Tomato season... not yet

They're coming: ripe tomatoes @ the farmers' market in a week (maybe 2 weeks)

2, 40' rows of tomatoes; celebrities left, romas right, covers off

I finally finished the first round of pruning the tomatoes and tying them up to the strands of bailing wire I strung horizontally over each row. It took more than several hours to support each and every heavy bearing branch with sisal twine, but it was finally done. What i'm to do is recreate a vertical trellis with bailing wire that will support 60+ plants in a more fiscally economical fashion than providing a cage to each individual plant (although, tomato cages are extremely cheap, so is soil, at the end of season clearance sales at our biggest of big-box stores in Gallup right now). The only caveat is that you have to track down each fruit bearing stem and tie a neat little sling around each one. Though time consuming, it's a great opportunity to commune with each plant, which in a normal size garden wouldn't be a problem, but with the market-size plots i'm dealing with takes most of a work day. I've also hung the Agribon19 row cover fabric over all the tomatoes to aid germination and speed the ripening of the fruit. The tomato harvest should be heavy this year, and I've already heard that I'll probably have to have a limit on how much each customer can buy at the market; when it rains, it pours.

Pruning Tomatoes

Celebrities: left-side trimmed, right-side dense and wanting

I think that since people have only 4 irreplaceable appendages we have a hard time with the concept of culling anything in the garden full of limbs, especially otherwise healthy branches of some tomato plant we've nurtured since it was wee little one. Who wants their left index finger cut off for the greater good of the others?

But, that's just what tomatoes need: Branches cut; nutrients concentrate in the remaining tissue; fruit swells, then ripens; harvest; we smile.

This season I planted my tomatoes much closer together than recommended, 18" vs. 30", and I'm gambling that heavy pruning of the lateral stems and extra suckers (fruit bearing branch growing diagonally between the vertical stem and horizontal branch), and purposeful staking will produce a consistent and heavy crop of the celebrity and husky red cherry tomatoes. In all I have a 105' of tomato rows planted this year. I took nearly 5 hours to prune and tie the tomato branches to the four strands of horizontal galvanized wire above each row. Most of my tomatoes are also under the protective cover of agribon-19 synthetic row covers. This keeps them warmer day and night, and helps lessen the negative effects of wind and rain on the self-pollinating yellow flowers.

Pruning really is one of the more nuanced skills in the garden. As a relative amateur, I really liked this recent LA Times article on pruning tomatoes; it's among many other great local food/farmers' market articles on the LA Times website. They also have the best Science/Environment bureau reporting of any newspaper in country, in my opinon.

Tomatoes: Red or Green?

Harvesting under the tent

Growing tomatoes is easy; harvesting red tomatoes in the high desert climate of Gallup, is not as straight forward. In my experience our cool early fall nighttime temperatures inhibit ripening of most varieties of tomatoes, and without some intervention, most gardeners are left with far more green tomatoes than red when the first hard frost inevitably comes at the end of September. 

Reliable cherries

The big exception has been cherry tomatoes that ripen beautifully without any heating aids; I planted 18 starts in a 30' row this year and harvested over 20 lbs. of sweet cherries. This year I used a medium-weight polyester gardening fabric over my 6 stunted Sweet 100's, that were loaded with green fruit. They quickly began producing ripened tomatoes and the fabric held the daytime temperature around 90 degrees and added 10 degrees to the nighttime low.

Doubled-up 1 mil plastic ($2.77 for 10'x20') and an incandescent lamp warmed my pair of roma tomatoes that refused to ripen.

Canning tomato sauce

After a month of enjoying fresh tomatoes the remainder of the fruit joined chile, onion, and garlic from the garden in becoming 8 concentrated pints of tomato paste/sauce.