In Ron Zayac's garden, it's tomatoes, not corn, that grows as high as an elephant's eye.
Customers stand in awe in front of cherry tomato vines reaching six to eight feet tall and several yards wide at Zayac's Canterbury Creek Gardens in Westlake. No ordinary tomato cage can hold these behemoths; their vines, thick as a man's finger, grow on plastic netting suspended from wood frames. When you look up at these giant tomato plants, they blot out the trees growing behind them.
Zayac has about 20 behemoth cherry tomato plants growing all around his all-organic garden centre. The biggest of this year's bunch is a 'Jasper' variety that is eight feet high and 20 feet long – and it's still putting out blossoms in early fall.
In anyone else's garden, this cherry tomato plant would be waist high, at most. What's Zayac's secret?
"Soil and fertilizer," said Zayac, 60. "It comes back to providing the nutrition it needs. Try to make sure the plants are well-nourished so they can nourish us," he said.