Category Archives: tomatoes

Peregrine Farm News Vol. 17 #22, 6/17/20

What’s been going on! 

Just when you thought the weather this year couldn’t get any crazier we set a new record for the lowest high temperature at Raleigh of 61 degrees.  All this rain, no sun, cool temperatures make it really hard for warm season crops like tomatoes to grow and ripen.

Traditionally the second week of early tomato season we pick twice as many as the first week.  Monday, in between the rain showers, I managed to pick a few more pounds than last Monday but certainly not double and I am not optimistic about how tomorrows harvest will go.  One saving grace is that all the tomatoes are under cover, to try and grow tomatoes outside in these conditions is disheartening at the least, disaster mostly.  We grew all our tomatoes in the open for 20 years and once we moved indoors 20 years ago we never looked back. With climate change intensifying the weather extremes it will only get crazier.

A few people say that the indoor tomatoes don’t have the flavor that field grown ones do, that they need to struggle a little like wine grapes to develop the most flavor.  I disagree.  Taste in tomatoes is partly variety, partly plant size (the amount of foliage) and partly the soil they are grown in and how they are watered.  The worst examples are the Florida winter field grown tomatoes which are small plants, raised in very sandy soils with terrible genetics, they have no flavor. Second are some of the greenhouse tomatoes grown in bags of “substrate” (not soil), irrigated and feed with synthetic nutrients, under low light conditions.  Some of them at least have some better taste genetics bred in.

Most tomatoes grown under high tunnels by small farmers are grown just like field tomatoes, in the same rich organic soil as the field just with a layer of plastic over them to protect them from early season cold and excessive moisture.  The most flavor comes from a variety with good flavor genes, a large plant with good foliage to photosynthesize lots of sugars and other compounds that go into the fruit, a good balanced soil to provide the right nutrients and careful irrigation.  Too much water washes out the flavor, just like in melons.

We spend a lot of time on managing our great soil with cover crops, compost and minerals, have spent years trialing and choosing the most flavorful varieties and most importantly are very careful in how much irrigation water we give them- especially when ripening.  What we really need now is some sun and warmer temperatures!

To update our fundraising to contribute to Campaign Zero to help end police violence in America, we had another impressive week helped with more large donations from Ellie and Jim, Karen, Lydia and others.  The total for the month is now at $702.  Thank you all!

Picture of the week

P1050593Even this lone sunflower can’t brighten this gray week.

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 17 #21, 6/10/20 The Tomato Issue

What’s been going on! 

If you want tomatoes there is a lot of info below, read carefully. 

The tomatoes are coming!  The tomatoes are coming!  Normally this heralds one of our favorite times of year but this year I have had many sleepless nights trying to figure out how we are going to safely and effectively sell this wonderful crop.  For decades we have relied on our customers to pick out the fruits they want, bag them and hand them to us to weigh.  We can’t do that with Covid-19, we cannot let a bunch people handle the tomatoes.

Everyone has their idea of what the best tomato is- size, firmness, ripeness, etc.  This year you are going to have to rely on us to be the experts (because we are) and make that decision for you.  We will not pre-bag tomatoes either, that is a waste of time, energy, resources, is not good for the fruit in the long run, and you don’t really get what you want.  We want the stars of the summer season to shine as much as they can.

Here is how it will work:

Online– we will only put part of the harvest in the online store to make sure we have some available for those who want to see them and buy them at market.  We pick Monday and Thursday mornings and will update the online store again Thursday afternoon once we know how many more we have in stock.  If they are sold out on Wednesday, check back on Thursday.

We will put limits on how many can be ordered online.  You will order by variety and by the pound.  Most of the varieties are about 2 fruits to a pound but can be 1 to 3.  We will do our best to get the weight close to the amount you order.  If you order larger amounts, expect some part ripe fruit in the mix to ripen later in the week on your counter at home.

Email Pre-orders– tell us what you want and we will have it ready at market for you.  Same pay instructions as below.

At Market– The tomatoes will be displayed on our front table, you will indicate what size and how many you want, we will pick them out and weigh them.  If you are paying with cash the total will be rounded to the nearest dollar, usually up.  We are taking no coins at market.  If paying by credit card then we can charge the scale price.

The line will form around the side of our stall, out into the grass.  You will be able to see what is available as you move along, please have an idea of what you want before you get to the front.  Know that many varieties will sell out early.  Imagine that you are at a market in Europe where you are not allowed to touch the produce.

Suffice it to say that our tomatoes are better than any you have had since last summer and probably since you ate one of ours.  We have a very limited supply this week but it will increase quickly over the next two weeks.  Patience my friends, patience.

To update our fundraising to contribute to Campaign Zero to help end police violence in America, we had another impressive week helped with more large donations from Ellie and Jim, Johanna and others.  The total for the month is now at $455.  Thank you all!

Picture of the week

P1050585A tunnel full of cukes and basil

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 16 #18, 5/30/19

What’s been going on! 

Yep, it’s hot but not completely unheard of at this time of year.  If you look at the climate history for this area we have had temperatures in the 90’s as early as March and in the 100’s the end of May and in early June.  It is not what it should be though as the average high right now should be the low 80’s putting us 10 to 15 degrees higher than normal and for this many days in a row is disconcerting.

I have written before about the effects of high temperatures on tomato pollination.  Days above 90 and nights above 75 degrees cause a number of problems with pollen viability and its ability to move to pollenate.  Tomatoes are self-pollenating so this is not an issue of bees or no bees, but the pollen itself has to be good and the flower parts have to be able to receive the pollen.

This is all bad enough for field tomatoes but you put them under a tunnel, even one wide open and the temperatures jump more.  We have been watching these hot spells get hotter, longer and earlier in the tomato season for a number of years now and its effect on fruit set and consequentially fruit to eat in July and later.  For the first time ever we have covered our tunnel tomatoes with a 30% shade cloth to help with both fruit set but also the quality of the final product in reduced heat stress problems like cracking, sunscald and yellow shoulders.  Old dogs, new tricks.  Part of adapting to climate change.

Picture of the Week

P1050060Looks cooler in there doesn’t it?

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 16 #9, 3/28/19

What’s been going on! 

Second morning in a row at 30 degrees.  Last week we had four mornings below freezing but the long term forecast has nothing below 32 degrees!  Now we never trust long term forecasts and we know that our last frost date is usually around April 20 and we will for sure have a close call or two but things are looking up!

In working the new plan for a shorter marketing season I had boldly scheduled the earliest tomatoes to go in the tunnels two weeks ago but as I have written earlier, they got a slow start and so did we on getting the tunnels moved.  Finally today is tomato planting day and on looking back over a number of years we have almost always planted them on this date or certainly this week so it must just be the proper time.

If you remember from the Big Reveal this will be the only planting of tomatoes we are doing this year and because we only have 400 feet of row in the little tunnels, the selection has been narrowed as well.  There will be all of the our (and your) favorites though with Cherokee Purple, Cherokee Green, Sungold, Big Beef, our new yellow tomato and some Italian Oxhearts; really what more does a person need?  Now we just have to wait two months.

Picture of the Week

P1050015 Frost on the Romaine Lettuce

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 16 #7, 3/14/19

What’s been going on!

 Every spring we set a date that we are going to slide the little tunnels to their summer position and every spring we are at least a week late in doing it.  Such is the case this year yesterday was moving day, a week late. The date revolves around when the very early tomatoes are supposed to be planted into the tunnels.  We want to move the structures far enough in advance to allow the cold soil to warm up as much as it can before we practice what is already a tough love regimen on the tender tomato plants. They will have a hard enough time early with cold temperatures and life threatening freezes the least we can do is give them warm toes.

This year’s tomato plants have had a slow start with both having to reseed some of them due to mouse depredations and too many cloudy days that impeded normal growth so it is OK that we are not right on schedule.  They should go in the ground in a week or 10 days but will mean not quite as early a harvest as we had hoped.

The other side of the moving coin is we are also uncovering from their protection all of the earliest planted vegetables which must now face the cruel winds and weather of March.  So the middle of March generally seems to be about right for both parties.

Pictures of the Week

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Alex ready to pull a tunnel off tender lettuces and over prepared beds

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Ranunculus anyone?

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 15 #22, 7/18/18

What’s been going on!

While we are in the middle of tomato season and all of the various festivals and tasting events focused on the fruit I thought it might be a good time to actually talk about tomato flavor and bust one of the big misconceptions about different flavor profiles.

To start, flavor is determined by the variety- how it was bred, including the size of the plant and how it is grown including the soil it is grown in.  The bigger the plant, the more photosynthetic area if has, the more sugars and other flavor components the plant will make and put into the fruit.  We grow only tall, indeterminate varieties that will have a lot of leaf area.  The breeders or choosers in the case of heirloom types, also pick texture and flavor attributes they want or like.  Big fruit/small fruit, color, firmer/softer, less juice/more juice, less sugar/more sugar.

The big photosynthetic array also has to have the right materials to work with to make the sugars and other compounds- that would be the soil they are grown in.  Greenhouse tomatoes are generally grown in bags or pots of inert, sterile material like coconut husk or peat moss or even rock wool and fed a solution of nutrients.  “Field grown” tomatoes are grown in real soil but every soil is different and will have more or less of some nutrients and the biology that makes those nutrients available for the plant roots to take up.  Tomatoes grown in sand are different than our tomatoes grown in a rich sandy loam with red clay underneath.  It is not even a contest to compare a short determinate commercial variety grown in South Florida in the winter to a tall, indeterminate, heirloom or hybrid variety grown in our upland soils in the full sun and heat of the summer.

One of the most common questions we get and the myth to be busted is “which of these tomatoes is low acid?”.  The answer is- none of them.  What???!!!  There is no such thing as a high acid tomato or a low acid tomato.  They are all high acid, as in low pH, the scale that acidity/alkalinity is measured by.  Neutral being 7.0, all tomatoes run between 4.3 and 4.9, pretty acid.  Less ripe fruit are more acid and become a bit less so as they become fully ripe.  So our perception of tomato flavor is more accurately high sugar versus low sugar.  The sugars mask the acidity and most good balanced tomatoes have enough sugar to taste some sweetness but also to let the acid be there too.

Because it is so ingrained in us to refer to tomatoes as high or low acid we will continue to describe them that way to most people but just between those of us in the who now know better we will point to the sweet varieties when asked for the low acid ones.

Picture of the Week

 P1040371

Tall tomatoes, growing in soil enriched partly from lush cover crops like the cowpeas and millet in the foreground

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 15 #21, 7/11/18

What’s been going on!

Two big weeks coming up all focused on tomatoes.  Technically starting tomorrow, but with a sneak preview today at the first wine dinner, is the 17th annual ACME Tomato Festival where the entire menu is taken over by tomatoes in every dish.  Runs through the weekend with nearly 1000 pounds of tomatoes being consumed.  We only supply part of that but we did take the first 80 plus pounds yesterday to get things started!

We are also doing our best to fill the menus of other restaurants around town too with delicious tomatoes.  Pizzeria Mercato who just re-opened after their summer break, Elaine’s On Franklin, Oakleaf  just back from their summer break too and the Eddy Pub in Saxapahaw.

Next Thursday, the 19th, will be our annual tomato class at A Southern Season- An Ode to the Tomato with our friend the NC Tomato man, Craig LeHoullier who introduced the Cherokee Purple tomato to the world.  Always fun with Caitlyn Burke cooking great dishes with our tomatoes and Craig and I bantering on about tomatoes from A to Z.

Finally on Saturday the 21st is the Carrboro Farmers’ Market’s Tomato Day a celebration of all the amazing varieties grown by the farmers at market.  A chance to taste as many as 60 varieties and find out which ones you like best.  The market will be brimming with lots of fruit and tomato centric activities, don’t miss it!

Picture of the Week

P1040363

The Crested Celosia are so tall that you can barely see Jennie amongst them

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 15 #20, 7/6/18

What’s been going on!

 It is all about tomatoes right now and we have them coming out of our ears!  With the holiday landing in the middle of the week it has curtailed our normal tomato sales both from the Wednesday market being a day earlier, and a bit slower, and all of our restaurants closed, some for the whole week!  Combine that with probably the peak of our harvest and we are swimming in amazingly beautiful fruit!  Don’t miss out.

This Saturday is usually the Carrboro Farmers’ Market’s big Tomato Day but this year it has been pushed back until July 21st for a variety of reasons partly due to most of the  farmers crops being a bit later this year due to the cooler spring.  Not to worry, there will still be plenty of tomatoes at market.

We finally got some rain on Wednesday after nearly 3 weeks without a drop.  Didn’t exactly need 2 inches in a half an hour but we will take whatever we can get.  After the downpour I have been working on dragging all of the driveway gravel back up the hill to where it should be.  With nearly a half a mile of gravel drives around the farm this is a never ending job but some years are worse than others, just depends on how the rains come.

Picture of the Week

P1040335

When you enter the packing shed you see this

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Around the corner you find this

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 15 #19, 6/28/18

What’s been going on!

“Are these field grown tomatoes already?”  We get some version of this question every year in June as they pick up a Big Beef and have that look like they just ate a stink bug.  We usually just say yes, or they were grown in the dirt or some other quick response but the answer to that question is actually a complicated one.

It used to be that there were greenhouse tomatoes, bred specifically for those indoor conditions of lower light and cool nights (as most are grown in the off season) to be pruned and tied up in ways that only can be done inside a structure.  They are also almost entirely grown in plastic bags filled with some sterile media and all the water and nutrients are pumped to them.  Some of the varieties taste OK but are never as good as a tomato grown in the dirt and with high light and warm days.

Then the other side of the coin are “field grown” tomatoes which is no guarantee of a decent tomato either.  Sure they are grown in the dirt but how has that soil been cared for and just because they are outside in high light and warmer temperatures doesn’t mean that we won’t have bad experiences with crappy Florida winter tomatoes or even North Carolina “field” tomatoes.

For good flavor and texture in a tomato it all starts with the variety and how it was bred.  To industrialize the production of tomatoes they started by making the plants short which makes for easier trellising, in fact they are working hard on even shorter and stockier plants that will need no plant support.  When you make a tomato plant small you reduce the amount of leaf surface that photosynthesizes all the sugars and other flavor compounds that go into the fruit.  The second thing they did was breed in thicker skins and firmer texture so they could be mechanically harvested and shipped long distances.

Now let’s add in a single layer of plastic suspended over the plants to warm up the soil and to protect them from cold nights in the early spring while the young plants are growing but they are tall “field” varieties chosen for the best flavor and texture and grown in beautiful soil.  Does that make them greenhouse tomatoes?  We say No!

It used to be easy to tell, pretty much any ripe tomato before the 4th of July was from a greenhouse but we all have gotten much better at pushing “field” tomatoes earlier and earlier with raised beds of rich soil, covered with soil warming mulches, planting big transplants with larger root systems, inside of protective structures, trellised and pruned in a way so that the plants get the maximum sunlight and voila- ripe, great tasting tomatoes in June!  And plenty for the 4th of July holiday, are we lucky or what?

Picture of the Week

tomato harvest 6-28

Jacob just at the start of the tomato harvest day

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 15 #18, 6/21/18

What’s been going on!

The first day of summer, the longest day of the year, the stifling heat and humidity.  The only bright note is that the days now begin to get shorter which leads, eventually, to cooler days, something to dream about.  Life continues on the farm, morning work out in the field, regular irrigation and planting maintenance but it is at a measured pace with as little afternoon, in the sun, expenditure of energy as possible.

One thing we have no control over when it is this hot is how the tomatoes and peppers will set fruit.  When the day time temperatures are over 90 degrees and/or the night time above 70 degrees it makes the pollen less viable or sticky so that it won’t be able to fertilize the flower.  Fortunately we have been relatively cool until this week so should have a good tomato fruit set until the last week of July or the first of August when this week’s heat will become apparent as it takes six to seven weeks from pollination (or not) to a ripe fruit.

The pollination problem is a bit less severe in peppers but it will reduce the number of fruit in July and early August which is one reason we have our biggest pepper supply in the fall.  With climate change and the increasing frequency of heat waves it will affect when and for how long people will be able to grow tomatoes in this area.  Another reason to savor them while they are at their best!

Picture of the Week

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Shade cloth on the Big Tops to help keep the summer lettuce cool.

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