the one doing the trimming.  This is, literally, my least favorite part of gardening each year.  I could mitigate the problem by planting the tomatoes further apart, but I don’t have enough space to justify it—plus I still get a massive yield every year.

Rodale’s Garden Problem Solver has but one suggestion for preventing this kind of infection for future crops and that is to use a technique called solarizing, which I’ll feature in its own post a little later.

We’ve been harvesting our outdoor microgreens for a few weeks now.  One thing that is still a problem is that microgreens—particularly arugula—don’t particularly like getting direct sun for hours and hours.  In fact, half of the arugula just up and croaked during the first heat wave—even keeping the soil moist didn’t help.  So, it’s our butternut squash plants to the rescue.  We rotate the location of our plants every year to keep the soil healthy and to discourage pests, and this year the butternuts are in the bed just below the flower boxes.  They’re pretty healthy this year:

They were planted in a bed behind the tomatoes.  Some of the vines have cascaded down into the onion/garlic bed and will likely pass the peppers and hit the street before the season is over.  However, Mrs. Butcher took a bunch of the other vines and tied them up the deck fence so that they would reach the flower boxes and provide some much-needed shade for the microgreens:

If you look very closely, you’ll see three immature butternut squash in this picture.  Right now, we think we’ve got close to 10 squash ripening on the vines, but it’s likely going to be more by the end of the season.

We do a fair amount of companion planting, mostly because we have so little space that we have to do it out of necessity.  For example, we grow the parsley with the peppers, so the peppers can provide some shade and keep the parsley from getting too tough.  We grow the dill with the cucumbers because it just makes sense.  These butternuts are in the same bed as the eggplants because the eggplants are tall enough that they aren’t going to be overshadowed by the butternuts.  There are all sorts of ways to use companion planting, so if you have limited space, or are just interested in finding ways for your plants to help each other out, the interwebs has a whole lot of info out there.