Posts Tagged tomatoes

Back in late July, two progressively demanding trends occurred to cause this blog to fall silent: my laptop hard drive started dying just as peak season kicked into gear.  By the time my hard drive crashed in August, I had no free time to worry about getting it fixed quickly, and so the farming season swept me into a whirlwind of activity that has only just started to settle down — now that the bitter winds and blowing snows of winter are making their appearance.

I’d love to be able to go back and fill in all the gaps for you, but honestly, I don’t remember everything I learned in my last three intensive months at the farm.  So in coming days I’m going to try to review some of the highlights, just to wrap up the year.

In August, most farmers’ markets are awash in color as summer produce hits its peak, so it’s no surprise that August proved to be a prolific and profitable month at the farm.

An abundance of heirloom tomatoes, ready for market

Heirloom tomatoes make up one of the three major crops at Dave’s farm, and he has collected and saved seeds over the years in order to have a rich variety of tomatoes over the season.  Varieties shown above include German Pink, Cherokee Purple, Moskovich, Sunkist, Jolly, and Yellow Pear, but later in the season we also had pints of Sun Golds, flats of Amish Paste, and many sunrise-brilliant Hillbilly tomatoes.

Green peppers put on their summer growth, while kale takes a breather

The peppers — both green bells and Hungarian wax — got off to a slow start earlier in the year, but by August we were starting to harvest them.

Second planting of cucumbers in field #6

Early heat in the summer meant that some summer crops, such as the two varieties of cucumbers shown here, produced early and vigorously, then tapered off in enough time for us to plant a second round.  The second crop didn’t yield quite as much, but it extended the season and brought in extra income, so it worked out well.

Second crop of squash, settling in nicely

A second planting of patty pan, yellow straightneck, and zucchini squash — even in a smaller field — added significantly to the season’s yields, and I harvested from these plants well into October.

Beets and leeks, going strong

I planted successive crops of beets throughout the season, adding new seedlings whenever old ones were cleaned out, so I would guess that this ended up as our most consistent, if not highest-yielding, crop.

Nothing to see here in the greenhouse

The intense heat of August — with many days in the 90s — caused us to empty the greenhouse, despite the need to keep seeding flats for fall crops.  Had I left flats in here, the seedling would have easily been fried, even with twice-daily watering!  (It got to the point when I would take flats, potting mix, and seeds out under the trees and work on flats in a cool breeze — anything to avoid this heat trap.)

Relocating flats for better temperature, sunlight, and water

Instead, we set flats out on the picnic table (and, later, the deck) where we had easy access to water and could keep an eye on the growing seedlings.  For fall, I continued to seed flats of beets, lettuce, kohlrabi, radishes, kale, and pac choi.

Our peak season continued into September, and I put in a very full Friday evening before Labor Day helping Dave harvest and prep for his big Saturday morning market.  By that point, we had all of the aforementioned crops ripening, as well as onions, more potatoes, loads of basil, eggplant, and even pears.  A busy time!

In my own gardens, August represented the trailing off of most summer crops, a superabundance of basil, the complete neglect of the bean and grain patch, halfhearted efforts at seed saving, and a complete panic about starting and planting seedlings for fall.  In short, a mess.

When peak season hits, you just have to hang on — it may be downhill from there, but boy, will it speed along!

Tomato seedlings that won't make it to the field: the lower one simply isn't happy in the flat, but the upper one shows signs of disease -- maybe blight?

Last year, area farmers took a blow from the pervasive appearance of late blight (Phytophthora infestans) on tomato crops.  A water mold that ran amok in last year’s cool, damp summer, the blight remains famous for its historical reasons: it was responsible for the crop losses that caused the Great Potato Famine in Ireland in 1845-1847.  And last year, it devastated the tomato harvest.

Dave felt the blow: his total harvest of heirloom tomatoes was easily halved, thanks to the damage to plants and fruits caused by this disease.  This year, we know we face the threat again, since the blight inoculum remains in the soil.

As you might have noticed above, the same disease can affect both potatoes and tomatoes — both are nightshades, of the genus Solanum — and since eggplant is also a nightshade, I wonder about that as well.  Dave practices crop rotation faithfully this year, avoiding the placement of tomatoes in the same areas as the previous year, but since potatoes are another large crop on the farm, there is bound to be some overlap of Solanum species.

So when we heard that late blight had been confirmed both in Pennsylvania and Michigan, Dave decided it would be sensible to take precautions.  There are a few sprays and such that are approved for use on certified organic crops, and the prime candidate used as a preventive against blight is copper hydroxide.  The Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA), the group that certifies Dave’s farm as organic, approved the use of this substance, so Dave called in an order for it, receiving it the very next day.

Hope and spray for the best

As with other sprays, copper hydroxide must be handled with care (it is mildly corrosive) and must be applied on a dry and not windy day.  Dave pulled out one of his sprayers, mixed up a batch, and applied the preventive to two plots of tomatoes, leaving a light turquoise mottling on the leaves and early fruit.

Along with the spraying regimen — every 7 to 10 days, or after rain — we will keep our eyes open for potentially diseased foliage, fruit, and plants and remove them from the field as quickly as possible, adding them to the burn pile since they are not compostable.  We’re using that same vigilance on the potatoes and eggplant, too, and I find in my own gardens I am eyeing the plants warily for suspicious spots.

Everyone connected with agriculture — farmers, researchers, and others who have a keen interest in the subject — are paying attention to blight this year, given last year’s destruction and this year’s wet start to the season.  Cornell University — excellent resource for all matters agricultural — has a great fact sheet about blight that will answer many questions.  USpest.org has a regularly updated map showing where late blight conditions are favorable or confirmed.  There’s nothing showing in our area yet, but we know it’s there, waiting.

Here’s hoping we’ll be ready for it.

First plot of tomatoes, looking healthy and vigorous

The ongoing rains lately have been both blessing and curse: while some crops have reveled in the continuous water supply, others with less lead time in the ground have succumbed to rot, and our work in some areas has been delayed.

Nowhere has both blessing and curse been so evident as in the tomato plots.

The last plot planted, still unmulched because we can’t even walk through it, shows signs of waterlogging, as does the lower part of the second tomato plot (where all the test seedlings reside).  And there’s not a thing we can do until the weather dries up a bit.  With any luck, the past few days have helped us out in that regard.

The first plot of tomatoes, however, looks lush and abundant, as the seedlings there got a sturdy foothold before the rains came.  So this past week, we set up trellises, pruned the seedlings, mulched, and started tying them up.

The first wire stays low, but we'll add more as the tomatoes grow

Over the years, Dave noted, he has switched from tomato cages to this system of metal posts strung with plastic-coated wire.  This line method suits the planting pattern of the tomatoes, which zig-zag back and forth over the drip line, and gives them the space to grow.

For so many reasons, trellising proves beneficial to the tomato crop.  By training the plans upward, we encourage the plants to develop more and larger fruit.  By keeping the plants from sprawling across the ground, we reduce the possibility of fungal diseases or insect damage.  And by training them to this neat line, we will have an easier time walking down the rows to harvest the tomatoes.

Pruned and fit to be tied

The pruning benefits the plants, too, removing the suckers that start to drain the plant’s energy toward the bottom of the plant.  Many of these seedlings already had small fruit developing, but Dave pointed out that these first fruits would not be as good as the later fruits, lacking some of the heirlooms’ prized characteristics.

So, like the Queen of Hearts declaring, “Off with their heads!”, I seized my clippers and quickly fell into a ruthless rhythm of snipping off the leaf stems and fruit along the bottom 6″ or so of stem.  And if any of those seedlings proved tall enough, I reached for a length of twine and tied them to the bottom trellis line.

Over the course of two days, we trellised, pruned, and tied up the first plot and made a good dent on the second plot.  This week, we’ll see what needs to be done on the third plot before we can start trellising there — I may need to replace several seedlings first.

Guess I’m the one who will be tied up this week.

This week, I started to get into a serious summer schedule at the farm.  Now that school is out for summer, Dave welcomes me coming to work earlier (since he doesn’t have to take his son to school in the morning) and staying as long as need be to get the work done.  That meant that on Monday I put in a seven-hour day, and Tuesday stretched to eight hours.

If you wonder how I held up, I’m pleased to say that despite minor injuries and regular aches, I did very well.  But then, we had an exciting week.

Room for more tomatoes, but not for ours

We still had tomatoes left after I planted the last patch last week, and we still had the lower third of one bed open for tomatoes.  But these wouldn’t be ours.  Instead, Dave had agreed to be part of a tomato-grafting trial this season, research being done at the OARDC here in town, and he left this section open for the Cherokee Purple tomato seedlings that the researcher would bring.

Grafted and ungrafted Cherokee Purple seedlings from the research station

On Tuesday, Michelle showed up with a flat of 40 Cherokee Purples — 10 ungrafted, with the rest grafted onto three different strains of hardy rootstock.  The goal of the research is to find out whether this grafting process for tomatoes provides enough disease resistance and general hardiness to make the time-consuming grafting worthwhile.

Can you imagine grafting something this small?

See, on fruit trees and other perennials, grafting makes sense because you’re investing a comparatively small amount of time on plants that will be around for decades.  But tomatoes, an annual crop, with such small stems and thus more delicate grafts?  Well, apparently the technique has met with success in Japan, Michelle notes, but these are early days for the method here in the States.

Note the graft (the "V") well above the soil and even the mulch

Michelle gladly answered our questions and shared ideas as well as her own questions about the farm — she’s enthusiastic about the farms she’s visiting for this project.  We talked while Dave’s daughter and I planted the seedlings (Michelle laid out the seedlings the way she wanted them to be arranged), being careful not to sink the plants so deeply as to cover the grafts.

One question I had was whether the seeds saved from the fruit of these plants would then carry the characteristics of both the rootstock and the Cherokee Purple strain.  (I don’t know much about grafting, so this may be a silly question.)  The research, however, is new enough that she wasn’t able to give me an answer — they simply haven’t thought yet to consider that aspect.  The seeds will produce Cherokee Purples again next year, but whether or not they will produce plants with increased hardiness remains to be seen.

Cherokee Purple trial patch, marked for different grafted rootstock varieties

In the meantime, we will watch this patch and see how things go.  (Since it’s the lower part of the bed, I suspect we’ll see some problems with excess water, but I hope it won’t be too bad.)  And when it comes time to harvest, we’ll be keeping special records on yields, resistance, and whatever else is notable.

I rounded out my work Tuesday with replacing other tomato seedlings that had succumbed to root rot, clearing out the old kale bed, harvesting garlic scapes for market, helping Dave lay the rest of the drip lines, and planting melons and winter squash.  Since we planned to spend time Wednesday preparing for a farmers’ market, we wanted to push through the field work while we could this week.

Wednesday morning greeted us with low skies and a steady rainfall that had me soaked through shortly after we started harvesting produce for Dave’s Wednesday market.  But the unofficial Post Office motto of “neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night” applies to farmers as well, so we persevered and harvested kohlrabi, turnips, beets, radishes, kale, mustard greens, and snow peas for market.

Everything for sale is weighed and packaged with care

“There’s an art to preparing for market,” Dave asserted as we started the day’s work.  From making clean cuts to harvest the produce to cleaning off unsightly leaves in the field, from washing produce thoroughly and cleaning off more problem spots to bundling produce together for sale, he demonstrated his techniques and explained his desire for the best-looking produce display.

Nope, not quite pretty enough for market

For example, turnips that looked perfectly good when pulled from the ground had to be reevaluated once cleaned — and these, sad to say, did not make the cut.  (They did, however, make it into a bin of seconds for me to take home.)

Bundles of turnips, ready for market

By noon, we had prepped all the produce he intended to take to market, laying bundles of root vegetables carefully in plastic bins and tucking leafy greens into plastic bags (stems all down, bag bottoms snipped to allow drainage).  And with that, my day’s work was done.

As we head further into farmers’ market season, I expect my weeks will follow more of this pattern — long days Monday and Tuesday, morning harvest Wednesday, and possibly another afternoon of harvesting later in the week.  So it’s good to get some of the basics of that process down now.  And I look forward to learning more about the art of farming.

Time to plant the tomatoes!

After we passed the mid-point of May, the pressure intensified at the farm.  Once we had eased past the threat of frost, we needed to plant summer crops: squash, cucumbers, onions, pepper, eggplant, and especially tomatoes.

At Dave’s farm, given the spread-out location of the fields, this meant that not only did we need to plant seedlings, but we also needed to lay mulch and drip irrigation lines.  These are, after all, crops that demand a great deal of water and care, and the heirloom tomatoes are especially precious to the farm’s bottom line.  Therefore, they merited all the extra effort we could give them.

The header line connects to the shut-off valve; the shut-off valve connects to the drip tape...

So, before I got down on my hands and knees to dig in, I helped Dave set up the irrigation lines.  He set the header line in place, turned on the water, and got it up to the right pressure.  Then, with the rows staked out, I grabbed one end of drip tape and walked to the end of the plot, adding an end cap to the line.  Dave poked the hole in the header line (getting a good soaking in the process), inserted the coupling for the drip line, and connected everything.  I straightened the line, anchoring it where needed, and moved on with him to the next line.

On days when the sun blazed down on us, laying drip lines actually made for a nice breather in between hot and sweaty planting sessions.  The water gushing out of the header lines tended to be hot, having soaked up the sun’s rays through black plastic all day, but it was a comfort to stand and be buffeted by the breezes once in a while.

Tomatoes in field #1, neatly mulched with black plastic

The mulch — be it mowed grass or sheets of black plastic — sometimes came before the drip lines.  The width of the plastic made an excellent indicator for where to lay the lines as well as for where to plant the tomatoes, though once I was ready to plant, the heat coming off the plastic made the task a little more challenging.  (The grass mulch, despite its lighter color, wasn’t much better: the drying grass caused a great deal of itching, and the light reflected off the mulch back in my face.  A no-win situation, it seemed.)

Tomatoes, as far as the eye can see...

In other areas, we laid lines and planted first, before mulching.  (It depended on weather, grass mowing schedules, and other tasks.)  And given the urgent need to get the seedlings planted, I set out tomatoes in all kinds of weather: hot and blazingly sunny, cool and mucky, and under the threat of an impending thunderstorm.  This field was finished just before the rain started — a good thing I have gotten much quicker and more efficient at planting!

I’ve also learned how to splice the drip tape in order to cut out a pinhole leak (detrimental to the pressure on down the line) and reconnect the tape pieces, and I’m (slowly) learning to be more careful when planting so that I don’t cover the emitters (the holes in the drip tape) with soil or mud, thus clogging them.  Details!

One more patch remains to be filled with tomatoes, and then we’re done with that task.  Not all the seedlings will find a home in the fields since we are running out of room.  And once we get the remaining summer crops planted — more squash, a plot of peppers, melons, onions — we’ll return to the tomatoes for trellising.

The rain moved in mid-week, so we may not have heavy use of the irrigation system just yet.  But we’re ready to keep the water flowing when needed.