We’ll get to this week’s main topic heirloom tomatoes after these brief announcements.
For drop-site members: please be aware of what you ordered and only take your items. If you send someone in your place please be sure they know what to take.
Also for drop-site members: Please let me know if you have any issues with the produce we are sending you. I’ve become aware of an issue with unacceptable tomatoes in one of the delivery boxes. I spoke with our crew and reminded them that one of their responsibilities is to be the final quality control for anything going into the box and if while packing they find items that are not satisfactory they need to set them aside and not include them in the box. Now sometimes there are issues — especially with the heirloom tomatoes — we can’t control and we may send you tomatoes with imperfections (more below about heirloom tomatoes). But if we have a choice we need to include the good stuff and reject the less desirable.
This Week’s Challenges
One big challenge we face this past week and it looks like it will continue into next week is the lack of rain. When we don’t get rain for over a week we start to get concerned for our plants. Unfortunately, when we have a dearth of rain all the plants need water and there is no way for us to irrigate every plot at the same time. In fact we can irrigate between 8 and 20 beds at a time depending on if we have installed drip irrigation or have to rely on overhead sprinklers. We don’t put drip tape on every crop. It is time consuming, expensive and time consuming. Three things we like to avoid. We install drip tape on our long term crops like tomatoes, winter squash and sweet potatoes. Most other crops are shorter term and so putting them on drip tape doesn’t make sense. Anyway, we are irrigating as much as possible and hope to keep things growing despite the lack of rain. If you would like to help, please leave your car windows open. Maybe if we all do it we’ll get some much needed rain.
One challenge that isn’t really a new challenge and is a challenge every week and every year is the growing of heirloom tomatoes. I should have included this discussion of heirloom tomatoes in an earlier newsletter, like sometime around when the first tomatoes came in, but I guess better late than never.
One of the most challenging crops to grow in Minnesota is tomatoes. Add to it the desire to grow them organically and you are decreasing your life expectancy by years worrying about their survival. Trying to grow heirloom tomatoes organically in Minnesota is a recipe for an early grave.
What are heirloom tomatoes? Heirloom tomatoes are tomatoes that were grown before humans figured out how to hybridize them. What is hybridizing? Hybridizing is where you cross pollinate two varieties of the same plant to create a new version of the same plant. The hope is it retains the beneficial characteristics of each of the parent plants and loses the bad characteristics. We humans have been hybridized forever — taking the best feature of our parents and eliminating the negative features like nagging us about never doing our chores (though come to think of it this characteristic has been most difficult to breed out of the human race) — but it wasn’t until last century that we started to do the same for our plants. Over the years tomato breeders have created tomato varieties that are resistant to some of the diseases prevalent in growing tomatoes as well as resistant to nagging their children to do their chores. The primary focus of this breeding the was on disease control not flavor. So over time the flavor of the commercially grown, “supermarket” tomato has become virtually nonexistent.
An heirloom tomato is a variety of tomato that has been grown and passed down for generations. The reasons for preserving the particular tomato frequently was its flavor, texture, yield, size or other characteristic that was considered desirable. Though I suppose some farmers saved seeds from varieties that had good disease resistance I would surmise this wasn’t as prevalent as these other items. And that is why there is so much variety in heirloom tomatoes.
As an aside, in addition to hybridizing to create the new flavorless tomatoes, large tomato farmers also needed better control of their success. Being at the whims of nature was a tough way to run a business (tell me about it). So last century chemical companies came out with new pesticides and fungicides to control the prevalent tomato diseases to help the farmer control the success of his or her tomato farm. Good for the farmer. Better for the chemical company. Not so good for us consumers, in my opinion. Here at Fresh Earth we eschew chemicals and their side effects to both we people and our home planet. Any disease problems we encounter we manage without chemical inputs. To paraphrase Prince: tonight we’re gonna farm like it’s 1899!
As I mentioned, heirloom tomatoes multiply the problems with growing tomatoes. Not only are they more disease prone but they are also more susceptible to environmental conditions or physiological anomalies like catfacing. Heirlooms tend to crack. Heirloom fruits tend to ripen unevenly leaving some parts of the fruit ripe when other parts are not. Heirlooms can be misshapen. But we grow heirloom tomatoes because of the flavors. Heirlooms have so many different flavors they make us realize why we eat tomatoes.
For example, Black Krim tomatoes are dark red on the bottom with green shoulders. The shoulders will never ripen to another color — they always stay green. But the flavor is so rich in tomato-y goodness.
Hungarian Heart tomatoes are (human) heart-shaped pink tomatoes that tend to ripen erratically. The tops of the tomato may not ripen before the bottoms are over-ripe. The largest tomato we ever grew was a 2.4 pound Hungarian heart monster a few years ago. This year we had a 2.2 pounder. Their flavor is wonderful and the seed cavities are small so they work really well where you want more flesh than pulp.
Yellow Brandywine tomatoes are yellow and generally flat. They are quite sweet and delicious however they are very susceptible to catfacing — malformed fruits with scarring on the blossom end. It may take a bit of extra work cutting around the scars — which typically are only on or just below the surface — but the resulting tomato flesh is worth it. We like to eat them with a bit of blue cheese.
All tomatoes — even the hybrids — are susceptible to yellow shoulder. Yellow shoulder is when the tomato has yellow shoulders that are less ripe than the rest of the fruit. This is thought to be caused by high heat and if there is one thing we’ve had this year it’s high heat. On top of that we grow most of our tomatoes in a high tunnel — a metal-framed hoop house covered in plastic. It helps the tomatoes grow better but it also raises the growing temperature for the tomatoes.
All heirlooms, and some hybrids, are susceptible to cracking. Cracking is typically caused by uneven fruit growth typically due to uneven watering. By growing heirlooms in the hoop house we have better control of the watering, however even with perfect watering the tomatoes may still crack. We may include in your shares tomatoes that have cracked and healed without any sign of mold or rot. Tomatoes with fresh cracks or those with rot or mold we put in the “Free Bin” for people to take and cut around the bad spots.
All tomatoes are susceptible to sunscald. Sunscald is a pale white spot that appears on the side of the tomato facing the sun. It is exactly what the name implies. It is like a sunburn on the tomato. We’ll typically pull these out and put them in the free bin though sometimes the scald doesn’t get caught during the quality control process. It may be small and unnoticeable at the time we pack the boxes or put them out for selection but then grows as the tomato sits around waiting to be chosen. Simply cut off the bad spot and enjoy the rest.
All tomatoes are also susceptible to blossom end rot. Blossom end rot is due to insufficient uptake of calcium. It doesn’t mean the soil is deficient in calcium but that the plant is unable to access the calcium for some reason — typically a pH or watering problem. We’ve seen a lot less blossom end rot as of late since we started watering the hoop house tomatoes with three drip lines per row and by injecting calcium phosphate — otherwise know as rock phosphate, a naturally occurring mineral and approved for organic farming — into the drip lines. We don’t give out tomatoes with blossom end rot since they tend to continue to rot. These typically go in the compost heap.
All the above problems are for the most part physiological problems. No pesticide, fungicide or herbicide could fix these issues. Weather plays a big part in how prevalent these problems are. We have some affect — e.g. managing the watering — but we can’t completely control them unless we stop growing heirloom tomatoes. Which we will not do.
There are plenty of web sites you can look to to see the myriad of diseases that afflict tomatoes and is beyond our discussion here. Over the years we’ve tried any number of organic strategies to minimize disease issues with our tomatoes. We’ve had some success but the tomatoes are still affected — especially in years with a lot of rain and/or high humidity. So at times you may get a tomato that has a spot or two or more. It probably didn’t have a spot when we picked it but developed the spot while awaiting its final destination. Spots on tomatoes are not harmful but it may make sense for you to cut the spot off for aesthetic purposes or if the tomato flesh underneath the spot is affected. Again we try not to include these in our delivery boxes but sometimes during the hectic packing of boxes some may escape our detection.
The bottom line is that we think heirloom tomatoes are worth the effort and worth the additional minimal hassle our members may have in trimming off the less ideal parts of the tomato. For those who pick-up on farm and have not tried the heirloom tomatoes because they don’t look right I would suggest giving them a try. We had a couple members from many years ago who hated tomatoes. When they walked past the tomato section without grabbing any I asked them why. This is when I learn of their hatred of tomatoes. I kindly suggested that they give these tomatoes a try. We loaded up a bag of somewhere around 4-5 lbs of tomatoes. The next week when they returned I asked them if they liked the heirloom tomatoes. Their response was, “Yes and we ate them all the night we brought them home!” So be brave and give the heirlooms a chance.
What will we have this week?
New this week are carrots! Some day I’ll have to have a long newsletter like this one to explain what it takes to grow carrots. Also in large quantities this week are tomatoes, potatoes, squash, cucumbers, eggplant, more eggplant, and onions. Then we will have smaller quantities of sweet corn, fennel, kohlrabi, cabbage, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, and maybe a few other things that escape me.
This is a FlowerShare, FruitShare and EggShare week.
Recipes of the Week
With all the eggplants this week I would suggest a few of the following recipes:
Here is one recipe and here is another recipe for Eggplant in Hoisin Sauce. Scroll down to the recipe section.
Here is a great recipe for Eggplant with Kalamata Olives. And to go with it how about a Greek salad?
If anyone has a go-to eggplant recipe they’d like to share please email it to me or share it on our Facebook Group Page.
That is more than enough for now. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, etc.