Lessons Learned from the Quarantine Garden

Spring 2020 will go down in the history books as a year not to be forgotten. One benefit from the global pandemic was that many of us could head to our gardens for solace. During the Pandemic, I found myself living in an Italian Villa in Southern Italy.

So as the weather turned from the cold days in the beginning of March to the cool days of April and finally to the sunny days of May… I worked in my garden. You can read about the crazy “heave-hoe” days of weeding, planting and planning in my article “The Life of a Gardener”.

But this article is about the new lessons I have learned working in my gardens during the Pandemic. I have found myself in the largest garden I have ever had the privilege to live in and plenty of time to tend the land. My friends at home in California are also gardening like never before and posting their successes and joys in the garden. This new “shared” information has opened my eyes to many garden techniques that I had never heard of before.

One of our friends turned me on to the show “Grow Cook Eat”, it is filmed in Ireland so many weather points don’t apply to me here in my Mediterranean climate. But I still loved many of the points I learned. One point was to bury a pot (like the black plastic pot the plant came in) next to the tomato plant with the opening at ground level. This was to make sure enough water got to the plants roots.

Brilliant! I didn’t have any nursery pots here because all of my plants came in six packs, but I do have 2 liter plastic water bottles! So I cut them in half and buried them instead. I’m so excited about this effective water conservation technique. I guess you could use the whole water bottle placing the drinking “top” down into the soil and cutting off the bottom. Many Italians use this technique but I didn’t want the ugly water bottle sticking up. It’s bad enough that I have a little clear plastic glittering in the sunshine from my “mostly buried” half bottles. But it’s all part of “reuse, recycle, repurpose”!

Now I am excitedly drinking up my water so I have more bottles to cut in half and bury by each plant in my garden. Every couple of days I go out to the gardens with my bag of bottles and bury them. I can already see the good results as the plants have the water they need right at their roots. It also really helps because in the clear submerged bottles I can see the soil clearly, I can tell where the soil is dry and how deep the dry soil goes. Amazing! No more guessing if it needs to be watered!

Another tip was to cut a long piece of garden twine and bunch the twine up under the buried half bottle, then string it up as high as you can go, a tomato likes to grow up to 10 feet! Ideally it would be nice if you had a frame to tie the twine to. I’m going to work on a system using my bamboo and see if I can encourage my vines to go straight up instead of the normal chaos of tomato vines that sprawl and tumble over the pathetic little cages we set up for them. Whoever thought of the idea of our current tomato cages and why has it become so popular to grow tomatoes that way? In my experience it has never worked. By August my tomatoes have voraciously consumed the cage and laughed at its “so called” restraints, spilling over in a very unsightly manner.

So I busied myself in the garden creating a complex yet slightly “ghetto” system of bamboo stakes and wire. I utilized anything in my path to create overhead wiring that would allow the tomatoes to climb straight up. I wired up to trees and fences to create structure for the climbing plants.

I had always heard that we should pinch back the new growth of tomato plants between the stem and leaf but I had never wanted to sacrifice anything that wanted to grow so profusely. But this year, with my tomato plants numbering in the 20’s for count, I decided maybe it was time to control the chaos. The show “Grow Cook Eat” explained it in a way I could understand, the main stem is what you want to keep and it should grow straight up, without any sprawling side growth. In fact, he said if you don’t pinch it back, it was like growing a new tomato plant in every “y” between the main stem and the leaf.

This seemed to confirm a beautiful thing I had seen last summer. We had taken a boat trip out to Ponsa, an island off our shores. After swimming in the turquoise waters we arrived back to land at the golden light of sunset. I remember seeing a house on the shore that had a row of tomato plants growing on the embankment in a neat little row, planted quite close together and growing straight up in a perfect vertical line, the red fruit shining in the light of the setting sun. Ok, this was my new goal, to have “neat” tomato plants bearing much fruit, reminding me of the Sea.

Apparently cucumbers are the same, you should pinch off any horizontal growth and just keep the main stem growing vertical, allowing it to grow up to 10 feet. Ok, I will give it a try…I strung up the wire attaching it to trees and fences. I also buried a water bottle near each cucumber, I figured what was good for the tomato was good for the cucumber.

Speaking of cucumber, I learned another handy trick that I am looking forward to trying, a way to control mildew. Have you ever grown cucumber and notice how the leaves get a mildew on them? The solution is milk! Yes, milk. You add 1 part of skim milk to 10 parts water and pour it over the vines that have mildew. This is supposed to control it, he says it works for zucchini also!

Another fun fact I learned this year was from my local Italian friend, she asked me what I was using for fertilizer, I said “nothing”. She encouraged me to mulch my kitchen scraps, I was hesitant about it because I had tried in the past and I ended up with a stinky pile of chunky vegetables that seemed to never breakdown, in fact, it seemed they would be visible in their current form until Armeggeddon. But she said, “no, you need to dig a small hole, just a small one…” as she made a gesture of a foot diameter. “Then you put your kitchen scraps into the hole and then throw in your weeds and then cover it with dirt, water it and forget about it. When you have more kitchen scraps, you dig another hole”, she explained in her Italian accent. Why does it sound so much more believable in an accent?

Italians amaze me because they make the most complicated thing simple and the most simple thing complicated. For example, I would have thought making olives was the most complicated thing on earth, but no, to an Italian it’s simple, and it is! Or limoncello or Mirto liquor or home made pasta or Tiramisu. Easy. But doing your taxes or starting a business or when to put Parmesan on fish, VERY complicated. So, it looks like mulching is easy, so I will give it a go.

I had another little piece of knowledge that I added to this interesting “mulching” factoid. I learned this piece of knowledge early during the quarantine when we cleaned the weeds out from one of the upper terraces. Jeff had piled his weeds up and covered them in dirt. He did this where the embankment was collapsing so he thought it would “fill in the void”. I thought it was so he could get out of hauling the weeds down the stone steps to the burn pile. I was a little indignant that he filled a portion of my planting bed with weeds. I thought I would have nothing but problems in that spot with recurring weeds. But alas! Six weeks later and the biggest, healthiest sunflowers are growing in that spot! Mulching with weeds works!

So I found a derelict corner of the garden and dug a shallow ditch and buried my kitchen scraps, topped them with weeds and topped it with dirt. We will see what happens. I guess we just move about the garden like this, digging little holes and burying my kitchen scraps. It seems like such an Italian thing to do.

Speaking of fertilizer, another little tidbit from the “Grow Cook Eat” series was to make a Stinging Nettle Tea, for the plants as fertilizer. This got me to thinking of all of those hours I spent diligently removing those weed that stung. Hmmm, is this Stinging Nettle? So I Googled it an YES, I had Stinging Nettle! Wow, I’ve never been so happy to have a stinging weed!

Apparently it is from Europe and likes shady damp places, they call it a “dynamic accumulator” because it soaks up high amounts of nutrients from the soil and then stores high concentrations of the nutrients in their leaves. You can tap into these concentrations by making a fertilizer tea. Simply collect a bucketful of stinging nettle , cover it with water and let it set for 1-2 weeks. They say it’s really stinky, well I am about to find out! I can’t wait to feed my plants this new super food. Now when I see tiny stinging nettle weeds I give them a wink and let them grow for my tea fertilizer.

These are my lessons learned in the Quarantine Garden, I have implemented them all and look forward to see if they work in my garden. Currently my tomato plants are about 8” tall with delightful little yellow flowers that promise of a future of tomatoes. I already have little green tomatoes the size of a marble on the cherry tomato plants. I exclaimed with delight when I saw them.

The cucumber plants have just stretched out beyond their baby leaves and have started to assume the appearance of a cucumber plant. I also planted pumpkins and zucchini by seed and in the beginning they all look alike. I will have to pay special attention to “whose who” as their leaves develop and they start to vine out.

The green beans are still only 5” inches tall but they already have baby green beans dangling from the immature vines. Every morning from my upper balcony, as I sit in the morning sun with my coffee, I look out to the upper terraces where the garden resides. I am always delighted with the large yellow zucchini flowers opening to the rising sun, promising of future fruitage. I can just imagine what it will look like in a month or so when the “zucchini terrace” is covered in green foliage and giant yellow flowers.

I planted pumpkin seeds earlier in the Spring, plopping them into the soil here and there, dreaming of how they will cascade into the terraces below where the olive trees are. Italians grow the most beautiful pumpkins, they aren’t for Halloween or for carving but they are for eating. Pumpkin Risotto, Gnocchi with pumpkin, Pumpkin Ravioli and roasted Pumpkin. Their pumpkins are large and ribbed and more of a peach color than bright orange. I of course will also make Pumpkin Pie, Pumpkin Cake and Pumpkin Bread! We Americans specialize in sweet pumpkin desserts with loads of cinnamon while the Italian prefer the Savory dishes. I love them all!

I also planted peppers: Hot Peppers, Bell Peppers and long green Italian peppers. They are still quite small holding out for hotter weather to start to sprout up. Eggplants are also in the garden, both types, the large ones and the skinny long Japanese type. I have visions of Eggplant Parmesan and Babaganush dancing in my mind.

So Phase 2 of the quarantine has started with new freedom to move about but Phase 2 of the garden has also began. The winter crop is gone and the summer crop is in its infancy. It is the slow days when you haven’t yet started to harvest fruitage but dreams burn brightly with each small glimmer of hope. Every little flower and every little premature fruit is noticed and encouraged to grow with the hope of tomorrow.