Nightshades

This appeared in the May 21, 2020 edition of The Fish Wrap

Nightshades is a spooky, cool name for a group of vegetables that includes tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplant and tobacco. It may be so named because of its relationship to belladonna, a night-blooming, poisonous plant associated with witchcraft! Many nightshades are familiar summer crops popular with backyard gardeners. And there are a great variety of tricks and tools to produce the best results.

One of the interventions used on nightshades is clipping off the top part of the plant. Clipping the upper part of the stem can encourage the lower part to grow more stalks, blooms and fruit. A more complicated intervention is grafting to fight disease. People will choose a root stock that is resistant to common diseases and graft their favorite tomato plant onto the resistant rootstock in the hopes of producing their favorite fruits without the plants succumbing to disease. Grafting is tedious and has to be carefully done at the proper growth period of the plant. Even with care, the process will stress and weaken the plant.

After a disappointing pepper harvest last year, we are experimenting with clipping tops and looking forward to bushy pepper plants with lots of fat peppers! For tomatoes, we’re going in the direction of trying to reduce disease pressure rather than unnaturally making the plants resistant through grafting. Our focus is on soil health to strengthen the immune systems of the tomato plants. Plants are just like us - good nutrition strengthens the defenses against disease!

To prune or not to prune? To graft or not to graft? These are the questions gardeners ponder while looking forward to a prize-winning harvest. Get to know your neighbor gardeners and local farmers to trade secrets. When it comes to nightshades, we choose practices that show respect to mother nature and support her in working her witchcraft!