Complimentary Blueberry Juice

There are few crops in my farming career that I’ve learned more from, and made as many mistakes with, as tomatoes. To put it simply, I never respected this crop, how beautiful it could be, and I didn’t understand the “tomato people.” I thought that a tomato is a tomato.

Furthermore, I thought that staking tomatoes was too time-consuming compared to the short window which tomatoes are in season in Zone 4. To that end I simply grew bush field tomatoes.

All the while I also thought that the flavour differences between tomatoes was not enough to warrant my attention. It’s a tomato-flavoured tomato, I would say.

Several years ago we were growing some 2000 tomato plants. We threw them all in the field and waited. Bush tomatoes were good some years and not others, some cracked or were eaten but when you grow 2000 plants, who cares what gets wasted? Heirlooms never ripened and experiments with varieties were always concluded with nothing beats the bush tomato.

One year we did the math and found out we were making less than $2.00 per tomato plant.

That’s what got me to consider that everything I knew about the tomato was most likely very wrong.

And now here I sit in complete wonder at the tomato plant and am really wondering what took me so long

This season I decided to go all-in and change everything.

The first thing undoubtedly is respecting the crop.

I finally decided I would take care of them: I made sure they were perfect out of the greenhouse, I made sure they were planted into good soil with good foundational nutrition and calcium, and they were all trellised.

To do that I was also going to take advantage of our new hoop house, with drip irrigation, to prevent fruit from cracking.

And to test how many tomato plants I would actually need…I also would try growing the same field bush tomatoes inside the hoophouse.

That’s them sprawling all over the ground (next year…stake them!).

By next week we will have pulled over 1000 lbs of tomatoes from these few bush tomatoes in the greenhouse…making for more than $20 per plant, more than a 10x increase.

I have another set of bush tomatoes in the permanent beds which I am also expecting to yield at least several hundred pounds, and yet another set in the field (as per tradition). This means that we will have achieved more, with a higher quality and higher yield, with 400-500 plants instead of 2000.

My cherry tomatoes have a similar story.

Like bush tomatoes, we were planting some 400 cherries. This year I have been able to out-yield, out-flavour and out-everything with only about 150 plants.

It took time to make sure they were growing up the trellis properly (and still have improvements to make there too) and trim them, but the cherries exploded! I have never seen sets like this in the field. It’s incredible! It has also cut harvest time down from 1-2 hours of climbing and searching through plants, to 20-30 minutes.

Moreover, I no longer throw half of what I picked away as graded-out defects. Almost all the cherries are perfect, and the varieties I’ve been able to try are also really wonderful and tasty.

Next season I am certain that I can produce enough cherries with only a double-row in the hoop house, and get cherry tomatoes from June strait through September in Zone 4. That’s a big change from just waiting for August to roll around and hope for the best.

But surely there’s more to this than beefsteaks and cherries?

Yes, for the first time ever I have set aside an entire bed exclusively for heirlooms and seeing what I can do with the thousands of varieties out there. Surely there’s ones that will blow us all away!

Not only did I save a bed for this, but I also trellised all of them. I’ve had enough heirloom failures in the field, and even if I was still short on a few growing points, I would at least be able to taste them.

This has worked mostly well, with some tomatoes performing better than others, but my favourites so far are these little blush tigers, which have a fruity flavour when fully ripe. The bonus is that they set fruit like a cherry tomato…so at most I might need 20 plants? (Certainly not 2000!)

These specialty tomatoes all have their own nuanced flavour profile and I look forward to trying more of these in the future, improving the variety selection and seeing what works for us.

Above all, consistent watering in biologically active soil, combined with baseline calcium nutrition and a foliar stimulant for continuous flower production, has put these tomatoes over the moon.

There’s another whole bunch of things I will change for next season regarding tomatoes, to improve them even further. The higher the level at which one grows plants, the more and more nuances in how they grow, and how to best assist them in growing, becomes more clear.

And more fun.

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice