If you live in the Central Valley and you care enough about food to read about it, chances are that you are now or have at some point attempted a vegetable garden. The lure of a home-grown tomato is just too strong. It’s hard to overstate how much better they taste than a hothouse tomato from the grocery store, and they have the added benefit of not costing four dollars a pound.
Of course, just because you like growing your own fruits, veggies, and herbs, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re any good at it. Yes, I’m speaking for myself here.
Having never studied agriculture, I end up cobbling together an eccentric set of best practices through trial and error, experimentation, and contradictory advice half remembered from Instagram reels, often made by people based halfway around the world.
Don’t be like me. There are a wealth of local resources and expertise on which to draw, and most of them won’t cost you anything. For instance, the University of California extension supports a Master Gardener’s program that has free classes every week. They even have a free “Master Gardener Helpline,” where you can, say, send a few pics of your suddenly desiccated lemon tree and ask, “Hey, why is this dying? What do you recommend?”
In a day or two, someone from the program will follow up with an answer. Even if they can’t bring your tree back to life it’s nice to feel like you did all you could.
This week, Master Gardener Gerry Hanford was kind enough to let me ask all of my dumbest gardening questions. She’s a retired nurse-turned-master gardener for almost 20 years, who was able to offer some professional guidance on all things home-grown food – skewing heavily towards tomatoes, because hey, it’s tomato season.
The edited conversation is below, but some of the key takeaways include:
- You probably don’t need to prune your tomato plants, though you do need to support them.
- Leaf miners won’t hurt your citrus fruit.
- You don’t need pesticides to kill your aphids, in most cases spraying them with water will do the trick.
- Most herbs will grow throughout the summer, but if it’s mint you should keep it in a pot or a container unless you want it to take over your whole garden.
- Hanford recommends A Gardener’s Companion for the Central San Joaquin Valley as essential reading for folks wondering what to plant and how to care for them, as well as their free vegetable planting guide for San Joaquin Valley gardens.
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Tell me a little about the Master Gardener site.
The site will take you to lots of other places, like free classes that we’ve got coming up. So if there’s something you really want to learn about, you could go take a class. People contact us at the helpline all the time with specific questions. “What’s going on with my tomato? Why are my tomatoes not producing?”
So I can send you a picture of my Meyer lemon tree that looks like it’s dying and somebody will try to tell me why?
Yes. That’s what we have people do. Send us a picture, tell us what you’ve done and we’ll go from there.
So how long have you been involved with the Master Gardener program?
Master Gardener is a volunteer program. I took the course in ‘07, so I’m coming up on 20 years now.
Was that just a hobby or where did that interest come from?
I always piddled around in the garden, but I didn’t really know what I was doing and I sometimes had success and other times I did not. And then I heard about the program at the Home and Garden Show out at the fairgrounds and I had never heard of it before. They said you had to take a full semester course, so I knew I couldn’t do it until after I retired. And I did it. I learned so much because you start basic, with soil and water and fertilizer, and different types of plants and then it just builds based on that. It’s a full semester course and then there’s a lot of hands-on things that you have to do. We were out in a grape field learning how to prune grapes early one spring morning. That was very interesting, helping out at the Garden of the Sun, that’s our demonstration garden. They have a perennial garden, an annual garden, they’re growing fruit trees, they have veggies. It’s Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from usually nine to 11 in the morning, and that’s a great place to go and look and talk to master gardeners. And we teach lots of free classes for gardeners. That’s a great place to get information and really zero in on something that you’re interested in.
So getting into specifics, right now I’ve got a lot of tomatoes. I’ve heard a lot of differing advice on how to prune tomatoes and what the best way to care for them is–
Why would you want to prune tomatoes? Seriously, why would you want to do that?
I don’t know. Some people say you don’t need to. Other people say trim everything, some say get rid of all the suckers…
Well, no, it depends on whether you pick determinate or indeterminate. [Determinate tomatoes are bushy varieties that grow to a set height and produce all their fruit in a relatively short window. Indeterminate ones are more like vines, that keep growing and producing until they die. Romas, for instance, are determinate. Early girls are indeterminate. Both grow well here, in my experience.]
The indeterminate are going to keep producing until it freezes. Sometimes in this last year, since we didn’t have really a good freeze this winter, some people’s tomatoes are still going and they’re still getting tomatoes. But you don’t need to prune tomatoes. You do need to prop them up with a good brace. My husband always used to use a cone shape thing, like tomato cages. That helps support them. You can’t just let them go because they’ll flop all over the place [and break], but the indeterminate ones just keep growing.
So pruning them to improve yield or whatever is not necessary is what you’re saying?
I don’t think so. Good soil, water. And then the trick is not to overwater, but you can’t underwater either. So they need a little water, especially during the heat of summer every day, or every other day, a little water.
I notice mine usually sort of stop producing in late July, early August. Is there a temperature range where it hits a certain-
Well, again, it depends on what type of tomato it was. If it’s a determinate tomato, it will only have a crop for so long, and then it’s done. It won’t produce anymore at all and you’re not going to do anything to get it to produce more. If it’s indeterminate, you should just keep going and going. They like the sun. When did you plant your tomatoes?
I usually plant in February, like after the last frost.
That’s a little early, but this year that was fine because lots of times we’ll get a freeze up until February 15th. Early March is kind of the ideal time to get them in the ground and get going. But this year February was fine because we didn’t have any freezes. So usually, okay, end of February, early March is when you put them in the ground. And natural soil, you don’t need to put a lot of fertilizer in there because you could burn the roots. That’s not a good thing. Have some kind of a cage or something for them to grow up into and you can kind of encourage them to do that. Watering with drip, that’s great and just don’t overdo it, but don’t underdo it either. They need that water and they need the full sun.
So last year, maybe the year before, I had some sort of varmint problem where they would start to get ripe and I’d see big bites taken out of them either by a squirrel or a rat or something.
It could have been a critter, because they love it. And we have possums in town too that sneak in. Somehow they know. We have raccoons in my area too. I’m in the Old Fig area and we have all of those guys at night showing up doing stuff.
Do you have any go-to ways to keep the critters off of your tomatoes or plants in general?
Well, what you would have to do is you would probably have to get some screen and put it over the plants, which is a pain in the you know what. Or else you just tolerate it.
As far as birds getting to my berries and certain things, I saw when I would drive by the Fresno State Farm that they would put those little reflector strips tied everywhere. They seem to be working for me. Have you had any experience with that?
No, but I know people do it and it’s not hurting anything, so why not? It’s not a pesticide. You’re not doing anything poisonous. So yeah, if it works, go for it.
So for most, herbs tend to seem like they bolt pretty fast as it gets warm. Are there ways to get herbs throughout the summer or herbs that are good to plant in the hotter months?
Yeah. I have some really large pots out back and I have oregano, tarragon… mint, of course, will grow anywhere. Those you want to keep in containers and large pots because otherwise some of it is just going to go everywhere. I have chives. They all got through the winter. I did plant some fresh tarragon because that doesn’t keep going, but they all look great. I water them once a week and they’re fine. I go out and clip what I want. I have a bay laurel, which is bay leaf and I’ve got that in a really huge pot. It’s like a small tree and I’ve that in a pot for years and I’ve got great bay leaves right now. The only herb I’ve had problems with is basil. Basil does not like the heat. Basil would be something that you could grow in the winter, actually.
So for citrus, I have noticed in my yard I get a ton of leaf miners and they really go to town on the citrus.
Right. But they’re not hurting the tree. It looks awful, but they’re not hurting the tree and they’re not hurting the fruit. Just let them go nuts on it and keep it growing. We get lots of questions and pictures on the helpline. “What is going on with this leaf?” “Well, there’s a little bug in there and he’s crawling through…”
They’re going to mine the tender leaves. The older leaves, they get harder and they don’t touch them. They can’t mine them, it’s too hard for them to get through. It looks ugly, but I wouldn’t worry about it.
The other things that I’d notice and I assume this is sort of the same category but there’s a lot of paper cutter moths and I think it’s the carpenter bees that take those big chunks out of various leaves to make their nests. Is that just another cost of doing business sort of thing?
Yep, just live with it. One of the things that are a very last resort for us is a pesticide. We just don’t want to go there. We want to try to use cultural, biological, mechanical methods first before we would ever go to a pesticide. For example, like when you get aphids, I don’t know if you have any roses, but when you get aphids on roses, people want to spray them with pesticides. Well, the problem with that is that if you do that, then you’re not going to get beneficial insects that come in and kill them naturally. That’s a biological control. What we recommend is you take your hose with a forceful spray of water, spray the aphids off. You’re going to have to do it time and time again waiting for the ladybugs to come, but they always come to my yard every year and they start laying eggs and I see them on the undersides of leaves. They hatch and then those little guys start eating and within about a month the aphids are gone and the ladybugs are here. So we want to encourage those beneficial bugs.
