Green thumb in winter

Several medium-size tomatoes are lined up to finish ripening in the sun on Bill and Barbara Dieffenbach's kitchen windowsill.

Bill Dieffenbach picked the last of his tomatoes at the beginning of the month before the first freezing weather. The couple stored the green fruits, wrapped in newspaper, in a cool bedroom. There the tomatoes continue to ripen slowly.

Now when the Dieffenbachs want a salad, they bring the tomatoes down to the windowsill to fully ripen to a bright red. They are not as good as they were when they came straight from the garden, Barbara Dieffenbach admitted. "But they taste every bit as good as the ones you buy now in the grocery store," she said.

The Dieffenbachs can even dine on an all-homegrown salad in January because Dieffenbach is still picking lettuce from his North End kitchen garden. And that's not all. He also is harvesting kale and beets as well as lots of herbs like cilantro, dill and parsley that reseed themselves throughout the year.

It won't be long before the garden will be empty, but Dieffenbach likes to stretch out the growing season as long as he can and he can usually get through January.

"The soup pot gets low in February and March," he said.

Dieffenbach makes great use of his small North End lot. He calls it a "functional landscape." His 10-by-20-foot vegetable plot is in the yard at the front of the house in bright sun where a bed of ligustrum used to grow.

He grows two pear trees, two apple trees and a fig bush in the backyard where others might grow shade trees. A couple of camellia bushes, two or three rosebushes and a small butterfly garden are the only ornamentals in the backyard. Instead he grows cucumbers along the back fence and tomatoes and eggplants in a bed on the south side of the house where boxwoods were once the foundation planting.

And therein lies Dieffenbach's secret for long-lasting tomatoes. Besides being on the hot southern side of the house, the tomatoes are warmed by the reflection from the sun on the brick foundation of the house as well as by the sun's reflection from a concrete patio in front of the bed. That way the tomatoes hardly know the weather has gotten cold.

Dieffenbach grows Better Boys. They are indeterminate tomatoes that keep on growing, so if the weather is good, they won't stop come winter.

"The Better Boys were growing 12 feet up to the roof of the house," Dieffenbach said. "That's six months of tomatoes we got."

The kale, lettuces and beets were his second crop of vegetables this year. He already had harvested his share of summer veggies, such as beans, cucumbers, squash, peppers and other warm-weather vegetables. The only thing he doesn't have room for is corn.

Next will come the spring veggies.

"I start digging in February," he said. "I'll be planting in March - radishes, lettuce and spinach."

He digs up the garden and replants in late August with more cold-weather plants like this year's kale, beets and lettuce. Some years it might be turnips, broccoli and cabbage.

He has no gardening secrets other than his tomato microclimate. He likes the sandy soil of the North End that he amends with compost. He rotates his crops. He knows he's lucky to have full sun and he has a well, so water is never an issue. He is not an organic gardener, but he uses very few chemicals.

"I think about what I'm putting in the garden, because I eat what I grow," Dieffenbach said. "And I like to grow things, because I like to eat."

Almost year round.

Mary Reid Barrow, barrow1@cox.net