DIY: The Lazy, Procrastinating Gardener's Tomato Cage

Let me be blunt. I am a lazy, lazy gardener. I spent all of June watching my tomato plant get bigger and bigger, bloom madly, start sporting the tiniest of green tomatoes, which turned into larger tomatoes, and are currently weighing down the plant to the point of cracking the stem. And all of June, I was telling myself that I'd better buy a tomato cage now, otherwise I wouldn't be able to get it around the whole plant when I really needed to. Well, it's the end of July, and there is no tomato cage on the market that would comfortably and easily support my ginormous tomato plant.

Eleven of....I stopped counting.

This left me this morning in the uncomfortable position of needing to build a tomato cage that was 1) fairly cheap, 2) flexible, 3) modifiable (to accommodate new growth), and 4) dead simple to put together. Well. Two out of four ain't bad.

I'm writing this up because a few minutes of googling didn't turn up anything similar to this, and I figure there must be a couple more procrastinating newbie gardeners out there who might like to follow along. 

The Lazy Gardener's Tomato Cage

Note: this guide is just to show you what I did and maybe give you some ideas. You should assume in general that if you modify any particular step to suit your needs, the world will not end. 

What to do:

0. Put on sunscreen if you're going to be outside. You always wear sunscreen, right?

1. Gather your supplies. Here's what I used:

From top to bottom and left to right, that is:

• (4) .75"x.75"x6' gardening stakes
• (1) tomato plant, badly in need of staking
• (1) hand saw (optional)
• (1) claw hammer
• (1) 550-ft ball of sisal twine (you won't use nearly 550 feet - maybe 1/3 of that if you're generous)
• appx. (60) 1.5" wood nails
• (4) 2"x0.5"x24" gardening stakes
• Not shown: pocket knife or scissors to cut the twine

Of all of these, you really only need to be particular on the hammer, in that without it, you will fail really badly at this project. The other items are up for customization - three foot tall stakes? Fine. One inch nails? Also good. Cucumber plant instead of tomato? Golden. Just for reference, here are the brands of nails and twine that I used:

2. This step is optional - if you don't care whether your top struts have pointed ends, you can go on to number 3. If you are slightly worried about having pointy garden stakes around eye height, by all means - read on. (Also a disclaimer: be careful with that saw. Use proper sawing technique and wear eye protection. If you hurt yourself, it'll be because you were being stupid like me. Don't be stupid like me.)

Now you should just saw off the pointy ends of your shorter garden stakes. It doesn't really matter how much you lop off - I took just over an inch off the ends. 

If you do cut off the ends of your stakes, please don't do it like I did. Get a vise or something. 

This is not smart.

Some tips on sawing:

• To start a cut, draw the blade of the saw very lightly several times over where you want the cut to be. The idea is to start a groove in the wood so that the saw blade naturally comes to rest there. 

About like this.

• When you're sawing, don't press the blade of the saw down into the wood. To cut more quickly, you actually want to lessen the pressure and saw quicker.
• Make sure all your motions are exactly parallel to your cut. It's easy to bend the blade and jam it, which can damage your saw and seriously slow down your cutting. 

So saw lightly and quickly, and soon you should have nicely squared off garden stakes:

Taking a minute to note that grain. Awesome. 

You can use your first sawed-off stake to mark the others, so they're all the same length, but that's not entirely necessary. Approximate measurements are fine here.

Not really 100% necessary.

3. Once you've done all four stakes, it's time to move on to the legs of the cage. What we're doing here is just studding one side of each leg with nails so that we have something to catch the twine on later. Add more nails than you think you need here - it's going to be very difficult to add more once the cage is standing. 

Take one of your cage legs and pick a spot at the top (the non-pointy end) to put your first nail. Find a hard, flat, level surface (or if you're me, a bumpy, inclined lawn) and hammer it in until you can just see the tip on the opposite side. 

It's a good idea to hammer the point back from the other side so it's flush with the stake. You don't want unexpected nails anywhere, ever.

Now hammer in 9 (or more or less, your choice) more nails down the length of the stake. I used the nail box as a spacer, but you can just eyeball it, if you want.

When you're done, you should have something that would be an excellent weapon in the zombie apocalypse.

Be careful with this.

As of the current moment, there is no zombie apocalypse, so you can hammer the nails over so they're bent parallel to the longest dimension of the stake, heads pointing upwards:

Makeshift hooks or a first-grade woodshop project gone wrong.

Now do the same for your other three long stakes. It's a lot of hammering, but fairly easy, low-pressure hammering.

4. There's a tiny bit of hammering left, but it's pretty painless. I hammered three nails partway into each shorter stake to serve as hooks on the top of the cage. I don't have a great picture of this, but you can sort of get the idea:

Of course, do this for all of your shorter stakes.

5. I had very ambitious plans to nail this whole thing together, but it turns out that without a proper vise setup, it's very difficult to nail one thin, low quality piece of wood to another, thinner, low quality piece of wood, especially when you're holding the entire setup in one hand and a hammer in the other hand, standing on the stairs so that you can reach the top of the stake. Bad idea.

I ended up lashing all of the pieces together with twine, which has the disadvantage of taking quite  a bit of time, but the benefit of looking pleasantly rustic when finished.

I'm sure there's a better way to do this, but here's how I went about it:

Hammer a nail in about 1/2 inch from the edge of one of your top stakes and bend it over like the others. That makes a nice place to anchor your twine. Cross your short strut with a long one so that about one inch of each is overlapping.

You should have a very lopsided X - the bottom legs of the X are ridiculously long, and the top ones are ridiculously short. Take your twine that's anchored at the nail, and wrap it in a figure eight around the short legs. Give it maybe 8-10 turns. I went a bit crazy with the twine and it took forever - you don't have to.

Now wrap the twine in a figure eight around the longer legs of the X. Once you have those two sets of wrapping in place, you can wrap anywhere you like. I don't have pictures of what else I did, but do what makes sense to you to limit the flexibility of the joint. You can wrap horizontally around the point where they cross, vertically, weave around the intersection, etc. Presumably the sailors in the audience can point out some better ways to do this.


Attach two long struts to each of two short struts, so that in the end you have two pi-shaped frames.

Pi, not pie.

6. This step is probably the trickiest, and of course the one I don't have any pictures of. What you want to do is take one of your remaining two short stakes, and lash it so that it sticks out perpendicular to the frame in question (perpendicular to the ground in the above photo). I put mine in the inside corner, between the long legs of the X, but you don't have to - you could put it on top, or on the side even - whatever's easiest, just make sure that you do the same thing to both frames. 

Also, before you lash the last short stake to its frame, make sure that when you're done, both three-legged frames will fit together! Up until here, the frames have been mirror images of each other, but in this step you need to line things up before you make anything permanent. 

When you're done with this step, you should have two identical pieces, each with two long legs and two short ones. When you stand them up together, they should form a rectangular prism shape - like a big box.

7. Doing really horribly with the pictures here - after an hour of wrapping twine, my fingers were green, and I really wanted to go drink some lemonade. 

 I hope this step is obvious - stand up your two frames and tie them together! Your smaller stakes should end up at the top, with the longer "feet" free and able to move a bit to accommodate uneven ground.

8. Now for the fun part - position your frame over your tomato plant. Using all those nails you hammered into the frame in the beginning, tie lengths of twine between the frame legs looping underneath your tomato plant to hold it up as needed. You can use any pattern here, but I liked the even look I got by tying the twine straight across. Diagonal wrapping would also work. 

And there you have it: one very lazy tomato cage!

All that wrapping with the twine gives the cage some flexibility, so I made the base wider than the top so that it would be a little more balanced. 

Some of my branches really needed some extra support, so I ended up looping the twine over the top struts, which are stronger than the "ladder rungs" that everything else is resting on. I also left loose ends after I tied the twine to the nails - I think it looks kind of rustic-chic, when really all it is is lazy.

How did your tomato cage turn out? Let me know!

Basil Lemonade - A Recipe for Amateur Bloggers

My introduction to the blogging world (well...the good blogging world - Xanga doesn't count, although other good things have come out of that) was through food blogs. Blogs like Smitten Kitchen, Macheesmo, and Culinary Concoctions by Peabody have a way of taking the ordinary (remember cheese-sandwich blogs? This is what I had for lunch today...and this is what I had for lunch yesterday) and giving it the Hollywood treatment. To this day, I'll turn to a food blog for a new recipe over America's Test Kitchen or The Joy of Cooking. Where a cookbook has very little leeway to go off and talk about how you should go about altering recipes when you live in a tiny apartment with an oven that runs a hundred degrees hot, you might find a food blogger (who hopefully has several hundred readers/commenters) who is in exactly your predicament. The best bloggers also have a bit of an artistic eye, and can make beef stew in an old brown dish look like something from El Bulli.

This is just to say, I am not one of those food bloggers. What I am is a warmish Bostonian with a summer afternoon off, gorgeous light coming through the south-facing windows, and quite a lot of basil in the fridge.

Lemonade? Lemonade.

Basil Lemonade Recipe

Before I start, I should add a disclaimer: what I'm making here is not straight-out-of-the-pitcher drinkable. It's more of a lemonade concentrate that you pour into a glass and add water to taste. So take these ratios with a grain of salt and far less sugar than I used.

Ingredients:

8 lemons or limes or some combination thereof

2 cups sugar

2 cups water + extra to taste

2 cups fresh basil 

Helpful equipment:

A sharp kitchen knife

A 2-liter pitcher

A citrus juicer (I have something like this)

Process

1. Start making your simple syrup. Combine 2 cups of water and 2 cups of sugar (or any 1:1 ratio) in a saucepot. Turn the heat up to medium-ish. Stir until the sugar dissolves. Simmer for 5 minutes, then remove from heat. And let cool slightly. 

2. Once the syrup has cooled (not a lot - you should just barely be able to stick a finger in it without burning yourself), bruise the basil lightly and add it to the pot, reserving some for garnish. Let sit while you juice the lemons, or for at least 20 minutes.

3. Cut all of your citrus in half. Squeeze into your serving pitcher.

4. Once your syrup has cooled significantly (room temperature or so), pour it into the pitcher and stir.

5. Fill the rest of the pitcher with water.

Serving:

Pour about 4 oz. of lemonade concentrate into a glass. Add water and ice to taste. Garnish with reserved basil sprigs.

You can follow the recipe above (mentioning again: concentrate, not something you want to chug), or you can do it the way I did it.


Once you've assembled your ingredients, you should realize that you'd like to blog about this later, and that the light is perfect, and you may not get another chance like this for weeks. Get your camera.

Set up in front of the only part of the apartment not covered in books or dishes or small pieces of electronics and carefully frame your shots so both the ugly box fan and the ugly radiator never appear.

 

Start taking pictures of your ingredients, then realize that it's de rigeur to assemble everything first and take a "group shot". Also take a moment to note that the tomato situation in the background has gotten very much out of hand.

Get out your limes and lemons and put them in a pot. Measure out the last two cups of sugar and vow to go to CVS later so your boyfriend won't be sad in the morning when he has no sugar for his coffee. Get out a huge handful of basil that you bought from the store, even though your herb garden has gone wild downstairs. Tell your boyfriend that it's because you want to make basil-something-else later in the week, and you don't want to decimate the basil crop. 

Start taking artsy shots of your food. Pretend you're a food stylist.

You can use all lemons, all limes, or some combination. I tend to favor lemons, so I used a 5:3 ratio (one wouldn't fit nicely in the pot).

Pour your two (!) cups of sugar into a saucepot. Don't try to replace this with artificial sweetener. The result is something very much unlike the lemonade we're making here.

Add two cups of water. (You could be using any 1:1 ratio. Simple syrup keeps for months in the fridge, so make extra if you're so inclined.)

I made an artistic choice not to show you my tiny, tiny kitchen with the stubborn splatters on the wall, so just believe me when I say that I put the pot on the stove and turned the heat up to medium. I also stirred until the sugar dissolved, and let it simmer for five minutes. Then I took it off the heat to cool down slightly.

In the meantime, juice your citrus. Like Alton Brown, I am against unitaskters. HOWEVER. 

• This particular unitasker just about doubles the amount of lemon juice I can get out of a lemon.
• It is less than fun to hand-squeeze sixteen lemon halves.

I justify it by thinking of all the money I'm saving by not buying double the amount of lemons. 

Cut all of your citrus in half. 

Take a picture of the helpful bird that's wandered by.

Now, I have a question for you folks. Wouldn't you think that, lemon juicers being shaped as they are, you'd put the lemon in this way?

So did I. But I was over on Smitten Kitchen the other day, and she had put the lemons (limes, actually) in upside-down, so the rind was facing up, like so:

I tried it both ways, and I have to say that the upside-down way works better to catch the seeds, although you do get a bit more pulp. Which way do you use a lemon juicer?

If you're diligent, you can get about a third of a liter of juice out of eight lemons. Try squeezing each one twice or three times, shifting the rind a bit each time, to get the most juice out of them. I think limes are a bit more juicy "per capita" than lemons, but this recipe is so flexible, it shouldn't matter.

Leave your artfully stacked citrus rinds for the moment, and go back to your pan of simple syrup. You want to catch it before it cools down to room temperature, but after it's done simmering. Luckily, since there's so much sugar in it, this is quite a long window. Your goal is to infuse the syrup with basil flavor without denaturing the alcohols that give it its smell and taste.

Test your syrup to see if it's cooled down enough by putting a small basil leaf in and stirring. If after 30 seconds, the leaf is still mainly bright green, that's a good temperature. If it wilts and turns a dull green or brown, put the pan in the fridge for a few minutes to cool off. 

Add your giant handful of basil to the pan. The more basil you use here, the happier you will be later. (Do save a few sprigs for a garnish - that's not just an aesthetic thing, it's important for the taste, too.) 

Stir and let sit. The longer you let this sit, the more intense the basil flavor will  be. (Also, folks, if you wanted to stop right here, pour all of this in a dish, throw it in the freezer and stir it every hour or so, you'd end up with an unusual and very refreshing basil granita. I won't tell.)

After 20 minutes (or however long you can wait), add about half the syrup into the pitcher. I added the whole darn thing, and it was too sweet, so take it slowly! (Alternative option: add water first and sweeten to taste.) 

Take a moment to note that the differing viscosities between water and simple syrup give this photo a different character than the photo of the water pouring above.

Add water to the top of the pitcher, and you're done!  Leave the basil in there. It'll get better with time.

Notes:

• This is very sweet, very concentrated lemonade. I would cut down on the sugar next time, and I love sweet things.
• Having made this with 8 lemons vs. a mixture of limes and lemons, I'd say that the limes cut the tartness a little bit, although they were juicier. I can't say I have a strong preference either way.
• A 1:1 ratio of concentrate to water makes a pretty darn good drink, although it could be tarter.
• A basil garnish is a must. Smell is the better part of taste, and although you will taste the basil if you let your syrup sit long enough, burying your nose in a sprig of basil as you go to take a drink really hits it home. 
• Folks, if you don't try this with gin, your world will be darker and smaller forever.

Have you tried basil lemonade before? Let me know in the comments!

A midsummer gardening update

I should really go around and take good pictures of all the lovely growing things around here, but there's really only one important thing here:



Eeeeeee tiny tomato!

Gardening Update

Well hello, woefully neglected blog. Can I just say that learning stuff and writing about learning stuff are two totally different things? I have what I call "Birthday Candle Syndrome", which I've just now made up and defined thusly: it is the tendency to equate putting on the finishing touches with completing all of the work that should precede them. Example: you're making a birthday cake, but didn't have time to frost it, but you slap some birthday candles on it anyway, and voila! You're done. The finishing touches are there, so you must be done. You're done, right? So instead of carefully documenting all of my new exploits for the blog and posterity, I'm rushing through to the finished project, because that's always more interesting.

I'm considering a "What I Learned Today" series to try and counteract that. For example, today's entry would include:

1. How to insert a title into an Adobe Premiere sequence.
2. How to (start to) add a SATA port to a ten-year-old Windows XP machine.
3. How to do frame-hold cross fades between separate video clips in Premiere.
4. How to make sure that when you water your potted plants after shamefully forgetting to do so for three days, that the water actually gets absorbed by the soil and doesn't just run over the sides.
5. How to make strawberry mango paletas (ok, this one wasn't today).
6. What ECC memory is. 

Since five of those require screen captures and/or more photos than I'm willing to take, I'll go with the gardening one, maybe a bit embellished. 

Gardening Tips from an Amateur Windowsill Gardener

1. If you've forgotten to water your plants for a few days, don't just dump water in when you actually do go to water them. Dig a little trench in the middle of the pot/planter so the water pools in it before the dry soil starts to absorb it. The top layer of soil can't absorb water that fast, so if you just pour water in, it'll all run down the sides (and into your guinea pig's cage, if you're me). 
2. Don't be afraid of thinning out. Let your seeds sprout, then when it looks like they're not going to die from the tiniest breeze, choose your favorites (pick a number that you'll keep based on how much space you really have), and ruthlessly pluck the rest. Crowded plants don't grow well.
3. Consider an un-manicured look. A windowsill herb garden that's a little overgrown and bushy not only provides more herbs, it looks pretty darn good, too.
4. Remember to pinch back your plants to make them bushier. It feels cruel, but pick off those little leaf sprouts every once in a while, and your plant will pick a new (less dangerous) place to put its new leaves.
5. Seedling pots are just that - for seedlings. Your average vegetable will not enjoy being grown in a 4" pot. (I'm looking at you, alliums!)*
6. Be realistic with yourself regarding how much space you have to grow. My eggplants will wait til next year because I can only handle one indeterminate plant in my apartment at a time.

What are your windowsill gardening tips?

* I will say that my indoor tomato plants (six in the planter that you see above, three - three! - in a 4" seedling pot) are doing just as well or better than the one I have outdoors in a five-gallon bucket. Go figure.

Thumbs: Now Greener Than Ever

When I started this blog, I had the idea that I would never post about the same subject twice in a row. For the last three days, I've tried and tried to come up with a decent topic that didn't have to do with plants. Hindi? Too much work right now. SketchUp? Not really feeling too architecturally creative. Something programming related? Tends to attract snark from my boyfriend, and he makes up a significant percentage of my audience. And, trumping that: I cannot get gardening out of my mind. I want to plant seeds and go absolutely mad with anticipation until they sprout. I want to set up large window boxes to be filled with herbs. I want to plant something that I can make dinner with in three months' time. Then I thought, hell, it's my blog. If I want to go garden-crazy for a week or two, well...I can do that!

I just came back from the gardening center. Oh dear. Cue gratuitous growing-things shots.

Plants absolutely everywhere. It's orchid week, did you know?

I should probably not be allowed in a nursery on a springlike day with a respectable amount of disposable income at hand.

These are not blurry in person, I promise.

A quick aside on these hanging plants: they are called Nepenthes, or pitcher plants, from the family Nepenthaceae (a word on the Latin naming system: Latin is dead. Say it loud, say it proud, and no one will ever know the difference.). They're native to Malaysia, India, and Australia. The "pitcher" portion of the plant is filled with a fluid to trap and/or digest insects that may find their way inside. Interestingly, the fluid is effective even when it's diluted with rainwater, as inevitably happens with this morphology. The name "nepenthe" in Greek means "without grief" and in Greek mythology "is a drug that quells all sorrows with forgetfulness." (source: here)

Possibly my favorite type of plant.

I thought these were daffodils, but now I'm thinking probably narcissus. Whatever they are, I adore them. I should do them more justice next time and take a picture that's actually in focus. If I thought I could get one of these to survive indoors on my desk at work, I would probably have six of them already. Maybe seven.

A little dark, but you get the idea. Plant in a bowl!

This one I like for the interior design aspect of it. I also like the composition of the shot. I could even pretend it took me a few minutes of careful setup, rather than the shoot-from-the-hip phone camera technique that I actually used.

But enough about the nursery, although I could have spent another hour in there browsing. I got these:

From left to right, that is: oregano, basil, marigold, green onion, romaine lettuce,  lettuce salad blend, basil, eggplant, and cherry tomatoes.

I'll leave the seed descriptions there for now, but know that I have much, much more to say on the subject (and of those tomatoes, in particular).

Artsy shot of same.

I also have two tiny flowerpots that I found at Target at Christmastime. They were $1 each in the stocking stuffer section, so I got myself two. As stocking stuffers, naturally.

Not shown: a large bag of potting mix and some fertilizer. They weren't very photogenic.

I have tentative plans in place to start planting things tomorrow. I need to do some research on the heavy-hitters (eggplant, tomato) that I haven't grown before and will eventually be planting outdoors. Those seed packets are all marked up with details like "Start indoors 5-7 weeks before last frost date" (May 3rd here, for interested parties). I need to figure out if I can start them even earlier and just transplant them after that date or if that'll stress the plants for some reason (too little light as seedlings? getting transplanted too late in the growing process?). I am giving no such consideration to the basil, however. I had so much basil last year that I was considering giving away half of my plants.

Tomorrow it'll be spring!

Gardening on a Whim

One of my always-on-the-back-burner project ideas that never really comes to pass is to grow a proper garden. I have dreams of fresh eggplant, fresh tomatoes, and fresh herbs all waiting to be picked, right in my front yard. I guess that in my dream of the idyllic garden, I can waltz through my patch of home-grown vegetables, fruits, and herbs, clipping at will, and eating fresher-than-thou produce all summer long.

Thanks, Wikimedia Commons user Srl!

Obviously, some education is in order.

For starters, I have no yard to speak of (well, I do, but I also have a landlord), so it'll have to be container gardening, probably indoors, although I could potentially co-opt the landing just outside my window, which is really the landing for the third-floor neighbors' stairs. Placement will definitely be an issue. Two points for an indoor garden, though: I have very large, south-facing windows, so sun will not be terribly difficult to come by, and two: I live in hardiness zone 6-ish, so plantng indoors will alleviate some of the "oh god, when's the last frost??" stress.

Secondly, I have never grown a garden. I have had some success with herbs - that is, last year I grew far too many basil plants, a lonely oregano plant, and I have never once gotten a rosemary plant past its third week. My basil made it through the winter indoors (hallelujah!), but I let it flower (bad!) in order to start over this year  (yay!). I would post pictures of the plants I have, but I'm far too lazy to get out of bed. I used Urban Garden Solutions' garden planner-majiggy to pick some plants I think I'd be happy to see in September/October: 

From the top left, in rows: basil, tomatoes, eggplant, flower x (type to be determined), lettuce, tomatoes, green onions, flower y, oregano, edamame, spinach, flower z. 

Obviously I can't go dig up the front lawn and put plants there in that configuration, but I'm planning on buying 12 approximately-1-sq-ft pots and arranging them on the porch (landlord permitting), on the neighbors' landing (neighbors permitting) or inside (boyfriend permitting). I'm also planning on doing plenty of research, because I've grown exactly two of these plants before. My first call will be to my lovely and knowledgeable grandma, green thumb extraordinaire, who has been gardening probably twice as long as I've been alive. 


I complained last night that it took me hours to make eggplant parmesan and roasted asparagus. Now here I am planning dinner for September. Bring it on, garden!