T is for Tomato in Bed A

I dig deep holes for tomato plants, about two feet deep. Tomatoes have roots that can go down four feet. One old farmer told me that he dug tomato holes with a posthole digger. My two foot hole means I have some subsoil to dispose of outside the garden. Then I work a couple shovels of inverted rye grass sod into the bottom of the hole and fill it to within six inches of the top with compost mixed with half a cup of organic tomato fertilizer. Judging by the number of tomato plants which volunteer in my fall compost pile, they must really love compost.  This deep compost drought proofs the tomatoes and they should produce until frost.  Next, I take my tomato transplant out of its pot, pinch all the leaves off except for the top three and bury it into the compost up to those top three leaves. Eventually the tomato plant will grow out of this six inch deep hole and I will fill in and hill up the tomato plant which will grow that much more root system from its stem. When I do bury the stem, I will also bury an inverted bottle near the stem for efficient watering of my compost sponge. In the mean time, with the transplant down in the hole, I can cover it with a plastic milk jug at night and cold days and uncover it to daytime sunlight and warmth. My soil is well drained sand so I don’t need to worry about my transplant drowning in a hard rain.

As my tomato grows, I cage it, snip off some of the bottom limbs and suckers to prevent any splash up soil borne diseases and when the soil gets hot, I mulch with straw. Straw mulch moderates soil temperature, prevents soil splash in rains, but does not block the rain from penetrating the soil. I plant an Early Girl variety on one side of bed A and a main season Jet star variety on the other side. Tomatoes love lots of sun and should be planted apart so they don’t shade each other. Indeterminate tomato varieties are very regenerative and easily cloned. To get a late fall harvest of green tomatoes for after frost storage, I pinch off  eight to ten inch suckers  and put them in jars of water until they get some roots and in early July, I can replace worn out zucchini plants with semi-sprawling late tomatoes. These late tomatoes do not shade the caged tomatoes because I let them sprawl over straw mulch and some low structure, like a tomato cage opened and laid on its side.

I pick tomatoes at the first hint of red or when they are full sized and opaque green and then allow them a couple days to finish ripening on a kitchen counter. Do not refrigerate tomatoes or they will get mushy. Much ado is made about vine ripened tomatoes, but I find that if left on the vine when red, you will lose nine out of ten tomatoes to bugs and rot. When they are full sized and green, only the horned tomato worm and the tomato fruit worm seem to bother tomatoes. Horned worms can be handpicked and tomato fruit worm damage can be lessened by not planting near corn. The tomato fruit worm is also the corn ear worm. Mature opaque green tomatoes make excellent mock apple pies and there are a number of recipes for fried green tomatoes which we like as much as sliced red tomato salads and BLT sandwiches. Mature green tomatoes picked just before the first fall frost can be rapped individually in newspaper, laid in cardboard boxes and eaten as they ripen. Tomatoes are very versatile and prolific plants. The two plants and their late season clones in bed A should provide for our needs.

Planting Tomatoes like Trees

We have moved quickly from a glut of summer squash in June to a glut of tomatoes in July. Actually, a lot of different vegetables came to the table in July. We have already managed to get tired of corn on the cob. When I realized what my wife (i.e. chief cook) was doing, the first thought to pop into my mind was “cop out soup”. I had brought in new potatoes, onions, peppers, corn, green beans, the last of the summer squash, and tomatoes. I thought we had an understanding that since she was now retired, she would be willing to process my garden produce… but like to tango, it takes two to have an understanding. She had decided to “make soup” and everything along with beef and broth was going into one super-sized slow-cooker crock pot. She was killing seven birds (vegetables) with one stone by making soup. To me vegetable soup is something you make and eat in winter.  Anyway, it turned out I was surprised; with a tall glass of iced sweet tea on one side and a plate of cold salted watermelon on the other, a bowl of black peppered vegetable soup actually was a very satisfying summer meal …correction, a whole week of  savory summer meals, since she had made so much. We froze some of  it.                                                                                                    Getting back to the tomatoes, I planted some Celebrity variety tomatoes, a truly prolific hybrid, to use as a standard of comparison for several heritage tomatoes. Someday I want to find a really good heritage tomato and be able to save my own seed. In general, hybrids (of which Celebrity is one of the best) are considered to have better disease resistances and be more prolific, i.e. more tomatoes per plant, whereas the heritage varieties have better flavor. I started off by planting all the tomatoes like I had seen directions for planting young trees…in large holes. I skimmed off the ryegrass cover crop and laid that turf to one side. Next I dug out the hole to a depth of over a foot and two feet in diameter, chopped some of last year’s tree leaves into the bottom, and then replaced the  ryegrass sod inverted grass-side down into the hole to act as a sponge and hold water for the roots when the August drought came.  I added a good soil/compost mixture with a handful of bone meal thoroughly mixed in. I left the top three inches of the hole unfilled so I would have a convenient watering basin. I stripped all but the top leaves off the transplants and planted the stems horizontally with only the top leaves above ground. I put a cage over the transplants and that was it. I believe the bone meal really did the trick because we had many large (hand-size) green tomatoes.

                The Cherokee Purple heritage tomato did not compare well on my soil to the Celebrity hybrid. The Cherokees were large but very gnarled and knobby, tended to have rot spots (most ended up on the compost pile) but did have a somewhat better flavor than the hybrid. I won’t try Cherokee Purple next year, maybe Green Zebra instead.

                I planted a heritage Chocolate cherry in front of the old Amish heritage Brandywine thinking that a cherry tomato would have a small vine. Small tomato, small vine…WRONG! The Chocolate cherry (also called black cherry, I believe) had good flavor, better than the Celebrity hybrid; the tomato was about golf ball-size and there were a gazillion of them…definitely the most prolific output of the varieties. The huge vine was very invasive, covering much of the Brandywine despite the fact that there was a two-foot space between the cages. Still the Brandywine produced large well-shaped and good old- fashioned tasting flavorful tomatoes. The chocolate cherry was early ripening and the Brandywine was quite late to ripen. Since I am into organic gardening, I try to pick all the large tomato varieties either opaque green or at first blush of red and wrap them in newspaper to ripen in the house. If allowed to vine ripen, some grasshopper or stinkbug will take a bite and rot will set in. Greenness is the tomatoes own defense against most insects (but not the horned tomato worm). I am interested in giving Brandywine another try next year.

                Because I was comparing several types of tomatoes, we ended up with a glut; what do you do with all those tomatoes? Fried green tomatoes are delicious in June. We eat a lot of BLT’s and fried ham and cheese sandwiches with big slices of red tomatoes, tuna salad with tomato slice and also toasted cheese, mayo and tomato in July.  Tomatoes make a good side dish just salted and peppered. Green tomato pie really does taste like apple pie. If all else fails, MAKE SOUP!