Garlic Succession - An Example of Synergy of Bonsai and Veggie Gardening! + NEW Sale Of The Month

Upcoming bonsai events/announcements in Columbus, OH:

• 8/8 Bonsai and Coffee: Intro to Indoor Bonsai (Wiring Styling Focus) Workshop @ Casa Cacao - reserve your spot while you can!
• 8/16 - Columbus Bonsai Society Meeting at Franklin Park Conservatory (Bring Your Own Tree)
• NEW August '26 Sale of the Month at In Vivo: get a free cherry tomato plant for your late summer and early fall harvesting with the purchase of any tool, indoor or outdoor bonsai tree, workshop, book, pot, and more here in Old North Columbus. I will also extend this offer to online orders where it is legal for me to ship them (excludes a few states and media mail). Anyone who wants to volunteer and work on trees together can also get one.
• I also just listed the tomato plants for sale at Invivobonsai.etsy.com if you want a bulk quantity. I'll try to start adding more live plants there but locals will always get a cheaper deal due to avoiding fees and shipping costs.

          Over the last few years, I have gotten increasingly into vegetable gardening and it's an area I am still experimenting with and learning more about. When I sell bonsai at events, I have always told people that bonsai is easiest if you have other plant experience already as you are halfway there on a lot of fundamental knowledge. Well now I'm going in reverse! In pursuing vegetable growing alongside bonsai, my goals were to save money and eat more fresh healthy food, which is very easy once your plants are happy and producing at a rapid pace. You definitely don't want any food you spent time and effort growing to spoil, so it does force you to eat more veggies than you might have otherwise!). At some point I will make a bigger article on what I am learning in the crossover of these two planty hobbies. Both require specific seasonal steps to be the most successful so there are definite similarities.

          For now, I will give one example of synergy for vegetable gardening and bonsai. Garlic is a crop typically planted by individual cloves in the ground in fall that are allowed to grow roots in winter and which sprout in spring. In May or so we harvested the flowets (aka scapes) which are great in stir fries. Subsequently in Early July or so the leaves start to dry down to the ground and then they are ready to yank the developed heads from the ground. We had some garlic planted in a full sun bed which was harvested at that time. Garlic depletes a lot of Nitrogen from the soil and I lack enough full sun bonsai benches, so after its harvest, I put my tropical bonsai starter flats over this bed. They now get more sun to develop more quickly for my future workshops and a nice bonus is that the fertilizer runoff from the bonsai will help replenish the soil nutrients! A few weeks later, I then succession planted some of these tomatoes into the same bed in between the tropicals.

Garlic planting example. Although typically the cloves will be buried completely.

Garlic scape example.

         Zooming out, sometimes I think that bonsai is in large part a useless hobby except for the destressing and enjoyment that we get from them. These definitely do have value but for how often we are watering and fertilizing for a large number of trees, it makes you think. By coculturing bonsai and edible plants together though, that water and fertilizer is conserved both in time and effort and materials. It doesn't take much more time on my part to water a few extra veg beds when I am already watering my bonsai trees nearly every day in the summer for example. Likewise, putting the fertilize runoff to use growing food is a win-win as well.

Garlic harvesting in progress (not my picture).

          Now, back to our sale of the month: the cherry tomato plants. These cherry tomatoes are 3rd generation organically grown here in Ohio and were originally sourced from THE Ohio State University. We call them "Kevin Tomatoes" around the neighborhood as my old neighbor, bonsai friend, and Bonsai Time Podcast co-host got them from a OSU greenhouse he worked at for a time. Last year, we had 3 cherry tomato plants in full sun raised beds which were prolific all through July-October until we started getting frosts. We had a hard time keeping up with the ripening at times so some tomatoes cracked on the vine or had insect damage, and these we just threw onto the ground to compost. Those seeds actually survived the winter and gave us a unplanned for excess this year which led to all these cherry tomato plants I separated and potted last month and am now selling and giving away.  Now I have planted about 15 in various beds so I'm sure I'll be drowning in more than enough tomatoes, I may even have to learn how to can this time! I hope some others will enjoy the abundance and new plant lessons that could come from these extra plants as well.

Large potted cherry tomato potted from the sprouts of last year's rejects!

Cherries tomatoes started popping in mid-late July.