Early frost, false frost, we're done gardening

Last week Tuesday around 9 p.m. I got a WeatherBug frost warning for Madison. Had I known earlier I could have gathered whatever blankets and sheets we didn't mind putting over the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, but we weren't prepared, it was late and the garden doesn't have lights in it. I went to sleep resigned with the end of the season yet hoping it was a false alarm.

 

At 6:30 the next morning I went to the garden. Most of my plants seemed fine. The beans definitely got touched by frost, but my tomatoes and peppers and eggplant were untouched. Our community pumpkin patch was, however, a different story. Leaves were slumped to the ground, revealing their unripened fruit. It was a disaster. Green pumpkins, unripe winter squash and lots of summer squash were all exposed, and attached to lifeless vines. I called Jay, depressed, upset and nearly in tears.

Our community pumpkin patch members had worked so hard, it was heart-wrenching to see all that work go to waste, cut short but a relatively early frost.  Our earliest frost potential IS Sept. 25, but we don't typically frost until early October, which would have given these plants a few more weeks to ripen the fruit on the vine.

Scene of destruction following the early frost.

That Friday I heard a freeze warning for Madison the following night. Jay and I were on our way out of town for a weekend at my parents' house - and I went into a bit of a panic. Again we weren't prepared with sheets or blankets, but it didn't matter, we weren't going be available to remove the blankets during the day for two days. I made the call to harvest everything - EVERYTHING.

We worked for a few hours pulling all our tomatoes - red, green and inbetween. We took all the tomatillos, ground cherries, and eggplant no matter the size. Finally, we picked all the peppers whether they had turned color or not.

We filled four boxes and several grocery bags with produce, put them in the trunk. A gardener friend of mine was picking produce and covering her plants. We walked over to Peg and took this silly self-portrait with my phone camera. The golden sun on our faces and pale blue gray sky was a fitting backdrop to this autumn ritual.

And the false frost? It turns out that it didn't freeze on Saturday night, but it did Sunday night, and to be honest, I'm not sure I had it in me to cover and uncover. 

Please write in the comments below your favorite ways to preserve green tomatoes - we've got a lot of them!

Jay, me and Peg in the garden before the next frost.

 

Spaghetti squash, pie pumpkins and three varieties of eggplant.

30# of green tomatoes and bell peppers.

A wide variety of roma tomatoes

A large box of jalapeno, cayenne and ancho peppers.

More green tomatoes.

A peck of peppers (before pickling)

Trellising tomatoes III - those crappy cages (Part 5)

No matter how you stake it, tomato cages do a lousy job of supporting plants.

Several years ago I invested in tomato cages that I thought could stand up to a tomato plant full of nearly ripe fruit. I went out of my way to go to Farm and Fleet because they had an inverted tomato cage. These cages are wider at the base and narrow as they get taller, and come in 3 sizes, up to 60 inches tall. This spring when I planted more tomatoes than I had cages, I returned to Farm and Fleet and bought several more of these sturdy, tall and least-likely-to-tip-over-cages.

Regardless of the smart design of the wide bases, my heavily–laden tomato plants are still tipping over. I've had to drive extra stakes in my bed to secure the cages. I think I'm done with these crappy cages.

Using everything I learned about trellis thing this summer, I'm going to put new trellising into practice next spring. But what to do with the cages?

This summer I also found the need to stake my pepper and eggplants, because the heavy fruit tends to break off the rather fragile branches. I'm thinking about supporting these plants with the abandoned tomato cages because overall, peppers and eggplants aren't nearly as heavy as tomato plants. It'll be less work for me staking and tying up the plants, and will probably do a much better job supporting the fruit and branches than stakes and twine. 

At least I won't have to worry about all the money I invested in these crappy tomato cages.

A note about the rest of this series. We are not well past watering tomatoes and pests/diseases. I'll pick this up again next summer when we're actually worried about these things. Happy tomato harvest!

1. Intro to varieties and classifications
2. Pruning
3. Trellising I - why bother?
4. Trellising II - string trellis
5. Trellising III - those crappy tomato cages
6. Pests and diseases
7. Watering

Solution for not enough tomatoes

I have 13 tomato plants in my community garden. They are producing beautiful fruit (seem to be past blossom-end rot now), but slowly. My paste tomatoes are small and tasty, but I don't have enough to actually do anything with them such as can salsa or a marinara sauce. And the really big paste and beefy tomato varieties are still green and getting bigger. But we really wanted to can this weekend because we're out of town next weekend - we had the time today but the tomatoes didn't cooperate.

Then it occurred to me. There must have been someone in my community garden who, this weekend, had a lot of tomatoes and had to go out of town and was wishing his or her tomatoes had come in a week later. What if I had offered a trade - "You give me 30 pounds of tomatoes this week. I'll have enough to can and you won't have any vegetables drop on the ground while you're away. And next week, I'll give you 30 pounds from my garden."

Is this a new idea, or have I just not come across the right bunch of vegetable swapping people, website or email list?

How do you glean enough produce to put it up with tomatoes ripening at different times?

Good and tasty, but not enough to do anything with - yet.

All about tomatoes in seven parts

"Bush type" determinate tomatoes.

In a little more than two hours, I got a great lesson in growing tomatoes. In a little more than 15 years of writing for a living, I got a great lesson in writing short articles. This starts a series of (mostly) brief illustrated articles about tomatoes that will cover the following:

1. Intro to varieties and classifications
2. Pruning
3. Trellising I - why bother?
4. Trellising II - string trellis
5. Trellising III - those crappy tomato cages
6. Pests and diseases
7. Watering

If you'd like to learn more about growing veggies in person, check out the classes offered by Madison FarmWorks and their  Urban Gardener series of classes. It's one thing to read a blog post, it's another to get into the field, see their best practices in action and most importantly, ask questions.

Part 1. Intro to varieties and classifications

Tomatoes are part of the Solanaceae family. This family is also known as "nightshades," which includes potatoes, peppers, tomatillos and eggplant. (Good news, I took another class called "Solanaceae - everything but tomatoes" which if I get through this series in a reasonable amount of time, I'll also write up).

Tomatoes are generally heat-loving plants, but really prefer warm days accompanied by cool nights. In fact, tomatoes will often drop their flowers if hit with prolonged hot days and nights, like, say, this July.

Originating in South America, the tomato was spread around the world following the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Read more about them on Wikipedia.

Tomato varieties

Here are the most recognizable tomato varieties:

• "Slicing" or "globe" tomatoes are the usual tomatoes of commerce, used for a wide variety of processing and fresh eating.
• Beefsteak tomatoes are large tomatoes often used for sandwiches and similar applications. Their kidney-bean shape, thinner skin, and shorter shelf life makes commercial use impractical but make for a great home gardening variety.
• Plum tomatoes, or paste tomatoes (including pear tomatoes), are bred with a higher solids content for use in tomato sauce and paste, and are usually oblong.
• Pear tomatoes are obviously pear-shaped, and are based upon the San Marzano types for a richer gourmet paste.
• Cherry tomatoes are small and round, often sweet tomatoes generally eaten whole in salads.
• Grape tomatoes, a more recent introduction, are smaller and oblong, a variation on plum tomatoes, and used in salads.

Indeterminate tomatoes need trellising to
keep them in line, such as this net trellis
in my community garden plot. More on trellising
in Part 3, 4 and 5!

Tomato classification

There are two classifications of tomato, determinate and indeterminate. 

Determinate tomatoes tend to put energy into first the plant, then the flowers and then ripening the fruit, which tends to come at (generally) the same time. These are great for canning because you get a lot of fruit at one time. Determinate tomatoes are also called "bush" tomatoes because they stop growing up at a certain height (determined by the variety).

Indeterminate tomatoes, on the other hand, are a wily bunch that, given the chance, will outcompete many varieties of zucchini. Before I knew how to reign in indeterminate tomatoes, I had a cherry tomato that had a wingspread of at least 25 feet. Indeterminate tomatoes need to be pruned, which I will hopefully get to before your plants take over your garden. These produce fruit all season long, which make them ideal for fresh eating or small-batch processing such as freezing or drying.

Hybrid and heirloom

Finally, it's good to understand that there are hybrid and heirloom seeds to choose from.

Plants from hybrid seeds will carry on desired traits from the two parents, but the resulting seeds can't be saved from year to year because you never know what you'll get.

Heirloom seeds will be true to their type, which means you are able to save the seeds from year to year and count on getting the same plant and fruit each year. The plants tend to be hardier, but the fruit tends to crack easily and sometimes aren't so "pretty.

Conclusion

When planting tomatoes, it's a good idea to select the classification according to your needs (determinate and/or indeterminate) and a variety of species to ensure at least a few of your plants survive disease, pests or a drought, because not all plants are susceptible to the same things.

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