Tomatoes under newspapers!
Some 20 or so years ago, I lived in a house that had a large tree in a small back yard with no space for a garden. A friend nearby told me I could have a garden on her lot. The space she gave me was so close to the woods that little grass grew. In addition, because of the surrounding trees; the only sunlight was before noon. The rest of the day, my little garden spot was in total shade. Yet, I had the best tomato plants there I have ever raised.
There were other problems. Almost daily, we had rain. Never that spring did it dry out enough to work the soil (MO soil has enough clay in it that one can’t work it wet without it drying out as a hard, unworkable crusty soil). I didn’t have a rototiller and if I were to contact someone with a small tractor to plow the patch, it would have been too small. The plot I had was only a little larger than a sheet of plywood. The resulting problem was how do you plant in a new garden without tilling the soil?
I had 16 tomato plants. I had four each of four different varieties and I do not remember which varieties I had. I never added any fertilizer or any soil amendments. I never pruned the plants. As you can visualize, these 16 plants were planted very close together. I would go up to this little garden and pick a five-gallon of tomatoes every couple of days. Surprisingly, one variety never produced a single tomato. I assume the weather had some effect on that variety and because of that experience, I always plant more than one variety because we never know the conditions that will occur which might affect one variety and not another.
This story is about how I planted the tomatoes. Without disturbing the soil, I laid down a newspaper. On that newspaper, I placed the leaf part of the tomato. I then placed a newspaper on the root and stem part of the newspaper. As there were some dried leaves and rocky dirt under the woods, I gathered enough to place on the newspaper to hold it down so it would not fly away. I never touched my garden again until the plants began bearing. The only variable would have been the fact that it was still raining almost every day and so keeping my plants watered was not a problem.
The first question I will address is “How did my tomatoes produce so well without added fertilizers or soil amendments?”
We have been bombarded for years about commercial fertilizer utilizing Nitrogen, Potassium, and Potash and a few others like sulfur or magnesium etc. We miss the true meaning of a productive soil. For those who are unfamiliar with real soil, I suggest you watch “Kiss the Ground” (I wrote a story about this movie for DaiyKos: “Kiss the Ground”). You will learn that soil is a living organism with billions and billions of microorganisms living in it that have the purpose of providing the plant with the minerals needed to grow and produce. The soil under the edge of the woods had not been tilled or sprayed with any available poisons (read my “Herbicide drift on my Garden“) so it would have been alive. In addition, a tree root extends deep into the earth bringing up the minerals necessary for it to grow. Then, many of the minerals are shed when the leaves fall in the fall. This would mean that the soil I was using had all it needed to be productive. If I had used this plot again the following year, I would probably have added more minerals in some form to adjust for those used by my tomato plants.
The second question I will address is; “How did the newspapers contribute to the garden?” Some of you may be familiar with Ruth Stout (“The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book: Secrets of the Famous Year-Round Mulch Method Hardcover – January 1, 1979”). She was famous for heavy mulching which she just pulled apart and then laid seed on the ground before pulling the mulch back over her planting. What the newspapers did was a similar process. As with mulch, the weeds, grass, and other plants were starved of sunlight and then along with their roots, returned to become humus in the soil. In addition, there was the protection of the soil from new weed seeds. The soil was not disturbed ( farming with cover crops). In addition, the original undisturbed soil which had been a bed for living plants already had micro-organisms such as mycorrhizae, bacteria, trichoderma dwelling and already active.
By laying the stem and root of the tomato along the surface of the soil, roots could sprout in multiple places the same as if I had dug a deep hole to plant the tomato.
Without a hoe, roto tiller, labor, weeding, fertilizing, etc, I raised tomatoes and this can be duplicated on most back yards and even applied to current garden spots. Rather than using newspapers, corrugated cardboard (worms love cardboard) would probably work better. If laid on grass, weeds (may need to be chopped or bent over so cardboard can lay flat), and then on top of that, lay grass clippings, mulch, or better yet compost. If done in the fall, this will give more time for the overlaid plants to decay, but even if just as you plant, the cardboard will soften enough for plants to root through.
So even if you only want a single tomato plant, a bed for radishes, lettuce, turnips, or want to do an entire garden, this can be done easily without a lot of expense. If you go to You Tube, you will find lots of sites addressing this method of starting a garden.