Correspondence

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Music Notes Lost and Found

Dear Bay Weekly:

Here we are at the start of the first major holiday weekend of the summer, and Music Notes has not been updated since May 7. This does not well serve your readers, advertisers or the many local musicians who depend on public awareness of their appearances. Supporting the local economy is far more important than running syndicated pieces that you have to pay for with your hard earned ad revenue.

–Bill Hogan, by email

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Dear Bay Weekly:

I just wanted to express how disappointed I was to see the local music listings taken out of the weekly paper. I picked up a paper every Thursday to plan what to do that weekend. I saw that it was listed online at first, but now I can’t seem to find it at all. I hope that you will reconsider.

–Brandi Zapata, Shady Side

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Try Trench-Intensive Gardening

Dear Bay Weekly:

Every year I intend to send in my idea for vegetable gardening in time for the season. I’ve decided to call it trench-intensive gardening. Maybe that’s self-explanatory.

I dig a shallow trench and put hot manure or fertilizer in the bottom. Then I fill it in with good soil and plant things very close together. The roots will grow down and get just what nitrogen they need without burning.

For tomato plants, it is a little different. My father loved growing them and taught me a lot. He said to strip off almost all of the leaves and plant them very deep, so they will have a good root system.

I’ve had them go through severe droughts without watering because the roots grow all the way down to the water table, like the trees’. If you do water, deep water. Fill the trench with water but only rarely, so the roots will go deep. You may want to bury your hot manure just off to the side.

Then plant very close together, maybe a couple of inches. You’ll get a lot more tomatoes out of a small space. It would even be possible to stake them by putting a strong pole at each end of the trench. Then run a high rope and a low rope between them. Put strings vertically between the ropes for each plant.

–Buck Herring, Millersville

Editor’s note: The Bay Gardener isn’t much on planting tomatoes deep. But another tomato-gardening father gave the same advice to contributor Ricky Rood, who reported it in the story My Father’s Tomatoes (http://www.bayweekly.com/old-site/year06/issuexiv24/leadxiv24_4.html).