Tomato maintenance

If we had to choose only one food to grow for ourselves, assuming the greater food production system unchanged, it would be tomatoes.  Tomatoes exhibit the biggest difference in quality between what we can grow in our backyard and what we can buy at the grocery store or farmers' market.  This year I selected four varieties to grow from seed: Longkeeper for shelf life after harvest, Tribe's Tobique for cold hardiness, Tigerella for fresh flavour, and San Marzano for sauce.    A couple of Big Beef and Tiny Tim plants resulted from a seed swap with a friend and a yellow-fruited specimen was donate by our neighbour.  Should be 36 plants out there, almost all of which require support and pruning, in addition to the ubiquitous watering, weeding and feeding.

Aside from the Tiny Tims, which are tiny plants (I expected just the fruits to be tiny), all the tomatoes are indeterminate, meaning there is no maximum height.  The vines will grow until they are uprooted or freeze to death.  While the vines are sturdy enough to support the weight of the fruit, they have terrible balance and need strings or stakes or cages to keep them from sprawling on the ground where they are more vulnerable to pests and diseases and also take up valuable real estate.  The ideal support system seems to be a horizontal beam several feet high (maybe five feet for us) holding strings under tension (weighted?) around which the tomato vines can be trained.  We haven't tried this.  Our tomatoes have always grown up inside cages or been tied to stakes.  Placing these supports is easy enough.  Remembering to make regular rounds to make sure the plants are complying with their stated boundaries is not so easy.  They have a tendency to escape the cage rings and grow away from the stakes.  The earlier these deviations are corrected, the better.

side shoot 

The general consensus appears to be that a single vine is best.  It's not what the plants want; they constantly initiate side shoots from the axils where leaves grow out of the stem.  This gets messy very quickly because side shoots generate their own side shoots and soon you need to use calculus to figure out how many vines are in the works on one plant.  It becomes difficult to support all the vines, the plant becomes too crowded for sunlight to reach all of the leaves, and energy is diverted away from fruit production on the main vine.  One source tells me there will be more tomatoes on an unpruned plant, but they will be smaller.  I try to pinch off the shoots when they are just a couple of little leaves.  This also requires fairly regular vigilance.  I forgot to do it for the earlier transplants and now they are all over the place and I can't bring myself to cut off vines with fruit just because the plant is too bushy.


At some point during the summer, the tomatoes should be told to cease and desist.  We do this by cutting the growing tips of the vines.  We have at least a month before we start worrying about frost, and probably a few more anxious weeks of growing season after that.  There is no point putting energy into fruits that will not develop sufficiently, during the remaining time, that they will ripen off the vine.  How long does it take to grow a tomato from blossom to this state?  I don't know.  Today I'm going to tag several stems of yellow blossoms and see what has become of them by the time we hastily  uproot the plants in the face of an impending heavy frost.

A hasty inventory taken a few days ago suggested we might have over 400 tomatoes in progress.  If they all make it, I think we'll be satisfied.