At the Thurmond Lake home Milford Scott built more than 43 years ago, his tomato plants towered over his 6-foot-3 frame, and the fruit they bore were as big as softballs.
When he moved a few years ago into a house in Martinez, he saw no reason why he couldn't have another successful vegetable garden.
Just like the nation's first lady, Mr. Scott, 80, started with a blank slate, although Michelle Obama had a lot more help.
"It was nothing but red clay," Mr. Scott said of his backyard, which now features a vegetable garden and several fruit trees.
Through trial and error, he developed a gardening system that grows cucumbers and tomatoes vertically. He encircled each of his four cucumber mounds with a cylinder of concrete wire. A sturdy trestle serves as the anchor for the ropes and wires that secure each cucumber and tomato plant, allowing each to run as tall as it can.
The Better Boy tomatoes are growing in thick clusters. Mr. Scott took off the bottom leaves of the cucumber plants so he could see which cucumbers to pick.
He dug up the plot and incorporated chicken manure. He prefers to use nonchemical fertilizers such as chicken and cricket manure. The plot has also been built up over the past five years with grass clippings.
Three years after planting fruit trees, Mr. Scott is picking dozens of plums left after birds visited the trees. The pear tree also has fruit this year, and the fig tree seedling he brought from the lake house is bursting with baby figs.
Mr. Scott contends there's always room for a few vegetable plants in any yard, no matter the size, that can produce a steady supply of vegetables for the gardener and the neighbors.
Join the growing conversation with the Garden Gnome at blogs.augusta.com.
ALL ABOUT MULCH
If you haven't mulched your vegetable garden yet, do it now. The soil should have warmed up nicely with all the heat, and it will benefit from the cooling and water conservation mulch will provide. Since I had questions about mulch, I pulled out some notes from Master Gardeners class that could help.
- Organic mulch is best. Pine straw is a great choice, but you can use hay and later hoe it into the soil to add nutrients. Straw and hay are fine for mulch around vegetables but can contain weed seeds.
- Stones will collect and keep heat in.
- Never let mulch touch the trunks of plants, because that can cause rotting. Plan to cover any bed to a depth of 3 to 5 inches.
- Never use nutshells or fresh wood chips for mulches. Nutshells can contain nematodes, and wood chips should be aged first.
- If you choose wood chips, you need a barrier or the wood will drain nitrogen from the soil. Several layers of newspaper will do the trick to separate the wood from the soil.
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