It's worth the trouble to grow organic
It's worth the trouble to grow organic

Ever eaten a Cherokee purple tomato? How about a red and yellow German stripe?

Chances are if you shop for your fruits and vegetables in a conventional grocery store, the only tomato that ever made it to your plate was a thick-skinned red one. But as organic growers know, there are so many other possibilities.

When it comes to taste, most organic choices far exceed their mass-produced cousins. But is the trouble of going organic worth it? Organic gardener John Leonard said he thinks so.

Leonard describes the flavor of his Cherokee purples as though he's savoring a full-bodied bouquet.

"Cherokee purples, they are the fine wine of tomatoes. It's the best blend of sugars and acids you can have in a tomato. It has a real earthy undertone to it — very rich and full of flavor.”

But they look different. So, at first, Leonard had to give away his purple tomatoes for free to skeptical customers.

"It went from, ‘My God, I'm not going to eat that!' to, ‘Give me more!' We almost made addicts out of people,” recalled Leonard, who grows organic fruits, vegetables and herbs for two restaurants and two farmers markets at his Organic Gardens acreage in El Reno.

Cherokee purples demonstrate the slow but certain rise in organic produce.

While it is typically more expensive and often more difficult to grow, many consumers are willing to pay extra and drive farther to buy organic fruits and vegetables. And the trend is growing.

Folks like knowing that the food they eat was grown without pesticides and genetic modifications. More than anything, they like the taste.

Oklahoma counts 20 certified organic produce farms in the state this year, according to the state Agriculture Department.

Still, growing an organic garden takes time, patience and an instinctive faith in nature taking its course. To help those getting started, the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture will sponsor a Sept. 9 workshop on organic gardening near El Reno.

Meanwhile, here are a few preview tips from Leonard, one of the workshop instructors, and from Robert Stelle, an organic farmer in Blanchard who teaches organic gardening throughout the state and at the OSU-OKC Farmers Market.

The simple definition of an organic garden is one that is grown without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. That can be a challenge when pests invite themselves in. Leonard and Stelle advise sticking with a few fundamental truths — and let the rest take care of itself.

Knowing this, Leonard picked his acreage carefully. He found a sandy loam about a mile from the South Canadian River and bought five acres.

Many Oklahomans, however, are stuck with clay soil that can take years of hard work to turn rich and fertile.

The key is to enrich the soil through natural means, Leonard said. Conventional farms run chemical fertilizer through lines to feed mass-produced plants because their soil is not that healthy. Instead, Leonard suggests using compost and manure or anything that once was alive and green to feed your soil.

"If you don't continually replenish soil, that just makes the dirt weaker and weaker, and it becomes more susceptible to disease,” Leonard said. "Soil is the root of all of it. If you can have the best you can, the healthier everything will be.”

For an organic gardener just starting, Leonard suggests laying cardboard boxes with leaf or grass clippings over the land to "smother” it for about a year. Then work some organic matter into the soil. The following year it should be ready for planting.

When planting season is over, add more organic matter and let the land sit and decompose.

Use a variety of organic matter — compost, manure, corn gluten meal, alfalfa and so on. The more variety added, the better mix of micronutrients.

Using cover crops such as legumes to pull nitrogen out of air and fix it to the soil enriches the soil with much-needed nitrogen, Leonard said. Ideally, till the soil about a month before you plant. If you till it too close to planting, it can deprive the plants of oxygen

Red clay, especially, takes a lot of work and patience. But Leonard said clay gets better each year with the right effort.

"Everybody uses poly,” Leonard said. "But weed fabric is reusable and lets the rain run through.”

Leonard rolls it to the ends of the beds, does light tillage, puts down drip tape and unrolls it. The drip tape is like a garden hose with holes at every foot. Leonard puts the weed fabric, which serves as a sort of tarp, over the drip tape. He cuts a hole in the fabric every 3 feet to put the plants in the ground. He secures the weed fabric to the ground with U-shape pins.

The result is no more weeding.

Weed fabric also allows Leonard to leave tomato plants unstaked, keeping the plants from coming into contact with the soil and the diseases that lurk there.

And while most people plant okra in closely spaced rows, Leonard has individual plants separated by 3 or 4 feet in weed fabric. The plants yield just as much except without the weeds.

Pests are another problem. Leonard's solution is a hands-off approach. When left alone, it is surprising how often "good” pests such as lacewings and ladybugs find a way to eliminate the "bad” ones.

"Don't react too quickly,” Leonard said. "Nature will take care of itself.”

Of course, sometimes nothing can be done about pests. Leonard has been known to let pests eat up a couple of plants just to keep them occupied, so they don't spread to other plants.

"Our biggest threat is caterpillars on the tomatoes. We spray Bt for that,” he says, referring to a natural pesticide approved for organic use.

In selecting plants to grow, Stelle suggests thinking beyond your garden to where the plants and seeds actually come from. Find out if they were raised with synthetic fertilizer. If they were, don't introduce them to your garden. It will take years to work out the synthetics and will defeat the purpose of going organic.

Consider tomatoes. Years of hybridization has created thick-skinned red tomatoes that travel well but have lost much of their flavor. On the other hand, organic heirloom tomatoes, or tomatoes that have not been cross-pollinated, have very thin skins and are easily damaged in transit. They usually must be sold within a day of picking.

But you simply can't beat the taste.

Organic produce is also more expensive. But customers say it's worth it.

In fact, Leonard has started taking growing orders from Ryan Parrott, Deep Fork Restaurant Group's lead chef, on things he'd like to buy from the garden. One of Parrott's requests this year: wild arugula.

Leonard also has added a greenhouse and plans to add more beds to keep up with demand.

His garden yields everything from cucumbers, okra and watermelon, to edamame, blackberries and blueberries for next year.

Fall brings potatoes, beets, radishes, turnips, cabbage and carrots. Nothing beats his melons, though, or his heirloom tomatoes, the garden's fine wine.

"We're very grateful for it,” Leonard said. "A lot of good karma has come our way in a very short time.”

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