Tomato Harvest 2012

Heirloom Tomato Taste Test Results:
     Ranking for best-tasting tomato as judged by my mother, husband, and self:
          #1 "Costoluto Genevese"
          #2 "Cherokee Purple"
          #3 "Brandywine"
          Also Ran: "Delicious" and "Arkansas Traveler"

My Garden

The steady stream of produce from my roughly 130 tomato plants is peeking about now. I pick them as soon as they start to get a bit pink and ripen them inside, away from the birds. This explains why these photos of my tomato plants show only green tomatoes.


This year, I planted three heirloom varieties that we enjoyed last year: Brandywine, Mortgagelifter, and Delicious. In addition, I decided to try Costoluto Genovese which gets described in the seed catalogues as "heat-loving" and Cherokee Purple because word on the street is it's yummy. I also tossed in a few Arkansas Travelers since they are supposed to do well in our climate. The midsummer evaluation of the plants is in:


Arkansas Traveler
     The plants look pretty good but they are smaller than the other varieties by quite a bit. They want to send up suckers very much but pruning them doesn't seem to reroute that vigor to the main stem. This is frustrating. I'm looking for varieties that will do well with the one-stem pruning I do. The fruit are very small. I won't be planting this one again.

Tomato variety: Arkansas Traveler

Brandywine
     Because I loved the taste of these ugly things so much last year, I admittedly favored them from seedlings. If I had doted on the other varieties as much as I did on the Brandywine, all varieties would have almost certainly done better. I just didn't expect that any other varieties would stand up to these for taste. (And I was so very wrong.) Having said that, the Brandywine vines are mostly very vigorous and some are already six feet tall with stems so thick I can hardly get a thumb and forefinger together around them. The fruit are mostly really huge. The flowers have been mostly very convoluted in shape and the resulting fruit have had truly weird shapes. This is only a problem now and then when it makes it difficult to remove them from the vine without breaking and to cut into sandwich-worthy slices. For whatever reason, the vines in rows going east-west are doing the very best. 

Tomato variety: Brandywine

Cherokee Purple
     These were really difficult to get to germinate and grow to transplant size. Only a small fraction of the seedlings made it into the garden and the ones that did were very weak and spindly until June. I gave them some choice compost in late May and they have responded somewhat. Now a few of the vines are quite robust and producing good-sized fruit. Since these were a success with all family members in the taste test, I'll save seed from these vines for next year, give them choice spots in the garden, and see if I can get more out of them in next year's generation.

Tomato variety: Cherokee Purple

Costoluto Genovese
     I bought these seeds because the catalogue description was very persuasive. They are reportedly old-fashioned in taste and very tolerant of extreme heat. That's what I want for sure. The plants seem to be generally slow. The seedlings developed more slowly than other varieties though they had a much better survival rate than all the others except the Brandywine. But, even now, they are slow in maturing: I have harvested dozens from all other vines but only now have ripened my first Costoluto. Admittedly, I had so many seedlings develop that I just took them for granted. I used these as filler plants during the transplanting phase -- as replacements in places where my more prefered varieties weren't surviving.  I even used Costoluto as the primary variety in my okay-hornworms-you-can-have-these-plants auxillary garden. It's possible that they need the hot temperatures to mature more than the other varieties, so I'll keep my eye on them and see if they pick up the pace a bit in July and August. However, considering how much my mother and husband like these, I'll have to buy seed and try again if I don't get enough from this year's fruit.

Tomato variety: Consoluto Genevese

Delicious
     These plants did well until transplanting. Then, they started dying off. They were reliable germinators though, so I have more than a dozen that have survived and they are now mostly quite vigorous. Two plants (right next to each other) have had a lot of end rot. This is strange because no other vines have had any at all. The fruits are medium-sized and nice and round but they don't have the dense meat of the Brandywine. I may not plant these again next year. I'd rather put my efforts into the Costoluto, Cherokee Purple, and Brandywine.

Tomato variety: Delicious

Mortgagelifter
     What happened to these this year?! Hardly any survived transplanting -- and the germination wasn't great either. The only fruits I'm getting from the few Mortgagelifters I have are much smaller than the Brandywines. I may try buying a package of Mortgagelifter seeds next year just because I have such fond memories of the big tomatoes I got from them last year, but I'm so very disappointed in what I had thought of as the tough workhorse of the tomato garden. Or, maybe, I'll pass on these for next year. It may be more interesting to focus on the three varieties we like -- and maybe try a new one or two.

Building the Garden

     So, I spent March 16 in the back yard building the garden. Below is a photo of most of the yard. It's taken from the northwest corner, facing the southeast. This picture was taken earlier in the week--before the chicken coop was built. You'll see the coop in the other pictures. My thinking on the building of the coop will be explained in a later post. 

      Obviously, the compost heap is in the back. The circle around the birdbath was planted with strawberries that reproduced more than they produced in last summer's garden. I transplanted them here in the late fall. You can see that I have tilled a square ring around the birdbath circle. This is where I will plant about 200 tomato plants.

       
     The photo below was taken from the southwest corner of the garden facing the southeast. This is the site of the chicken coop before it was built.

     While talking with a local woman who expressed interest in my organic gardening, I was asked several questions about beginning the tomato seeds. We have a room in the southwest corner of the house that has a few large south-facing windows. Though the windows have big awnings that keep most direct sunlight out, they are big and bright enough to support seedlings during their first weeks after germination. Here's a shot of some seedlings at the window:

     Once they get their first true leaves, I pot them and put them outside to harden off every day that's not rainy or below 50 degrees. This year, I invested in some plastic pots I found on Amazon.com. I think I paid $30 for 180 of them and they are substantial enough that they should be reusable for several years. I also bought the pale green trays pictured below. I only bought four of them because they were a bit more expensive and I wanted to see if they were worth it. For next spring, I will definitely be investing in some more of these trays but I'll buy them in the winter when the prices are lower.

     This western side of the house is a good place to harden off the seedlings. It's the one spot on our property where the birds leave them alone.

      Once I've set up the scaffolding for the tomatoes, I can leave the hardened-off potted plants behind bird netting for several days at a time. Once a good number of the plants can be left out like this, I feel like the mother of many children whose oldest are finally spending the day at school--a few more hours in my day.

     So, the scaffolding. This is a way of staking my indeterminate tomato plants that I came up with after the season was well underway last year. Necessity was the mother of it--the plants were so tall and heavy, nothing I was trying was working well. What I ultimately came up with (and see myself using for the foreseeable future) is a trellis system in which each module is made of five pieces of 10-foot rebar. Four of the pieces are bent into an upside-down L shape with the top bend at 7 1/2 feet up. Two of the 2 1/2-foot parts of two pieces are zip-tied together. Then, the other two 2 1/2-foot sections of two other rebar pieces are zip-tied together and the fifth piece of unbent rebar is zip-tied on top holding the five pieces together in the shape of a children's swing-set. The rebar pieces are so thin and muted in color that they are difficult to see, but here they are:

      I have two twenty-foot lengths of this trellis on each of the sides of the square ring I had tilled out. I will plant the tomatoes one foot apart and prune them up tightly, wrapping each one around a piece of twine tied to the base of the tomato plant at the bottom and to the top rebar piece at the top. This structure is strong enough to support all these plants when they get to be ten feet tall and are covered in heavy fruit. They have the added advantage of being able to be taken down and easily stored during the winter. Next year I will configure them into a new arrangement. The photo below is the view from the street on the west side of the property. When it is warm enough to plant beans, this view will be on its way to disappearing thanks to a line of rebar trellises that will be covered with purple hyacinth vines. That will give the garden some privacy and protect it from the vicious late-day sun in August.

     Below is a view of the chicken coop at the far south end of the garden, framed by the freshly-built tomato trellises:

Above is a photo taken from the eastern side of the garden. The road and neighbor's grey house will be blocked from view when rebar scaffolding I will build at that end of the garden is covered in the hyacinth vines.

     And here is the chicken coop under construction:

      Here is the view from above. You can see that the square ring of tomato trellises are bisected on three sides by a narrow walkway of straw. (The side of the square closest to the camera has not had the trellises put up yet because I'm needing to get some more rebar.) The tomatoes will be under-planted with basil, lima beans, lettuce, and spinach. down the center of each side of the square I will plant zinnias, cosmos, and Queen Ann's lace. The spare space in the four corners will be planted with peppers, beans, and eggplant.

The Garden: Making It Up As I Go Along

     I have become completely obsessed with my garden. Mind you, it's not much of a garden as yet. I only planted it for the first time last year. It takes time to turn a yard into a garden. Last year, I just jumped in and did the best I could. I was making it up as I went along. I still am.

     That's not to say that I didn't do research before starting last year. I did. It's just that research on when and how to start a garden is not a linear process. For every "fact" I learned, there was a contradicting "fact," all of them asserted by people with very strong opinions about what "works" and what doesn't. Now, I could go on and on about the various reasons I did not go to a large, central authority for answers. I could have gone to the local farmer's co-op, the county extension office, etc. Rather than waxing self-reflective about why I did not make a bee-line for these obvious authorities, let me just chalk it up to the reveling in my dyslexia I have enjoyed since I quit my job in academe. So, my "research" was a disorderly but voracious reading of everything ordinary gardeners were putting online about their own gardens. I felt there was a greater truth to what they were telling me because they weren't doing reductionist experimentation like scientists, they were doing it the way people have done it since the idea of planting first occurred to us. It was fascinating to see on YouTube and read on blogs all these people's experiences. I felt I was learning faster and better than I ever could from a textbook presentation. It's hip to dis the internet but I feel better educated by playing around online than I ever have sitting in a classroom. (Again, we can chalk that up to the dyslexia thing but it seems to me there's something so natural about learning this way.)

     My success with a fairly large ornamental garden while living in Florida (1999-2003) only served to teach me how to garden in the most forgiving setting in the world. From what I was reading online in planning my northeast Oklahoma garden, growing vegetables is fraught with dangers. Just getting started with when and how to plant the seeds was a subject of some debate in the blogosphere. I ultimately concluded that if planting a seed can have various theories, then absolutely everything about growing the plant will too. So, it would be best, I reasoned, to just jump in and try something out, see how it goes, and learn along the way. I picked up ideas and attitudes from many different people online and made decisions about what appealed to me. My dislike for rows of desks in a classroom lead me naturally to seek out gardeners who refused to enforce such unnatural rigidity on their plants. Yet, I found myself drawn to theories about staking and pruning tomatoes (my primary crop) that were tightly controlled. Again, this affords me an opportunity to wax self-reflective about the effect years of Catholic schooling might have had.

     One of my favorite ways to find interesting garden blogs, forums, etc. is to type something like "vegetable garden with flowers" or " beautiful vegetable garden" into Google Images and check out the sites posting interesting pics. For example, this

inspired me to map out a potager garden. I will have these kinds of beds in 2012 but without the raised aspect (i.e., the boards allowing soil level to be higher than the path) and I won't put in any gravel pathway until I decide how well I like it. If it goes well, I'll install the boards and gravel in 2013. Some of the images I found led me to discussions of the practical issues of potager gardens and the history of potatger gardens. I guess I'm plenty visual because this is how I've gotten inspiration for garden plans. For the how-to of planting and growing vegetables, I've been pleased with YouTube's community of gardeners. My favorites are the ones that show me both the failures and successes of different methods they've tried. It feels like I'm getting the benefit of many people's experiences with out having had to go through the trial and error myself.

     In any event, I learned enough to make a fairly good go of it last season. The tomatoes were a huge success in a year when most of this region's growers were having a terrible time getting fruit to set.

I learned that I had to pick my tomatoes when they started to turn pink or the birds would get into them.

The eggplant and bell peppers were less productive. The peas were interesting to grow but the pay-off was not very satisfying and the potatoes were a bust considering how much labor they involved. As for the lettuce, broccoli, and spinach I sowed directly into the garden, well, let's just say that I underestimated the local bird population. I knew that the soil would need to be developed before the veggies really produced well, so, on the whole, I was very encouraged by last year's attempts.

This is my best bell pepper plant on its best day. They were nice but small and thin-walled.

     What I had forgotten in the years I'd been away from gardening was the hypnotic effect a garden has on me. I can pass hours there, fussing with the plants or just sitting and watching them and the insects that visit them. Spending a lot of time there, I got to know the birds, mice, snakes, and moles. In the case of the moles, not a face-to-face communication, but I watched the soil moving around as they visited the garden. I can lose myself completely in the garden and I always return to the house in a blissful state of mind, feeling that the whole world is beautiful and fruitful. And ever since dismantling the garden at the end of October, I have pined for a return.

     So, I'm spending the winter planning my little Eden. Last year, I was only able to break the sod on half the backyard. It would have been overwhelming to try to do the entire 1000-foot area all at once.

This is a view from the southwest corner of the garden with the house on the left and garage in the center.

     If the photo above had been taken in the summer, it would have shown rows of staked tomatoes, bush beans, basil, and a failed attempt to grow a mirliton vine. Now it shows some green that may appear to be grass but is actually sprouts from the straw that is decomposing there with the brown paper under it and the soil and grass from last October. I'm taking the sprouting straw (whatever plant it is) as a sign that all beneath it are decomposing richly. The theory is I will till this under in the spring. However, I'm toying with the idea of not digging it again and just putting another layer of paper and straw into which I will dig the places I will set the new plants into the soil. Among things I haven't decided is where I stand on the tilling vs. no digging theories.

Here, on the far eastern edge of the garden, you can see the layered paper and straw. This shady area under the tree behind the garage was just grass last year, but I covered to too in hopes of extending a nice shade garden here.

A view from the northeastern corner of the garden

     As you can see from the photo above, The southern boundary of the yard is flanked by a jumble of privets that have just been allowed to grow for ages along the chain-link fence that separates our property form the alleyway that runs behind it. The wildlife use this privet as cover and food, so I'm not disturbing it. The only shade it casts on the garden is in the late evening -- in July and August, that shade is very welcome. Below is a closer view of the soil around the only tree in the central area of the yard. Last year, the garden stopped about five feet before reaching this tree. It's not really a shade issue because of its size and shape. The roots aren't much of a problem at this point and I'm hopeful they won't start doing any wacky growing in response to the tilling.

I will mulch over the grass around the drip line of this tall, thin fruit tree.

     The property is a corner lot and the west side is open to a street.

This view from the deck shows the relationship of the street to the garden.

I don't have the funds to build a fence and the needed gates to close this off, so I'm planning a 6-foot trellis on which I will grow purple hyacinth bean vine this year and rotate the tomatoes on it next year. I've also put a rose of sharon and purple butterfly bush in the northwest corner for increased privacy. The only reason privacy is an issue is that I'm self-conscious about the extent to which I'm making this garden up as I go along. In my experience, people see a diminutive female doing yardwork and immediately want to offer advice on how to do it "right." I once had a neighbor roll up in his car on his way home from work to tell me, "Be careful." in all earnestness upon seeing me cutting a hedge. Maybe I could just put up a sign: "I realize I don't know what I'm doing. Please look away. See my blog for explanation." Or the hyacinth vine. Either way.