Ghosts in the Garden

From a distance, the vegetable garden now looks like it's been visited by Kaspar the Friendly Ghost and his colleagues.  What, you may ask, are those odd looking structures leaning like miniature towers of Pisa on top of the beds?

They are called Walls 'O Water, and they're the key to getting tomatoes in the ground ridiculously early for our climate, so we can stretch out the tomato season as long as humanly possible.  



Each little tent is a series of tall plastic cells linked together to form a pliable collar for an individual plant.  We fill each cell with water to make them stand up straight, and set them around each plant, leaving the top open during the day, and twisted shut at night.  They act like mini-greenhouses, trapping the day's heat, tricking the tomatoes into thinking it's mid June rather than raw, drizzly early May.



If you peek inside, you can see how happy this makes the plants.

Happy tomato nestled inside the Wall 'O Water

We go to these great lengths because we're total tomato snobs.  The only time of year we eat them is during the time they're actually growing in our garden.  We'll eat tomatoes from local markets, too, but only during the same time that we eat our own.  And while they're in season, we eat them like pigs.  Grilled with eggs for breakfast, cut in big slabs for sandwiches at lunch, peeled and sliced in great wheels of juicy redness as a side at dinner.  


We also grow paste tomatoes which I process and either can or freeze so we can have fresh tomato sauce almost all year long -- I usually run out in July a couple of weeks before the new year's crop is ripe.  In the early days, our kids wouldn't touch tomatoes, so Mr. Mulch and I had them all to ourselves.  Now we have to share with the girls who have become just as disdainful as we are of the pink rocks masquerading as tomatoes most of the year.  They don't go quite as far, but it's truly rewarding to see that they now enjoy them as much as we do.

A harbinger of juicy tomatoes to come

In fact, the girls get really excited when they see the Walls 'O Water go up, because they know that means that tomato days are not that far off.  And they think their Dad is a real genius for having figured out this way of getting an extra month out of our crop.  I suppose I should let them think this was all his idea.  After all, I don't really have any proof that the true inspiration for these ghostly structures was the design of the Denver Airport...

Waccabuc International Tent City

Denver International Airport

...it's just hard to believe that the resemblance is purely coincidental...