Tomatoes

My grandfathers made it looks so easy. Vine ripe home grown tomatoes bursting with flavor and juiciness were so plentiful as a kid that I just took them for granted.

Truth be told I’ve grown tomatoes before without much hassle but since moving to coastal NC it’s been pretty hit and miss. This year I decided to do the necessary reading and research to determine what was so frequently going wrong. In the end I believe I’ve learned what I need too in order to have a reliable yield next year.

Perhaps my most important victory this year was to correctly identify the diseases that have been plaguing my tomatoes for several years. The first and worst of these is early blight. This is a nasty little soil fungus that tends to accumulate in gardens that routinely grow tomatoes. There is no such thing as blight resistant plant, which was my first mistake. When you see varieties listed as resistant this is generally referring to the various forms of wilt but more on that latter.

The prime natural controls for early blight are crop rotation and removal of diseased material from the garden. A good rotation of crops deprived the blight organism of a host and so it becomes attenuated in the soil. I’m not sure you can ever be rid of this disease but if it only exists as a part of a balanced soil flora it’s less likely to cause significant damage to crops.

Prompt removal of diseased plants is critical in preventing further spread of the organism to neighboring plants. Equally important is removing tomato vines from the garden at the end of the season so they don’t serve to help the fungus overwinter. While it is easy to understand that you wouldn’t throw diseased plants into the compost pile, I’ve made it a practice not to put ANY tomato produces into the pile. As compose is spread throughout the garden doing so would defeat the positive effects of rotating my crops.

Plant spacing and moisture control are also important in controlling blight. Blight loves cool damp conditions so evening watering is not a good idea. Instead it’s advisable to water in the morning or early afternoon so that the foliage has time to dry before nightfall and the onset of cooler temperatures. Wider spacing of plants also facilitates adequate air flow around the plant to help the drying process. Keeping the plants staked and off the ground is another important method of control. Remember that blight is a soil dwelling fungus and whenever foliage has the opportunity to contact soil the chance of infection is increased. To this end some recommend trimming plant’s lower branches to keep them off the ground and a good layer of mulch to prevent soil particles from splashing onto foliage when it rains.

This year I have very little issue with blight. Even though tomatoes had been grown in the same spot for the last two years, adequate, spacing, staking, pruning, mulching and timely irrigation seemed to control the disease quite well and no chemicals were needed.

The second disease I have in the garden affecting tomatoes is bacterial wilt. Wilts affect the plant’s roots and their ability to take up adequate moisture. Most of the time the vines will look healthy but during the heat of the day they wilt back because they can’t take in enough moisture. Generally the plants rebound as the day lengthens but such repeated stress on the plants makes them susceptible to other diseases and interferes with proper setting and formation of fruit.

Natural controls for wilt are rotation, spacing, soil preparation and selecting the proper variety. Rotation controls the wilt organism the same way as with blight while spacing and soil preparation allow for maximum root growth and moisture uptake. Variety selection is important in that some show resistance to the disease.

As this season approached I did some research and selected three varieties that were know for good resistance to bacterial wilt. The resistant varieties were selected for varying fruit characteristics and because they had indeterminate vines. Indeteminant plants grow and fruit throughout the season. With these three varieties I had hoped to produce a sustainable crop of varied fruits right up to the first frost. As it turns out, all three "varieties" were determinant plants which generally grow to a certain size, set fruit over a much shorter season and are done for the year. They are great when growing for the mass market or when you plan to preserve your crop but for fresh eating its feast then famine and our feast was largely over by the end of July!

The big lesson here however is not the difference between the two types of vines. The important aspect is but that you have to be careful who you buy your plants and or seed from! The three distinct varieties I planted all look and performed exactly the same. Vine characteristic being completely off alone is sufficient to support the conclusion that they were not the varieties I believed them to be. That the fruit the plants set was decidedly inferior is enough to tell that they were likely some form of uncontrolled hybrid. As always, I bought my plants this year from a respected garden center but it’s quite obvious that either the seed supplier had insufficient controls to propagate varietals or the garden center failed to track and label their inventory properly. To get around these unknown I’ve decided that next year we will be starting our tomatoes from seed purchased from the venerable Southern Seed Exchange. One can not take the initial input into a garden for granted if you want reliable and predicable results year after year.

The Essence

Just in time for planting warm season plants it looks like the weather will finally cooperate and allow me to work my plant beds. Actually, the weather cooperated last weekend but it was just too pretty to spend double digging the garden. Instead, I ended up
heading south with the family to visit the town of Bath NC and Goose Creek State Park in Washington County. The park was a real hit for the kids who swam in the shallow, tea colored waters of the Pamlico Sound, looked for fossils along the trails and chased lizards across fallen logs. Needless to say they had a blast exploring and having some dedicated time with Mom and Dad. Gardening is great but life requires balance and this proved a very restorative day trip. But I digress...

Since my last post, I've selected the location and size (30 X 45 feet)of the garden expansion but a few issues relating to its placement have ruined my motivation to have it ready for a summer planting. Number one is that the chosen site has been heavily "utilized" by my 100 lb "house dog". I could paint a nice verbal narrative on the problem but will spare you the details. Anyway, because of this I've decided to let the expansion area go fallow for the summer. I'm fencing the plot to exclude the dog and planting it with a warm season cover crop. This should allow for attenuation of dog nasties and in late summer, prior to prepping it for fall and winter crops, I'll cover the area with black plastic to cook off the rest.

The other issue with the selected area is that it is wind swept by frequent northeasterns. To mitigate this I'm planting two parallel rows of bushes along the north border to block the brunt of these damaging winds. For this I've successfully rooted three cuttings from an amazingly wind hardy blueberry bush in my neighbor's yard which will be mixed in with two other cultivars from a local grower to ensure adequate cross-pollination. The other row will be grapes. I lean towards putting in native vines as they are completely trouble free but I already have an arbor of scuppernongs in the front yard. Some have suggested wine grapes (V. vinifera). I'm not adverse to the idea but I need to find out how much chemical support they require. I'm hoping that a small isolated arbor can be supported organically so I'm continuing research on my alternatives. In any case, I doubt that either of these fruiting "hedges" will provide much in the way of a wind shield for a couple of years so I'm planning to use alternating rows of rye grass to block late spring and early summer winds for the next year or two.

Perhaps I'm just deluding myself but this "delay" is really not keeping me from reaching my objectives. I've mentioned before that our food choices have tremendous implications from their impacts on our health to our dependence of foreign oil but somewhere in the middle is their influence on our communities. As a citizen gardener I don't want to produce all my own vegetables just those that I reasonably can. For the balance, I plan to rely on other local producers, be they other back yard enthusiasts or commercial growers. In other words besides growing vegetables I need to grow support for the types of land use I want to see in my community. In my mind, developing such relationships, seems to be the essence of becoming a citizen gardener.

Time Vampires

Not much has happened on the gardening front since my last post. Planning, reading and thinking yes, but no ground has been broken, no seeds have been purchased. The usual time vampires suck at my most precious resource and to be honest by the end of most days I’m so spent that even if I do find a little extra time, the thought of putting spade to earth isn’t appealing in the least unless, of course, we’re speaking metaphorically!

I’m currently reading two books, Michael Pollen’s In Defense of Food and Gardening When it Counts, by Steve Solomon. Pollen’s book in particular tends to get me following mental tangents. One such mental tour had me mulling the relationship between how we spend our time and how we eat.

Like anything else that we wish to “do well” eating well requires discipline which demands time and effort. You just don’t decide you’re going to start eating well one day and begin shopping at the "Eat Well” grocer the next. Besides the time you spend procuring and preparing nutritious food, "how" you eat it also takes time. One wouldn’t think that finding the time to eat well would be too hard but when you’re so harried that fundamentals like a good night’s sleep or finding intimate time for your children or spouse are overlooked, the temptation to reach for a frozen pizza can become pretty overwhelming. The real problem is that once we start basing our food choices on convenience we don’t use the time we free up well. A quick and easy dinner doesn’t mean more time with the kids or a more reasonable bed time, it just enables us to keep whittling away at outside commitments.

I bring this up because I’m increasingly beginning to think that the ready availability of cheap and easy calories is one factor fundamentally undermining the fabric of American family life. As a kid growing up, I remember sitting around a table and eating dinner most nights of the week. I can tell you that when eight people sit down to a meal you tend to store a lot of memories. One of my most vivid is the perpetual look of dismay on my poor father’s face as six kids gobbled up piles of food! I’m not sure of the rest of my siblings, but this always made me keenly aware of both the effort it took to put the food there and how fortunate I was to have parents who provided it. Anyway my point is that setting and clearing a dinner table where we ate together took time and effort. Time and effort that led to a greater appreciation of the food I was eating, the parents who provided it and the family I shared it with. Time and effort that I can’t imagine would have been spent if our meals routinely consisted of frozen pizza.

First Things First and Say Goodbye to the Snake Room!

Raising a fair portion of my food and supporting local agriculture has been something I've wanted to do for some time. Even before eating local became the new organic I was attracted to these ideals. Perhaps this goes back to my Baltimore childhood where both my grandfathers offered examples of food self-sufficiency. Pop Pop was an Italian immigrant who converted every available space of his back yard into a highly productive garden. He was composting when composting wasn't cool and turned yard waste into fruits and vegetables for his table. I remember his pickled green tomatoes being the best thing I ever tasted. Sadly his recipe for these has been lost. My maternal Grandfather operated a snow ball and produce stand in the MD countryside, which supplied local residents with summer refreshments and fresh produce. Sweet corn and garden fresh tomatoes were always in excess and these, along with steamed local blue crabs from the Chesapeake Bay, brought family together helping forge some of my fondest childhood memories.

My first moves towards food independence are focusing on making the time for such an effort and learning to cook and prepare whole foods that are already available to me. Time is the hardest element to control. My wife and I both work, our children attend private school and participate in varied activities. These basics alone don't allow for a lot of down time so a little "side interest" of mine, keeping pet snakes had to go. Yep you read that right! I kept snakes as pets for the better part of 30 years! I loved caring for learning about their natural history and could talk abou them for hours but I honestly don't think I'm going to miss my involvement in the hobby. The best part of any endeavor is the people you meet and they will still be around.

The Late Snake Room
Learning to cook and prepare whole foods is not hard but I was concerned that my children wouldn't adapt to it. I love to cook and prepare food. My motivation however is other's appreciation of the effort. I knew if the family wouldn't eat such foods I'd not have the stamina to stay with the program. I needn't have worried. For the last couple of months I've been selecting whole foods from the corporate grocer. Their offerings are limited and not locally produced but they served to prove that my family would indeed eat braised greens and roasted root vegetables. Both of my children (ages 6 and 8) eat them just fine if not relish them. They may only eat small portions (subject for another post) but what they do eat is nutritious and I think more satisfying. Perhaps I just want to see this but diner time is already more fun and they seem to look forward to trying new things.

Over the last month I've started planning what type of diet we would like to eat that can also be largely supported via home gardening and local agriculture. By first envisioning where I want to end up I hope to more effectively plan this years garden.

The goal here however is not complete food independence; that would likely be just as damaging as the industrial process to which we are currently simple end users. I also want to be cognizant that decisions about what I eat effects not only how I enjoy and benefit from my food but also has far reaching consequences from impacts on our environment and agricultural heritage to our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.