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.

Baba Ganoush

Looks like we're making baba ganoush this weekend. What's your favorite way to prepare eggplant. PLEASE comment on the blog so all can see your wonderful ideas.


Here's a nice recipe. I char mine on the grill and whip up the skins and all in a food processor.

Also in today's harvest are some tomatoes and a few tomatillos.

What would you plant?

I pulled all of my onions out of the ground earlier this week. Not newly 1/3 of my garden is empty. I haven't started any plants, and greenhouses and nurseries are already thinking about poinsettias.

What would you plant here?

Trellising tomatoes (why bother?) Part 3

If you just discovered this blog, this is Part 3 in a series on growing tomatoes in the home garden. Check out Part 1 (intro) and Part 2 (pruning).

There are several reasons to trellis tomatoes. Determinate tomatoes, also known as "bush type" tomatoes, have a generally upright postion while growing and bearing young fruit, stop getting bigger but tend to flop over as fruit matures and gets bigger. 


Indeterminate tomatoes, on the other hand, never stop growing. Check out good old Wikipedia for more info on tomato classification.

One of the main reasons to trellis either type of tomato is to get the plant, leaves and fruit off the ground. In my five years of growing tomatoes on my own (that is, not with mom's guidance on the farm) I find this protects them from:

• soil splashing on leaves, which can infect the plant with early blight.
• keeps plants tidy, out of paths or from crowding other plants.
• keeps fruit up off the ground away from the soil (potential rot issues) and animals (though chipmunks climb into my plants to steal fruit anyway).

Trellising also helps increase airflow and sun exposure, both of which help decrease the likelihood that a fungus will attack the plant. 

Indeterminate tomatoes, such as these in my community garden
plot, need to be trellised to keep them in line.

Finally, good trellising will keep plants from touching one another so you don't get those back seat arguments that start with "Mommmmmm, he's touching me." Seriously, keeping plants from touching can reduce disease transmission from plant to plant.

Here's a great resources from our own UW-Extension on growing tomatoes in Wisconsin. 

If you're convinced that trellising is a good idea, stay tuned for the next two parts of this series:

• My version of a string trellis and how to build one
• Those crappy tomato cages

If you'd like to learn more about growing veggies in person, check out 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.

If you liked this, please subscribe to the blog so you don't miss any of the rest of this tomato series!

Pruning tomatoes (Part 2 in a series)

If you just discovered this blog, this is Part 2 in a series on growing tomatoes in the home garden. Check out Part 1 here.

Pruning tomatoes is key to healthy plants, which in turn increases production, decreases susceptibility to disease and makes  fruit easier to harvest.

Pruning is particularly important for indeterminate tomatoes. (learn more about indeterminate tomatoes).

Pruning for better production

Pruning helps direct energy from growing lots of leaves into fruit production, and helps with producing more, larger and earlier fruit. Sure, every plant needs leaves for photosynthesis, but not that many leaves. Tomatoes can get particularly leafy when presented with lots of nitrogen as well, so careful with the fertilizer.

Pruning for disease management

There are a number of soil- and air-borne diseases that you can minimize with proper pruning. Early blight is a soil-borne fungus that, when splashed up on leaves, will infect the plant. The good news is blight won't usually kill a plant, but will begin to defoliate the plant from the ground up and will compromise the plant's ability to produce lots of fruit.

As my plants mature and get taller, I start pruning them from the bottom up until I have no leaf branches up to about a foot up from the ground. I also trim back branches that sag down towards the ground, so that there is little to no chance of soil splashing up on the leaves. (A good thick layer of mulch will fortify pruning efforts by minimizing soil splash up as well.)

Pruning will also help with other air-borne diseases that require a moist, still environment to take hold on your tomato. Plants with dense foliage crammed into a tomato cage are just asking to harbor diseases such as fungus that like dark places.

When to prune, and tools

Tomato pruning can begin once a plant is established and has several sets of branches with leaves. As plants get larger, you need to be careful about how much you remove (it's also much more psychicly more difficult to do). And, a heavy pruning after fruit has set risks sun scalding the fruit (which would have toughened up with earlier pruning).

You don't need a fancy pruning tool for tomatoes. In fact, the best tool is already right in your hands. I snap branches and suckers off with my fingers. When I need to remove a particularly large branch, I use a simple scissors. 

What to prune

The big picture here is that you want two main stems to have leaves and fruit. The plant in the image above shows a plant that has been pruned to allow the main stem and one sucker to grow, leaf and bear fruit.

You can read more details about how to prune tomatoes on the Home-grown tomatoes for Wisconsin document. See page 3.

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.

If you liked this, please subscribe to the blog so you don't miss any of the rest of this tomato series!

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.

If you liked this, please subscribe to the blog so you don't miss any of the rest of this tomato series!

Solanaceae, disease and dehydrating

This has been a great week of learning about gardening and what to do with the produce.


On Tuesday, I spent a couple of hours with Megan and Claire from Madison FarmWorks talking about Solanaceae (everything but tomatoes), including peppers, potatoes, eggplant and tomatillos. Will write more about it just after I write about the great tomato class I took last week.


Thursday, Brian Hudelson, a UW-Extension plant disease expert, visited the American Family Community garden to see what he might find. The good news is there wasn't much disease in the garden, thanks to the dry weather we've had. I'll browse my notes to see what I can write here. Check out what Brian had to say about blossom-end-rot when he visited our gardens last year. 


I spent Thursday evening at a dehydration workshop put on by the Fair Share CSA Coalition. LOTS to write about from this one. 


Jay and I are signed up for two-class canning series. Jay is going to take the water-bath class for high-acid foods on Aug. 12 (4-7 p.m.) and I'm taking the pressure-canning class for low-acid foods on Aug. 26 (4-7:30 p.m.) You can learn more about these at http://www.csacoalition.org/our-work/food-use-preservation/.