The Plain Dealer: Ron Zayac "Grows Tomatoes as High as an Elephants Eye"

Just this last Sunday, The Plain Dealer featured my brother, Ron Zayac — and his amazing ability to “grow tomatoes as high as an elephant’s eye“!

Ronny (we still call each other by our boyhood monikers) is the Wizard of Canterbury Creek Gardens – at the corner of Detroit and Canterbury Roads in Westlake.

He’s been featured many times before in The PD and other local and national publications.  But this article focused on his “behemoth” tomato plants — and their extraordinary fertility, noting that “when you look up at the tomato plants, they blot out the trees behind them.”

One plant, the Jasper variety, is 8 feet high and 20 feet wide — “and it’s still putting out blossoms in early fall.”

Ronny runs an all-organic garden center, and he has always said that his secret to growing plants is “soil and fertilizer.  It comes back to providing the nutrition it needs.”

The writer, Julie Washington (she’s just terrific; check her out) notes several of Ronny’s secrets:

He uses unsterilized soil — containing beneficial microbes;

• He makes his own fertilizer mix — with poultry manure, kelp for trace minerals, beneficial microbes and fungus;
• He starts seeds indoors each spring — waiting until the soil is warm in early June and keeps planting new seedlings through August;
• He uses containers about 12 inches deep. He puts only a few plants in one container, giving them room to spread out — because “gardeners don’t need to plant more plants; just make a few plants work harder;”
• He grows winter rye in his containers — keeping the soil’s microbes alive during winter;
• He grows onions and shallots grow alongside tomatoes — because those vegetables feed beneficial microbes in the soil; and
• He prunes most of the leaves off the tomato plants — making it easier to pick the tomatoes and to encourage the plant to make strong stems.

As a final touch, he plays oldies, classical or jazz tune for his potted friends.   “Our plants like eclectic music,” he joked.

Maybe he’s on to something there.  He shared the front page of Sunday’s North Coast section with an homage to Michael Stanley.

Two rock stars, huh?