Category Archives: tomatoes

Peregrine Farm News Vol. 9 #17, 7/11/12

What’s been going on!

A glorious, cool, cloudy, rainy morning!  Still not a lot of rain yet (1.2 inches over the last two days plus an inch last Friday) but what we have gotten has been steady and slow, almost no runoff, just a good soaking.  We have been so dry that even with last Fridays and Mondays contributions we were able to till soil yesterday and seed more flowers and another round of summer cover crops.  We now hope that the rains forecast for the rest of the week will actually come and bring those seeds up.  I would love to see another two inches!

A beautiful gray day, old Zinnias turned under and seeded to a cover crop

We are all in full blown tomato mania.  While we have passed the peak of our harvest most everyone is getting ready for theirs.  Last Sundays tomato cooking class at A Southern Season was a full house, went really well, and folks went away with a new enthusiasm for a spectrum of tomato possibilities.  For the last several weeks we have been supplying tomatoes to every outlet possible.  For the next week or so you can find ours at both the Carrboro and Southern Village Weaver Street Markets; on the menus at Elaine’s on Franklin, Pazzo, IL Palio and GlassHalfull in Chapel Hill/Carrboro and at Nanas and Watts Grocery in Durham.  You can find links to all of the above here.  The Carrboro Farmers’ Market’s Tomato Day is this Saturday (more info below).

Of course we are all breathing a sigh of relief to be past the record setting heat wave of the last two weeks which culminated in the all-time record of six 100 degree days in a row at RDU.  There will be very few tomatoes at market the third and fourth weeks of August due to no fruit set these last two weeks.  When day temperatures exceed 85°F and night temperatures exceed 72°F, tomato flowers will abort.  July is definitely all about tomatoes, don’t miss enjoying them as much as you can.

The packing shed bulging with tomatoes

What’s going to be at the market?

The Carrboro Farmers’ Markets annual Tomato Day is this Saturday and we have expanded it to the entire town with restaurants and other businesses participating with specials.  Over 70 varieties to try and other samplings including tomato juice from us.

Tomatoes are still in full swing with good supply.   In reds we have an abundance of full flavored Big Beefs.  The flood of Cherokee Purples is here along with its cousins the Cherokee Green and a few Cherokee Chocolates.  A small supply of pink, low acid German Johnson.  Plenty of the fruity bi-color Striped Germans.  In orange/yellows there are Orange Blossoms and the beautiful Kellogg’s Breakfast.  In cherry types we have a better supply of Sungolds and the mixed Sungold cousins Sun Lemon (orange), Sun Peach (pink) and Sun Chocula (I did not make these names up) and the bi-colored elongated Blush.  The best supply we have ever had of the Italian Oxheart sauce tomatoes and beautiful Romas, if you want to make sauce, now’s the time.

The peppers are starting with Shishitos and Padrons for appetizers and a few Serranos and Jalapenos.  Sweet Red Onions and Basil to go with tomatoes!  Flat Leaf Italian Parsley.

Betsy and the flower department are still producing an amazing amount of beautiful stems.  The Crested Celosia wave is beginning to roll.  More long lasting Lisianthus, queen of cut flowers, mostly in purple with some pink and white.  The second cutting of Delphinium has started.  Lots of fragrant Oriental lilies in pink and white.  The Zinnia flood rolls on with the Sunflowers.  The airy and elegant Trachelium.  Annabelle Hydrangeas for drying.  Beautiful Bouquets!

As a reminder if there is anything that you would like for us to hold for you at market just let us know by e-mail, by the evening before, and we will be glad to put it aside for you.

Hope to see you all at the market!

Alex and Betsy

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Peregrine Farm News vol. 9 #16, 7/5/12

What’s been going on!

Hope you all had and good July 4th and are managing the heat well.  We spent the day with some early work before the heat set in (Betsy had to cut some flowers and I had to irrigate and attend to the turkeys) and then we hid out in the AC catching up on paperwork, reading and eating.  It is the peak of our tomato season and so there are lots of not-good-enough-for-public-consumption fruits crowding our kitchen counter.  Yesterday we made our first big batch of salsa for the season now that we also have serranos and red onions.  Betsy is headed towards making tomato juice and for dinner we took a cue from Ben Barker and grilled some fish then laid it on top of slices of what may be the biggest Striped German bi-colored tomato of the season (slices at least 6” across) and then topped it with some salsa fresca.  Do we have to go back to work today?

Speaking of tomatoes, if you haven’t already registered, our annual tomato class at A Southern Season is this Sunday.  In tandem with Craig LeHoullier who is the heirloom tomato guru who introduced Cherokee Purple, Chocolate and Green to the world, amongst others.  We talk tomatoes while Marilyn Markel cooks up a great three course meal using our tomatoes, wine included!  Not a bad way to spend another 100 degree afternoon.

The turkeys are three weeks old and it was time to let them outside.  The brooder building was designed for about 65 birds and having 83 in there, in this hot weather, makes it a bit tight.  As usual we pulled one of their field shelters in front of the brooder and connected the two together with sections of chicken wire.  To give them extra shade I also strung an old tarp across the gap.  Down came the front opening/gang plank and they were more than happy to get out and stretch their legs and wings.

With them out in the open we finally got a chance to get a count how many guinea hens we were sent by mistake and the number is eleven.  It turns out that the Barkers want a couple of them for pets and tick control over at their place.  We told them that was fine but we first had to choose the right pair and give them appropriate names.

These are the Guinea Hens Confit and Fricasee next to one of the turkeys

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 9 #14, 6/20/12

What’s been going on!

The summer solstice, longest day of the year, last day of spring, summer starts at 7:09 p.m., the heat started yesterday, had to happen sooner or later.  Tomorrow Betsy can start her annual chant “Now that the days are getting shorter, frost is just around the corner!”.  It has been a marvelous late spring with nights in the 50’s and low humidity but it will all soon be a dim memory as we head into the tunnel of summer heat and humidity.

Some good things come out of the right amount of summer heat.  Tomatoes that taste better than just about anywhere else in the country for example.  Without sun and warmth, the plants just don’t make enough sugars and other flavor components.  This is why greenhouse tomatoes or ones grown in the northern tier of the country, no matter what variety or how well tended, can never really have great flavor.

There is a balance though.  With too much heat and humidity, the plants stop setting fruit, there is more trouble with sun burned fruit (sunscald in the vernacular), hollow walls and blossom end rot when the plants just can’t move enough water up through the plant fast enough.  This is why our farmer friends in the most southern tier states have tomatoes in June and maybe early July and then pack it in for the season until it cools back down.

Fortunately we are entering tomato season at just the right time, plenty of fruit hanging on the vines waiting for the heat to finish the process.  We pick more each harvest day and soon the table will be overflowing with all of the colors, shapes and sizes.  Here’s to summer!

Picture of the Week

Tomatoes in the cool of the early morning, waiting for the heat to flavor them up

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 9 #5, 4/18/12

What’s been going on?

We made it past the cold weather without any real damage other than some fig leaves being burned a bit. 26 degrees on Thursday morning and 31 on Friday. As soon as it warmed up on Friday we began to slip the tomato transplants into the ground. Perfect day, not too hot and no wind to stress them while they are getting used to their new home. A nice watering in with the hose and then a deep irrigation a few days later and they look fantastic. Today is the next step for the peppers, we seed them into small cells to maximize space in the germination box and then move up only the best looking seedlings into larger cells to grow larger until they too go into the field in just about a month. Nearly 3000 plants to move up of thirty plus varieties. Another perfect day for this job too, cloudy and cool which will make the greenhouse conditions less brutal on the tiny plants as they recover from being pulled out of one tray and poked into another.

Finally a bit of rain last night after a solid week of irrigating to try and catch up on the surprisingly dry conditions. Things look much better including the onions that have looked like hell for weeks. The now annual water watch has begun. Just like last winter and spring (2010-2011) when we got fairly regular small rain events but never really enough to recharge the ground water we are in the same pattern this year. The creek is running well but the upper pond only came up about a foot over the winter. A month ago we began the process of filling the upper pond by using the irrigation system pump to move water from the lower pond. Over 140 hours of pumping later and the upper pond is full and at least six feet deeper than it had been. Hopefully we will not have to use it this summer but it feels comforting to have it there.

Picture of the Week

A tomatoes view of the world, “You want me to climb up to the top of that fence?”

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 9 #4, 4/11/12

What’s been going on?

You knew that it was coming, couldn’t go all the way through this warm spring without one last blast of cold weather, are you ready? Lots of people blinked and planted their tomatoes and other warm season crops, now they will be running around today trying to cover them or are just going to take the hit and replant, if they can. The if they can part is the one thing we can’t do. With over twenty varieties of tomatoes, some the only seeds we had, waiting to go in the ground, we just can’t gamble that way. Last week we had moved them all outside to harden off before they went to the field but this would be a little too hard. As it was they went through 29 degrees on Sunday morning and a few got a bit burned even with row cover over them but it was only supposed to be a low of 35 degrees. So with tonight’s low forecast to be 30 degrees here and knowing it can swing 5 degrees or more, we moved them all back into the greenhouse for safe keeping until Friday morning when we hope to finally put them into the ground.

The super early tomatoes in the little sliding tunnels will be just fine and we will protect them with an additional layer of row cover and clamp the plastic down to make them as warm as possible. We have been able to protect them down to as low as 20 degrees, which we had some years ago with the historic Easter freeze in April 2007. Hopefully this will not be as drastic a situation as that was but we are going into it with very similar conditions. So make sure you cover what you can tonight and be wary about tomorrow night too as sometimes we get fooled and the second night is the worst.

All at the same time we are now getting too dry and we need to spend the day setting up irrigation. We wait as long as possible in the spring to install the irrigation because it makes planting and cultivation more difficult once it’s in the way. We spent the last few days doing some final cultivation and now we can start running lines. Drip irrigation lines down every bed, sometimes two on crops like onions. Micro sprinkler lines down every third bed on the greens. Flush the main lines and then attach the headlines that run across the top of every field and flush those, to which we then attach either the drip or sprinkler lines and finally fill them up and make sure they are all working. There has never been a year we didn’t have to irrigate at some point in the season but we always wait until we have to.

First Wednesday afternoon market today (3:30-6:30), it will be cool and breezy but there are good reasons to come out besides the fresh produce. Bill Smith from Crooks Corner will be doing a cooking demonstration during market and then immediately after market there will be a Food Truck Rodeo fundraiser for the Farmer Food Share which is the group that collects extra produce from the Farmers’ market and then distributes it to the food banks and kitchens. Come on out for both the market and the fundraiser, see you there.

Picture of the Week

Warm tomato plants as far as the eye can see

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 9 #3, 4/5/12

What’s been going on?

One of those weeks when the whole body is sore after days of tugging and lifting and putting things together for the spring. One of the big jobs of the year is underway, preparation for planting the main field of tomatoes. Of course there are lots of steps involved in growing tomatoes that happen through the year beginning with soil preparation the fall before with mineral amendments, raising up beds and seeding the right cover crops that will mature at just the right time.

The week before planting would be enough work if we grew the tomatoes out in the open like most of the rest of the world with soil prep, drip irrigation lines, landscape fabric mulch and trellis construction having to be done first. For us there is one more job that has to be done before any of the above can proceed, covering “The Big Tops” with plastic. The Big Tops are our field scale multi-bay high tunnels that we brought in from England in 2004 to answer the foliar disease issues that were making it nearly impossible for us to grow tomatoes in the open. Named by our neighbor the first time we covered them because he said it looked like the Circus had come to town, not sure if he meant they looked like circus tents or we looked like a bunch of clowns covering them.

Every spring, a week before tomato planting day, we have to hope for a still morning to drag the 30′ X 100′ sheets of plastic over the top of the thirteen foot high bows and get them secured before the wind picks up. No easy task but with four patient people and lots of scrambling up and down ladders and tugging on ropes we can cover the four bays that are over the quarter acre in which the tomatoes will be planted. A perfect morning on Tuesday had us done with the job in just over 3 hours. By the end of the day tomorrow, all of the beds will be prepared and the trellises built, waiting for the tomato plants to be tucked in early next week.

Picture of the Week

The plastic “roofs” floating over the tomato beds

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 8 #17, 7/13/11

What’s been going on?

The heat? So I see that we are one day ahead of last years record setting pace for days over 90 degrees, at 40, the record is 91 and I hope we don’t get there. These are the days we work hard to get out of the field and the sun by noon at the latest. Down into the deep shade to work at the packing shed, or seeding fall crops or something similar. It is just not practical to be out in the field moving like turtles, suffering to do something poorly or taking two or three times as long to get the job finished over what it would take to do in the cooler hours of the day. Some folks say I’m getting soft in my old age, I just think I am getting wiser.

Good class last night at A Southern Season cooking school. It has become an annual event where Craig LeHoullier and I carry on about tomatoes and Marilyn Markel (who is the manager of the cooking school) is calmly cooking up some great dishes with our tomatoes. If you haven’t ever taken a class there it is very well done, entertaining and you get a whole meal (with wine included) for a very reasonable price.

I have mentioned this before but Craig is the god father of heirloom tomatoes. Back in the early 90’s when nobody knew what an heirloom tomato was, I came across an old fashioned printed newsletter that he co-edited call Off the Vine. It was an amazing resource on all of these crazy varieties where he and others would share their successes and failures growing these unusual tomatoes. Craig now keeps almost 3000 varieties in his personal seed bank and shares his new finds with the world. Maybe most importantly he is responsible for introducing Cherokee Purple to the seed companies and for discovering the new Green Cherokee.

He lives in Cary and over the years we have communicated and run into each other. Finally a few years ago we began doing these cooking/gardening classes at A Southern Season and it has been great fun to learn more from him about where these varieties come from, the stories behind them and the new work he is doing on easy to grow varieties for the home gardener. Another amazing resource we have here in North Carolina.

Picture of the Week

Need some Celosia?

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 8 #16, 7/6/11

What’s been going on?

Well we made it to July, hope everyone had a good holiday weekend. We are in tomato mania at the house right now. The counter is covered in those tomatoes that are not “stable” enough to go anywhere but from the field to the house and then into our stomachs. It is a tomato (at least) at every meal and then other uses are dreamed up as we go along. Hot weather and a house full of cookbooks can lead one into dangerous territory.

Just in the last week we have made Betsy’s favorite Tomato and Basil risotto, several different batches of salsa (with our red onions and serranos), a yellow gazpacho, oven roasted some Blush tomatoes for later use on dishes, Betsy has made a huge pot of tomato sauce (to be frozen for all year consumption) from the new Slow Food Presidia variety we brought back the Torre Canne from Puglia, sandwiches, tomato salads and just plain eating as one walks by. If you want to try more of our varieties and not cook yourself, there are at least three tomato dinners coming up using our tomatoes and at least five restaurants using our toms.

The turkeys graduated from elementary school yesterday. Three weeks old and growing fast, we let them outside for the first time. This group is not timid, usually when we open the front ramp of the brooder they all mass at the opening, blinking at the new world and wait around for the one brave soul who will actually walk out there. Sometimes it takes them an hour or so to get the courage up. Not this group, they were down the ramp and into the grass in minutes! I take that as a good sign that they will be good foragers when we finally take them to the field in two weeks.

They will spend a week running in and out to the new mothership, protected by the chicken wire surround. Next week we will move the mothership back and surround it with the electric net fence to give them more room and to get used to the mild shock of the fence, this is like moving from middle school to high school. Finally the last night or two they will sleep out in the mothership. At five weeks of age they will graduate from high school and go to college, into the blueberry field and on to greater and more interesting things. When you are a turkey, you grow up fast.

Picture of the Week

A turkey’s eye view of the new world

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 8 #13, 6/15/11

What’s been going on?

So you all may remember our troubles with Fusarium Wilt in the heirloom tomatoes, it slowly kills the plants and severely reduces production. It is a problem we never experienced until about six years ago and then it didn’t become fully apparent how severe it was until about three years ago. Several solutions are possible and like most good sustainable ag approaches, it takes multiple tools to do it right, no silver bullets here.

The first tool is resistant varieties, easy enough with the hybrid tomatoes most of which are bred with resistance to the wilt but we don’t grow many. So we have been saving seed from our past crops, from the plants that seem to be fighting the disease the best, with the hope that we can slowly build resistance to it. Second tool is grafting the variety we want onto a rootstock that is resistant to the soil borne disease, just like fruit trees are done. Last year we attempted to do it but didn’t get our timing right, this year we contracted with someone to do it for us for the two most disease prone varieties and they failed too.

The third technique is to solarize the soil which will kill or greatly reduce the amount of the fungus in the soil and it has been shown to be very effective. Solarization is covering the moist soil with clear plastic and heating it up to as high as 140 degrees. It needs to be done in the 6-8 hottest weeks of the summer. We have designed the Big Top rotation to have a rest year (without cash crops) to really build up the soil with cover crops, so we do have a window in which we can solarize.

With that in mind, covering a quarter of an acre is a lot of plastic! We needed to put some new plastic on one set of the Big Tops so last fall we did just that and reserved the old plastic to use for the solarization. Yesterday I turned under the remains of the huge winter cover crop and the soil was nice and moist from the two inches of rain we received on Friday night, perfect! We pulled the plastic covers over and buried the edges. Now we just have to wait and hope it does the job. Next year will be the test as the tomatoes will be in that section again. Patience my friend, patience.

Picture of the Week

Let’s hope this works

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 8 #5, 4/20/11

What’s been going on?

Interesting Farm Tour this year. Saturday was a bit odd and at times tense with the storms moving through. We were very fortunate to just receive a very intense down pour with just a little bit of wind following it. We feel for all of those folks east of here that received the brunt of the storms, clean up is always hell. To be expected our Saturday crowd was small but dedicated, the Sunday visitors made up for it with gusto. Great folks both days but the Sunday tourees were reveling in the beautiful day and we had great discussions on all topics related to sustainable agriculture and farm life.

Busy weeks now. Today is tomato planting day and our first Wednesday market. I have spent the last part of the morning drawing up the map of where the nearly 1000 plants will go. “Only” fifteen varieties this year but the field that they are in, along with the edge effect of the Big Tops (more water on the side beds than the middle ones) dictates careful placement. Some can take extra water, like the Romas and Big Beefs. Some have to be protected in the middle like the Sun Golds and Striped Germans. The varieties that are new or we don’t grow a lot of need to be on the end we pick from so we can keep a close eye on them. Which ones will do best in the bit of heavy soil on the far corner? It is never perfect but the die has been cast.

Earth Day on Friday and today is the one year anniversary of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, kind of polar opposites. We think often of the impact of that spill on such a important and vibrant ecosystem and what the unknown long term effects will be on the area and it’s residents. It will be easy to lose track of that disaster as it leaves the news but I think we will be reminded at least each year on it’s anniversary which maybe will make Earth Day seem even more relevant as time goes on. Makes us even more committed to doing the best job we can with this piece of land that we are the temporary stewards of. OK, off to plant tomatoes.

Picture of the Week

Tomato transplants marching to the horizon

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