Category Archives: tomatoes

4/30/08 Vol. 5 #7

Success!  All the tomatoes are in the ground and only a day later than last year.  Thursday the guys got the last of the trellises built, most of the tomato varieties we grow are heirlooms which grow tall and need strong support.  In the wild (in Central America) tomatoes are actually perennials and will grow and grow, here where they get killed by frost we forget about that.  These old heirloom types are closer to their wild cousins than the new hybrid types that are bred to be shorter and easier to grow.  The standard tomato support system in the industry is called “stake and weave” where you drive a stake every other plant and then weave a string down both sides of the plants and around the posts and so on.  In the past we have done some stake and weave on short plants and I hate it!  For one it means driving 35 stakes per 100 foot row and it’s difficult to weave with tall stakes.  So we developed what I call the one sided tomato cage.  Research has shown that the best production is tomatoes grown in cages, round cylinders of wire mesh where the plants just grow up in the middle and out the sides.  The problem with cages is they take a lot of wire and room in the field.  So we run the wire, field fencing, down the middle of the row with plants on either side.  They grow up through it and we only have to tie up the branches that head out into the aisle.  It only takes nine posts to support it and it fast to put up and take down at the end of the season.  Trellising 101.

Trellis done we planted half the rows on Thursday and finished up Friday with the rest.  Only fifteen varieties in this main planting this year, kind of going back to basics.  Sometimes a person gets so carried away with trying new kinds that it doesn’t leave enough room for the ones we need to grow to make a living and the new ones don’t give us enough to really make a display at market.  There is a new red that several growers raved to me about at meetings this winter and we are growing Mortgage Lifter (a pink) again for the first time in years partly due to a Slow Food tomato taste challenge going on later this summer (I will let you know more details later).  We are still trying to settle in on one of those Italian paste/eating tomatoes we brought back that everyone has given high marks to.  After years of side by side testing we have settled in on just two yellow varieties Kellogg’s Breakfast and the high acid Azoychka and have let Nebraska Wedding go, just not good enough production.  The rest are the mainstays of our show- Big Beefs, German Johnsons, Viva Italias, Green Zebra and Aunt Ruby’s German Green and of course the champion Cherokee Purple taking up a full third of our production.

The other high point of the week was the arrival of the little turkey poults.  After a year hiatus raising turkeys we are once again back in the business.  You may remember all of the trials and difficulties we have participated in with poultry processing which is the reason we decided to take last year off.  The great news is we have a brand new processing plant in Siler City which just opened this month.  Abdul Chaudhry of Chaudhry’s Halal Meats has built a beautiful new poultry facility next door to his red meat plant and we are very excited to be working with him.  As usual the phone rings early, 7:30, and it’s the Post Office, “come get your turkeys” and you can hear them cheeping up a storm in the background.  Betsy zips off to Graham to collect them while I get their feeders, waterers and heat lamps ready.  Betsy returns with 66 energetic, Bourbon Red poults, maybe the best looking ones we have ever received.  Each on gets it’s beak dipped in the water then plopped down in the feed tray so they know where it is.  Now a week later they look great and it is nice to have them back on the farm.

Picture of the Week
What is this big animal in here bothering us?

7/9/08 Vol. 5 #17

It has been so long since we have had a wet period like this, one almost forgets what it can be like.  It used to be that every July we would have a monsoon period right in the middle of tomato season, generally near the peak.  We feared these wet times as all of our hard work in tending the plants was literally washed away.  Two things were guaranteed to happen.  First the tender skinned ripe heirloom varieties would split and explode from too much water.  Tomatoes are not like balloons that you can just keep pumping up, once they begin to turn color that is as big as their skin will get, excess water has to go somewhere.  We would pick buckets and buckets full of huge Striped Germans and Cherokee Purples split across the bottom from side to side and just throw them away, every Sungold cherry would be split.  The second insult was that  the foliar disease, that haunts us, would run up the plants like someone light a match to them, exposing the remaining fruits to sunscald and increasing the chances of those fruits exploding because when there are no leaves to transpire (breath) water out of the plant any excess water makes the fruit splitting worse.  Once the disease started up the plants it was only a matter of a week or two until that crop was finished for good.  To counter act this we would plant tomatoes three times in the field to try and have some tomatoes all summer.  In reality the best tomatoes are the ones planted in late April right after frost because they grow the biggest plants to support great fruit with great taste.  Plants grown later in the summer just never get as big or set fruit as well.  As the days get shorter in August and then the nights begin to cool off in September it affects the flavor of the tomatoes too, never as intense as fruit ripened in the middle of the summer.  Enter the Big Tops, the cathedrals of tomato production.  We knew if we could keep those plants dry and control the water to their roots we could grow incredible tomatoes.  The trick was that smaller greenhouse structures can’t hold enough plants and get too hot in the middle of the summer.  The huge size of the Big Tops (24 feet wide and 13 feet high) makes it just like growing the plants out in the open but with a thin plastic roof just over the plants.  Now instead of only producing for four or five weeks, that April planted crop will produce for eight or nine weeks or longer and the fruit quality is nearly perfect.  So now when these rainy periods come, I just smile and sleep well, it’s a miracle!

Interesting day yesterday.  We spent most of the day being interviewed by a pair from the National Academy of Sciences for a study being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Kellogg Foundations titled “Twenty-First Century Systems Agriculture”.  Twenty years ago the National Academies released a ground breaking report “Alternative Agriculture” that showed, definitively for the first time, that sustainable and organic approaches to farming actually worked and were as profitable as conventional agriculture.  Now two decades later they are doing it again but with a broader scope than just economics.  Using fact-finding workshops, data analysis and case studies to identify the scientific foundations of sustainable farming systems.  Somehow (it’s always a mystery to us) we were chosen to be one of the nine farms nationwide as one of the “real world” case studies.  They sent seven pages of questions that they wanted to cover (enough to scare anyone) but it turned out to be a wide ranging conversation about how we farm.  As Betsy said, “We had the easy part, they have to try and make a report out of that conversation!”

Picture of the Week
Happy tomatoes under gray skies

4/8/09 Vol. 6 #3

The annual last frost/freeze dance is near.  This morning it was 28 degrees, not cold enough to really do any damage but low enough to get our attention.  The only things out there that could really get damaged are the first tomatoes and 28 degrees is really their point of no return.  But they are inside the little tunnels tucked under an additional layer of row cover.  After the famous Easter freeze of two years ago when we had tomatoes under the same protections and they survived 20 degrees we are a little more relaxed about these last fronts of the year than we used to be.

There are really two major methods of cold weather crop protection covering, like we do for the most important crops and ice.  The ice method that the most of the strawberry growers use requires lots of water, big pumps and sprinkler guns and you still have to stay up all night making sure that it all keeps running.  Once you start to “throw water” you have to keep it up until it begins to melt the next morning.  If you run out of water and or the pump stops you can do more damage than if you didn’t spray any at all.  In high winds, like yesterday evening started with, it is even more difficult to get the water to behave and go where it is supposed to.

We don’t have the capacity to ice protect so we mostly use the third method of protection- we just don’t grow those crops that need it or wait to plant them until it’s safe.  This goes along nicely with my “keep it simple” motto of farming.  It is so easy in farming to make the basic act of growing crops into a wildly complex house of cards that relies on too many artificial supports for it to work.  At best it adds additional work and cost to a crop, in the worst case it can mean total crop loss if the support fails.  Even organic/sustainable growers are lured into the trap by the promise of an extra early crop and maybe a little more money, or a special spray that will “enhance” the crop in some way.  Farming is complicated enough without adding too many additional hurdles.  I am happy with my unheated greenhouses and simple row covers, it’s as high as I want to jump.

Picture of the Week
Warm tomatoes

4/15/09 Vol. 6 #4

Today we are supposed to begin pulling the plastic over the Big Tops, the giant greenhouse structures that we grow tomatoes and some flowers under.  As I sit here looking out the window I can see a slight breeze in the tops of the trees which may mean no covering this morning.  30 by 100 foot sheets of plastic make great sails and any breeze gets exciting when you think you could be carried across the river unless you let go.  The Big Tops cannot take a snow load so we uncover them every fall, this also allows us to grow the important soil improving cover crops and recharge the soil with rainfall.  We wait until as late as we can to cover them so we can get all the natural water into the soil possible before we have to start irrigating.

This is all part of the inexorable march toward planting the main crop of tomatoes.  The cover crop of wheat and crimson clover was turned under a month ago to give it time to decompose and begin to release its nutrients for the tomatoes to use.  Last Friday we tilled the beds again, almost ready to cover with landscape fabric and build trellis but first we must pull the plastic roofs over as it is too hard to do with all the tomato trellises in the way.  Once covered we can proceed with these preparations so that sometime next week we can tuck the plants into the ground.  Timed to make sure we are after the last danger of frost, the transplants have been “in the system” for five weeks so that when they are planted they are at the best stage of growth so they can just take off without a pause.  The first sungolds six weeks later, if the wind will hold off.

With all of this rainy weather it is getting difficult to keep the guys busy but we keep having enough dry days to keep on schedule with planting.  This week more lettuce and spinach and flowers made it into the ground.  The pea trellises went up too.  The big spring clean up push began with brush burning, all of the limbs that fall in the winter plus various prunings of the perennial plantings.  Not only do we have to get ready to plant tomatoes but next week is the Farm Tour so we have to get buffed up for that too, lots to do.

Picture of the Week
We were successful in getting the tomato Big Tops covered!

4/29/09 Vol. 6 #6

We survived the Farm Tour but just barely, it was damn hot!  We had good and interesting tourees as always and despite the heat they seemed to enjoy them themselves and the farm.  We spent so much time late last week getting irrigation set up that we didn’t get tomatoes planted until Monday of this week but the big planting is now in the ground.  “Only” fifteen varieties this year, sometimes you just have to go back to your base and do what you do best, plus it gives us a few more plants of all the kinds we all love best.  Plenty of Cherokee Purples, Kellogg’s Breakfast, Aunt Ruby’s German Green and more, can’t wait.  With this dive straight into summer we are now running hard to get things planted and keep up with what has been in the ground and waiting for some heat to really start to grow, weeds included.

Just wanted to let you all know about a meeting you might be interested in next Monday the 4th.  For some years now we, at the Carrboro Farmers’ market, have been talking about forming our own “Friends” organization like many markets around the country, to help support the market and work on community issues around sustainable agriculture. The Friends of The Carrboro Farmer’s Market is being developed as a tax exempt organization to undertake charitable and educational activities related to agricultural issues.  We want to hear your ideas of what you would like to see from a Friends organization and explore opportunities for you to be involved in its formative stages and future projects. Come join us for fun evening and help build greater support for sustainable agriculture!  The meeting is going to be held at the Carrboro Town Hall (where market is held) at 7:30 p.m.  This meeting is open to all, so if you have some ideas you’d like to share, please come and bring a friend. If you’re interested in attending , please email info@carrborofarmersmarket.com

On another farm front, as you know we are very proud of the people who have worked for us and especially the ones who have gone on to start their own farms.  You may also know that we have helped several get started by letting them use part of our land to grow their first crops.  We are pleased to announce yet another farm start up with Cov’s debut at the Wednesday Farmers’ Market last week.  He is using a half an acre in our bottom field and is producing some beautiful stuff down there.  Look for him in the other shelter on Wednesdays.

Picture of the Week
Cov at his first market, farm name yet to be determined

7/1/09 Vol. 6 #15

We have made it to July and the heart of tomato season is upon us.  We pick tomatoes twice a week, slowly going up and down the rows hunched over coaxing the now knee height fruit from the vines that are currently nearing six feet tall.  Both the very early rows in the little sliding tunnels and the main planting in the Big Tops are all giving us fruit from the nineteen varieties we have this year.  But not all is well in tomato land, we have a silent thief which will ultimately steal many of the heirloom varieties we all love.  It has been four years since we had tomatoes in this Big Top location and we had forgotten that the same thief visited us then as well, but that year we thought it was an aberration, never having had this kind of problem before.

Fusarium Wilt is the culprit and there is nothing we can do about it, at least for this year.  It is a soil borne fungus that can live in the soil for years and attacks only tomatoes.  Most of the hybrid tomatoes are bred for resistance to it and if you have looked for tomatoes in a seed catalog and seen abbreviations next to a variety description like V, F, N the F is for fusarium resistance.  The heirlooms are generally not resistant to it but some are or partly are and that is what we are seeing in the field this year.  The yellowing and wilting doesn’t become apparent until hot weather arrives so if there is a silver lining, it is that the plants grew large and set some fruit before it showed up.  The bad news is we will have a very short season for some varieties.

The most affected are the high acid yellow Azoychka and the huge, fruity, red and yellow Striped Germans.  Next are the green when ripe Aunt Ruby’s German Green and the Green Zebras, they won’t give us much fruit at all.  Showing signs but still producing fine are the pink German Johnsons and the beautiful yellow Kellogg’s Breakfast.  Fortunately our favorite, the Cherokee Purple, appears to be resistant.  All of the red varieties are hybrids and mostly look great except for the Italian Oxhearts that we introduced here three years ago.  So enjoy them while we can, there will be tomatoes all season long but less variety as time goes on as the different kinds succumb to the thief.

Picture of the Week
Resistant healthy hybrids on either side of the yellowing German Johnsons

7/8/09 Vol. 6 #16

What glorious weather for July (except that lack of rain thing), can’t remember summer weather so delightful for such an extended period of time.  I am sure we will return to the normal steamy hot days before it’s over but we are really enjoying it for the time being.  We are into the “easy” days of summer where we have designed the program to have everything in the field done by noon and then hide out in the shade (or air conditioning) the rest of the day.

Some of this means fewer crops to manage and less planting going on but what ever is in the field now needs to be established and/or tough enough to handle the conditions.  Betsy is in the thick of Lisianthus harvest, it is a daily process of cutting truck loads of stems, taking them back to the packing shed (in the shade) and then processing them for later use.  The big job for the staff is the Monday and Thursday tomato harvest which takes all morning to complete.  The rest of the week is filled with a little harvesting of other crops, a little planting, a little trellising, a little mowing, a little weeding, a little irrigating.

Fusarium Wilt (chapter two).  I want to thank everyone who has expressed on their sorrow for our problem with this disease in the heirloom tomatoes.  It is a damn shame but it is just the kind of thing that happens in farming that you become used to and learn to adapt.  The good news is we have several things we can do about it for the future and it appears to only really be in this one area in the Big Tops field.  I have already taken the first steps this week by saving seed from plants that showed no signs of the wilt or at least a strong resistance.  The seed for the Cherokee Purples we are growing is some we saved two years ago, from plants grown in the same field.  They are showing no signs of the wilt and producing lots of great fruit.

The other two things we can do are to solarize the soil in that area by covering the bare, moist soil with clear plastic in the hottest part of the summer and basically cooking the fungus spores out of the top few inches of the soil.  That process will have to wait until year after next when we have a rest year planned for that spot.  The last thing we can do is to take advantage of the research we have done with NC State over the last few years and use grafted tomato plants.  I have mentioned this in the past and didn’t really think we needed to use this technique until now.  It is just like fruit trees where you graft what ever tomato variety you want onto a wilt resistant rootstock.  So next year we may actually have to graft some of our own plants.  There’s always something when farming.
Picture of the Week
Beautiful Lisianthus beds flanked by brilliant Celosia