Mason Popp grows a food garden in his backyard, as well as inside a greenhouse for Sagra Trattoria in Austin, Texas. In the greenhouse he’s figured out how to grow healthy, productive heirloom tomatoes and a wide variety of herbs. I asked him to share some of his gardening tips with us, and he kindly obliged.

Tomato Cluster, Photo: Knottyboy

Mason Popp’s Short Guide to Growing Great Grub

For me, soil is everything.  If you have healthy soil, you will have healthy plants.  So there are a few rules to follow in order to have and maintain healthy soil.

Your soil should be well tilled; ideally to a depth of two feet.

FIELD & FEAST NOTE: Loosening soil to a depth of two feet will give deep rooted vegetable plants like tomatoes the room them need to fully develop their root system.

I find that the best soil is composed of native dirt from your area that is mixed with granite sand for aeration and trace minerals, and a good amount of compost. Compost is the key to a successful garden.

Think of your soil as a living entity, an ecosystem that benefits plant life.  Within this ecosystem live beneficial microorganisms that eat the decaying organic matter within your soil and produce nutrients as a byproduct. They are living fertilizers!

In order to thrive, these microorganisms need a few elements:

• Consistent moisture, although too much moisture will cause die off,
• Air: soil compaction is detrimental to the life of the soil and plants,
• Trace minerals like rock phosphate and decomposed granite sand,
• And compost made of nitrogen and carbon- rich decaying matter like grass clippings and dried leaves.

If all these elements are present, your soil will have what it needs to be healthy, and so should your plants.

To maintain my soil, I water frequently for short periods of time. Watering too heavily will drown the microorganisms and your plants’ roots as well as allow harmful organisms, like molds and certain fungi, to thrive.

FIELD & FEAST NOTE:  It is our experience, and the recommendation of most horticulturists, that it is best to water your gardens deeply and infrequently, as doing so encourages your plants to send their roots deeper into the soil, thus developing a substantial root system, and also making them more drought tolerant.  It is important to allow the soil to dry out somewhat between waterings as not to suffocate the plants and the microorganisms or promote fungal growth as Mason Popp suggested. GREENHOUSE GROWING may be the exception to that rule.

I use mulch to keep the soil at a more constant moisture level.  I never walk on my soil and compact it because microorganisms, as well as plant roots, have a hard time living in compacted soil due to a lack of air. And I fertilize my plants with a homemade concoction called “compost tea”

Compost tea is a concentrated liquid form of compost.  I basically take a permeable bag of healthy living compost and soak it in a well circulated and aerated barrel of water.  In the water, I add molasses, or sugar for the present microorganisms to feed on and multiply. I also add a host of other organic fertilizers like fish emulsion and liquid seaweed to enrich the mixture.  The result is liquid gold for your garden.  This “tea” enriches the microbial life within your soil and generally fertilizes everything.  It also acts a balancing agent that keeps harmful organisms at bay both above and below the ground.  This is my best gardening tip.

The only other tip I have to successful gardening is to stay on top of pests.  Have organic solutions to pests ready before they are apparent, and treat problems quickly before they get worse and slow your plants’ production.  Also, understanding the life cycle of each plant that you grow is important to knowing how to care for it. Every plant is different, and the same rules don’t necessarily apply to each plant. Experience will teach you that lesson best.