Mostly Tomatoes

Our seedlings are doing great. I believe the number of tomato starts is somewhere between 100-125. A majority of these are determinate paste tomatoes for the community garden's market garden area. In a third tray we have a slew of greens and some flowers. 2014 is off to a solid start.

Best Paste Tomato Year Yet

We planted ten paste tomatoes in our community garden plot and we will probably harvest 100 pounds of fruit. The two bags in the photo are from the first harvest, which yielded 30+ pounds. The second gave us 42 more. We planted two determinate varieties, one called Margherita (I think that's right) and the other is just plain ol' Romas.

In terms of end product, the first 70+ pounds gave us 30 quarts of juice that was then cooked down to 15 quarts of thick sauce. Next year we may plant more, but first we will want to invest in a pressure cooker.

This trellis sucks

The reason is quite simple really: shade. In the top photo I am standing on the south side of the trellis. Both years we used this design, the tomato plants on this side did quite well, the ones on the other did somewhat crappy.

The north side tomatoes were destined to be smaller than the other side just because it wasn't getting that true southern exposure, but the unforeseen problem actually turned out to be moisture related. By 11:00 in the morning, the sun would be blazing everything quite effectively. However, one morning (probably around 9:00) when I walked past the north side of the trellis, I noticed that the morning dew had not yet been evaporated; about a week later the same dewy leaves were turning brownish yellow and they eventually shriveled up. At the end of the season the north side tomatoes looked like trees from a Dr. Seuss book, tall scraggly trunks with bushy floppy tops. No good.

We've tried a lot of trellising techniques over the years and it looks like we'll be trying another this year. I believe that if we had the space we would stick with the last trellis from our Downingtown garden.

It had everything: plenty of air flow, plenty of sun, and plenty of support. The only problem is that it took up more room than we can sacrifice in our tiny backyard. Maybe we can develop a city version. Hmm.

The Tomato Plan

Last year we went a little overboard with our tomatoes—yes this is possible. As I said in an earlier post, a mistake we made when transitioning from a country garden to a city garden (stop thinking of mice) is that we didn't realize to feed ourselves from a small space it would still require the variety we had in a larger garden.

We did have quite the spread these past two years, but we had the quantities all wrong. Looking back I can't believe how much growing space we dedicated to tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, and hot peppers. Really, it was silly. Sure we grew a bumper crop of these four veggies, but harvests from other plants like peas, greens, squash, and other staples took a while before we had enough to make a meal.

So for the tomatoes (and I'll try to address the other garden hogs later) our plan will be to plant five varieties and try to keep them in half the space consumed in previous years. We'll see if this can satisfy our cravings and our desire to put some food by. One thing I should mention is that this year we have a partial share from a CSA to balance our production needs.

The five varieties of tomatoes will be:
Amish Paste - for sauces
Grandpa's Germans - for sauces, salads, and sandwiches
Black Cherry - for salads, pastas, and snacking
Peach - for salads and pastas
Yellow Brandywine - For sandwiches and snacking

There have been some questions regarding our trellises. We'll be bagging the old and developing new this year. In the next post or two I'll explain why we're making the change.

Endangered Tomato

A while back we had a post about our Grandpa's German Tomatoes. My family has been saving seeds from these tomatoes for over 40 years (mostly from my grandfather). Last year's blight kept us from saving seeds, so the plants we have this year are from two years ago.

Sadly to say the seeds are all used up, on our end and my grandfather's, and that has us very anxious to harvest. What has us even more on edge is that I got a call from my grandfather and his plants again got the blight. He lives on the other side of the state, where we've heard of some folks getting hit; thankfully for us we have not.

We do have friends in the area who we gave plants to, so hopefully theirs are doing well. In the meantime, we wait. The two tomatoes in the photo are the closest ones we have to being ripe. With this heat we expect to pick them by the end of the week. We'll be sure to take some seeds to my grandfather when we see him mid-July.

The Summer so far (part 2)

Okay, okay—this isn't exactly a catch up post, so it shouldn't be a part of the series. But to hell with it, we'll live. Eh?

Today we pick the season's first tomato. No joke, no greenhouse, no chemicals, no shittin'. Yes we still live in PA and yes we started this dog from seed. Hot damn we're excited!

After last year's blight issues, it's good to see the tomatoes getting off to a good start.

Another Year, Another Trellis

Meg and I are always looking to improve our tomato trellises. Last year we did a string suspension system, which worked very well, and we will certainly try again, but at our new digs we are really aiming for space saving practices. The idea for this trellis came from some photos of the trellises over at Path to Freedom. At the moment I can't find any specific photos of their engineering, but if you hang around their site long enough, you're bound to see them.

We used some inexpensive plastic garden fence for the plants to climb. We'll have to make some of the holes bigger, but it should last us a long time.

Unfortunately the only part of the project that was made from reused material was a ten-foot piece of metal pipe we found in the basement. We'll get better with this as we learn what's available around us.

The trellis is about six and a half feet tall and each panel is four feet wide. We have a second set of panels to erect next to the ones in the photo, but we ran out of staples for the plastic fencing. We'll hit the hardware store tomorrow and call the project done.

The End of Tomatoes

This quite possibly will be the last tomato from our garden this year. The rest are looking kind of sickly from the damp chilly weather. If we have learned anything about tomatoes this year, it's that with our new squasher, we can handle a great deal more than what we planted. Next year we are looking at possibly tripling the number of saucing tomatoes. Space may be an issue, but I'm sure that we'll figure something out.

Tomato Sauce

The tomatoes we juiced on Saturday became canned sauce on Sunday. The recipe we used, again came from Putting Food By. It really couldn't be easier.

What we did is took the five quarts of juice (from fifteen pounds of mixed tomatoes),

put it in a pot,

and gave it a gentle boil...

for an hour.

The reason for the cooking time is to cook off the excess water from the fruit. When using paste tomatoes there isn't much loss in volume, but since we were using slicing and paste tomatoes the loss was much more. Actually, after a hour our five quarts cooked down to five and a half pints. However, cooking it down is important, so we just kind of hung out...

and had some beers.

One quick note: Since we are doing a boil-water method (as opposed to pressure cooking), we left the sauce straight as not to muck with the ph levels. Adding any kind of vegetable will lower the ph and run the risk of bacteria having a field day in your food. To be on the safe side we added a tablespoon of lemon juice to each pint, which guarantees it will be okay.

When the juice becomes sauce, the rest is pretty simple. Hot pack the sauce into scalded jars, wipe the rims, set the lids...

and put the jars back into the boiling water for half an hour. Oh yeah, we took Robin's advice about adding a little vinegar in the water to eliminate mineral dust. It works kick ass. Thanks Robin.

After half an hour we pulled the jars, let them cool...

and dated them.

Four quarts down, lots more to go.

We did not have any sausage-making music, but yesterday's tomato squishing went pretty well anyway.

Tomatoes ready for squashing.

Kelly chopped up the tomatoes and I cranked 'em through—we got done with 15 pounds in about 15 minutes. Our new tomato grinder-upper worked great. I ran the waste stuff through a couple of times to make sure it was all properly squeezed out, and by the time we were done the runoff glop was pretty much completely dry.


And in the end there was a whole lotta lovely tomato sauce in our mixing bowl rather than on the counter, which surprised me.


Three little drips. And that was my fault, I think, for cranking too exuberantly.

That's More Like It

The tomatoes have been trickling in for the past couple of weeks, but today all our plants conspired and decided it was time to get serious. We harvested 10 pounds of tomatoes and left many pink ones to ripen for a few more days. I predict that within a week we'll be cranking out tomato sauce like crazy. Pictured are Brandywines, Goldies, Yellow Pears, Amish Pastes, an unknown variety of fuzzy peach tomatoes, and an unknown variety of black tomatoes.

Yellow Pear Tomatoes, Kind Of

These little yellow pear tomatoes are really cute. They're about the size of a typical cherry or grape tomato, and they grow in clusters. Unfortunately our particular yellow pear tomatoes really suck. I think they have wilt or something because all season they've looked just pathetic—dry and droopy regardless of the watering schedule. We haven't had tomatoes in that particular area before, so who knows.

We should probably give up and yank them because the tomatoes themselves don't taste so hot, either. They are pretty dry, and the skin is tough. However, the chickens devour them anyway, so they've earned themselves at least a little more time out in the garden.

Another One Bites the Dust

This is the pupae of a tobacco hornworm. We found (and squashed) a handful of these in May.


This is a tobacco hornworm that apparently escaped being squashed in May. He didn't have the same luck tonight.

Blame it on the rain. Or the magnesium. Whichever.

Wow, you guys are good. After Kelly posted about our potential tomato and squash problems, you all responded with a million helpful and interesting suggestions—we even got the advice of a plant pathologist and a biologist (thanks, Taylor and Miriam!). Alan even put up a post about similar problems in his garden, along with photos that illustrate the curly leaf problem better than ours did.

After reading all your comments, and based on the weather so far this year and the general condition of the yard and garden, we're rooting for either a water issue or a magnesium deficiency. Whichever. Maybe both.

Lots of you suggested that the curly tomato leaves could be the result of irregular water, which makes sense because as I'm typing this the tomatoes are getting rained on for only the third time this year. Our rain barrels haven't been able to keep up with the drought, and so the garden has been running on minimal water. Vegmonkey probably said it best: "the tomatoes look like they need a damn good watering." Bloody right, VM.

The magnesium issue that many of you mentioned also seems about right—aside from eggshells and compost, we didn't add any amendments to the beds this year. The yellowing leaves seem to match with the photos we've found of magnesium-deficient plants, and even the basil (around the tomatoes) and the nasturtiums (around the squash) have some splotchy yellow leaves, which is definitely not typical for them in our garden.

Of course, we could still have an unfortunate disease—both of the consulted scientists mentioned mosaic virus, among others—but since there's nothing we can really do about that we decided to cross our fingers, buy some epsom salt, and give everything a damn good watering.

We didn't even know where to find epsom salt, so we wandered around the store for a while until we found this surprisingly large and cheap carton of the stuff:

We sprinkled about two tablespoons of it around the base of every tomato, squash, and pepper plant:

And we watered it in a bit:


We watered just enough to get all of the salt dissolved into the ground because a big storm was rolling in as we were outside. Tomorrow we'll give all the plants some fresh compost and prune some more, and hopefully within the next week or so we'll see some signs of recovery. We'll keep you posted.

Oh Hell

Disasters in our garden are never minor. Never. The first year it was groundhogs, drought, and incompetence. The second year it was squash bugs and black walnut poison. This year, well, we're not sure what it is but we don't like it. Below are some shots of a squash plant and tomato plant that are looking terribly suspect. We have a list of possibilities and what their causes are, but no solutions. Meg believes it may be some kind of mosaic virus on both plants, but can't say for sure.

If any of you know what the hell is going on and maybe know of a solution that doesn't require moving, we'd greatly appreciate it.



The squash leaves that look like this feel brittle and dry. The stems leading to the leaves look okay, and there is no insect damage on them.



The worst looking tomato leaves are towards the bottoms of the plants, and they feel tough and kind of leathery. No bugs on them, either.

Strung Out

Today we began phase two of our tomato trellis project. This involved training the tomatoes up pieces of string so that they grow nice and tall and also look cool. As an added bonus, these tomatoes will not make you puke your guts out, though that has less to do with our trellis than it does with the fact that we don't water our garden with sewerage.

Anyway, to get our trellis in working order we first cut pieces of string slightly longer than the height of the trellis and tied little loops at one end. Then, we threw them up and over the top bar of the trellis so we could make a good, tight slipknot.

Here's Kelly throwing the string into place. He was making a weird face in the photo so I cropped that out and left his disembodied hand.


Here's the resulting trusty slipknot.


When the strings were hung above each tomato plant, we tied the end of the string loosely around the stem of each plant and twisted it up a bit, so the tomatoes were supported by the string.


I was too busy playing with string to take many illustrative photos, but if you'd like some more detail about this method of supporting tomatoes I highly recommend this entertaining video from Hanna of This Garden Is Illegal.

In about two months,

picture this

but with tomatoes.

Companion Planting and a Flashy New Trellis

The tomatoes are in. The bed in the photo is 4' by 18'. There are eight tomato plants (a little less than half our stock) in the bed, which I know isn't very many, but they will be sharing the space with four varieties of poling beans, red onions, leeks, and a shit load of basil. Well, maybe not a shit load, but a fare amount none the less.

We're really happy with how well our new trellis turned out. The design is mostly from something Meg found on the internet and in the latest issue of Organic Gardening. However, the modifications are all Future House. It did take us a few hours to build, but it's nothing more than bamboo from our property and salvaged string (the whole thing didn't cost a cent). I'm certain that by the end of this year I'll be able to tie knots like a sailor (which is fitting, because I tend to curse like one).

Sleepover Party!

We've been hardening off our tomatoes and tonight they're spending the night outdoors, under the row cover with the Brussels sprouts and purple cabbage. They'll be in the ground by the end of the week, and then we can officially begin the long wait for a ripe tomato.

Calcium Boost

We have just about one more month until the tomatoes go in the ground (though with the 85° temp we hit today, maybe we should bump our target date up a little). Our seedlings were started a few weeks ago and there's no way they'd comfortably make it four more weeks in their little six-packs. So, today was re-potting day. I upgraded the largest of the seedlings to slightly bigger containers using the Future House Farm Surefire Method for Wicked Hardy Tomato Plants.*

First, I made myself an enormous omelet.

Kidding! I actually took a bunch of eggshells we'd been saving and smashed them in to wee little bits.

And mixed them into a bucket of potting soil.

The eggshells are because tomatoes need to have a lot of calcium available so that they can regulate their water intake, or something like that. Last year our tomatoes and our peppers seemed to like having some eggshells, so we figured we'd try that trick again this year.

The real key thing to re-potting tomatoes, though, is to bury them deep. All those little hairs on their stems can develop into roots, so we pull off the first leaves towards the bottom and stick them way down deep in their new pots.

That way, only the top couple of leaves will stick out and the buried stem will grow new roots.

Tomatoes are really affected by water fluctuations, so both the extra calcium and the really deep roots help a lot. Every time we replant the tomatoes, whether in new pots or out in the garden, we bury them at least halfway. They always look a bit pathetic afterwards, but being able to access so much extra water makes them grow like crazy soon after they settle into their new home.



*I just made that up. Our tomato plants were actually killed by a black walnut tree last year.