With this week’s newsletter I will be addressing the comments on the survey regarding tomatoes. Tomatoes seemed to have the most comments so I felt they deserved a newsletter of their own. But first a few announcements:
We still have winter squash available. Time to load up for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and Valentines Day (roses are so last century!) Only $1/pound. Pick-up a dozen to make a nice bouquet! Whatever is left will be donated to the food shelf so pick-up some up today. Contact me to schedule a time.
We received our first Winter/Spring FruitShare. Apples, pears, Asian pears, pomegranates and avocados. Delish! If you’d like to participate I can give you a prorated price for the rest of the Winter/Spring. Might be a good gift for that hard-to-buy-for foodie on your list!
We are ahead of last year’s recruiting for next season, which is great, but it would be even nicer to be sold out and not have to spend money on events, brochures, etc. So tell your friends, neighbors, family, etc. And as an added bonus I have extended the Early Bird Special until the apocalypse. Join before the world ends on December 21, 2012 and get next year’s produce at this year’s price. I should also mention that next season is our Spinal Tap season!
Eggs! We have Eggs! If you would like some please let me know. We can deliver them to our St. Paul FruitShare drop site if that makes it more convenient (near the corner of Dale and I-94).
Now onto the survey comments!
Let’s start off with the nice ones shall we?
the tomatoes & peppers were great this year
Tomatoes were really great. I love the pinkish heart shaped ones (know you gave us all the names but I can’t recall).
The zebra tomatoes were amazing.
Loved the tomatoes and green beans
Tomatoes and corn were outstanding
Amazing tomatoes, peppers, onions.
The pinkish, heart-shaped tomatoes are called Hungarian Heart.
I am glad to hear that many of the members loved the tomatoes this year. After last season, where we didn’t have nearly the success we had hoped for, this season produced more tomatoes than we could harvest. It was a banner year from a productivity standpoint. I attribute it to the lack of rain. What? That’s right. Rain kills tomato productivity. A few of the past seasons where the weather had been wet and sticky the tomato plants died from disease before the frost killed them. With the lack of rain this year the plants did not get diseased as early and were therefore more productive over a longer period of time. Plus with the early high heat they got started a couple weeks earlier than usual. In past years we would get tomatoes around the first week of August (cherry tomatoes come a couple weeks earlier). This year the first harvest was July 13th.
Now lets look at a few less nice comments but in many ways far more important. First lets look at non-mechanical injury issues:
Some tomatoes and peppers turned bad too quickly
tomatoes where hit or miss
Tomatoes were touch and go- some good others bad
I thought that some of the tomatoes and bell pepper were over ripe
I was surprised to open bell peppers and tomatoes and find black mold inside. This hasn’t happened in past years.
Growing tomatoes is tricky business. Growing heirloom tomatoes multiplies the trickiness tenfold. There is a reason commercial growers grow hybrid, red tomatoes and pick them when they are green and flavorless. Their goal is to provide a tomato that looks good, can be transported and has a long shelf life. Heirlooms fail on all three of these criteria, though some of them look really cool if you ask me.
Tomatoes are very susceptible to diseases. Many of the diseases effect the fruit. Sometimes the disease isn’t detectable until the fruit ripens. Sometimes it is obvious. Some tomato have better disease resistance than others. Some tomato varieties crack easily. Some tomato varieties ripen non-uniformly.
Tomatoes are the problem child of the vegetable world. They are darn difficult just for the sake of being difficult. So what do we do? We put them inside. We restrict them to their room — or in the case of tomatoes, inside a clear plastic bubble of a room called a hoophouse. This makes them behave a little bit better but they are still not the perfect-smile, happy children we’d like them to be. They still get ornery and rebel by growing funky extra parts; splitting and cracking for no reason; and getting soft spots. Now they are much better behaved than their wild, cage-free cousins out in the field. But unfortunately housing all the tomatoes we grow inside a hoop house would be far too costly. So we grow what we can inside and the rest go out into the wild.
Let me explain a bit of our philosophy when it comes to tomatoes (and in some ways our philosophy of what we distribute). We try our best, with the resources we have, to provide the best quality produce we can that has the attributes our customers desire most. Much like a Chinese restaurant, there is cheap, fast and good, but can only choose two. In our case it is flavor, yield and good-looks. We choose flavor as our prime criteria for selection (and yield as our second). So we grow stuff our customers say tastes good.
Another philosophy we have with regard to tomatoes is that we like them to ripen somewhat on the vine. We want the tomatoes to produce the flavor we expect. Vine ripened tomatoes provide the most flavor, but at a cost. You could taste this for yourself this year. Most of the tomatoes given out prior to the frost were at some level vine-ripened. Most of the tomatoes given out in late September and all of October were picked green and ripened off the vine. The difference in flavor was stark. In fact just yesterday we had some tomatoes that we were still ripening that had flavor but it was closer to the flavor found in the grocery store. So we let the tomatoes get some color on them before we pick them. This has the down side of increasing the likelihood that something can go wrong with them. It exposes the tomatoes to more pathogens which can lead to problems in storage. But we feel the risk is worth it for the wonderful flavor.
Still not the full story though. The next part of philosophy is that we give you our members most everything we grow. Sometimes things don’t work as well as we planned but the vegetable still has enough goodness in it to make it work, or at least part of it work. We could certainly toss out all the tomatoes with bad spots, cracks, etc. the chickens probably couldn’t keep up, but we feel if we give you some of the less than perfect tomatoes you can cut around the bad spots, you can make a sauce instead of slicing it on a sandwich, you can find a use for it other than our creating chicken feed. Granted we’d prefer to have perfect tomatoes but it doesn’t always work out that way. And so we send them off, as imperfect as they are, to you to use the way you’d like. If we were a larger farm with a processing business we could give out only the perfect tomatoes (which would result in your receiving fewer tomatoes) and save the less than perfect ones for canned tomatoes, sauces, etc. But we aren’t so we don’t.
Now our philosophy for packing boxes also plays into the whole tomato situation. When we select tomatoes for the delivery boxes we choose tomatoes from those available that we feel we would be fine receiving. We try to give you a mix of heirlooms and hybrids. We try provide tomatoes that are at different stages of ripeness so that you don’t have to eat them all at once. We try to pack them in such a way that they don’t get squished, bruised or damaged. We probably spend more time selecting and packing tomatoes than we spend selecting and packing the rest of the box. And yet still we get comments like:
Sometimes the tomatoes we received were squished
Several of the tomatoes were bruised but otherwise very satisfied
Better packaging for the tomatoes
We certainly try to ensure the tomatoes arrive undamaged but it seems like it is not always the case. We know that the tomatoes were undamaged going into the box so we need to figure out how to keep them that way getting to our members. Hopefully people realized they could turn the squished, damaged tomatoes into something that requires squished tomatoes. And I wholeheartedly agree with the last comment, I just wish the person provided an answer. If we can figure out a way to pack them without taking up the whole box we will do it. Suggestions?
One last thing that makes tomatoes difficult may be unique to our farm. With on-farm pick-up we put out the produce for our members to choose. I think this is a great attribute of the farm I’m not willing to give up. The downside is the tomatoes sit out in the tent for a while — and with the heat we had this year they were none to happy about it. But equally difficult is that over the course of the three hour pick-up window a tomato could be handled (read tossed around) a couple dozen times as people look for the particular tomatoes they want. This of course damages the tomato. In many cases it bruises the tomato without showing any outward signs until later. Each day I probably throw out 10% or more of all the tomatoes we put out in the tent. It is a sacrifice that we are willing to make to create a better experience for our customers. But it could be causing a lesser experience for later arriving members by bruising the tomatoes. I think a sign asking people to be gentle with the produce will be a wise investment for next season.
One last word on on-farm pick-up. If you don’t find something to your liking — e.g. the tomatoes don’t look the best, or there is something on the list that doesn’t appear on the table — please ask if there is any in storage. I try to keep the tables stocked but after 10 hours in the field getting everything ready I sometimes miss when something runs out or the tomatoes get too bruised and need refreshing. I may have to tell you that we are out of something but I would prefer to do that then have you disappointed when we could have easily met your needs.
I think that covers the majority of comments people made on our survey. I do appreciate all the comments and we will do what we can to fix what doesn’t work. If anyone has suggestions on better tomato packaging please let me know.
As a final comment on tomatoes: This year, for a FamilyShare, we gave out 62 pounds of tomatoes (not counting cherry tomatoes) over over 13 weeks — almost five pounds per week. That is a lot of lycopene!
Newsletter frequency will become random over the next few month. Giving updates on the farm when there isn’t much happening seems dull to me: “The ground is still frozen this week. We’ll update you with the frozen ground status again next week.” So expect to see a newsletter about once per month unless there is something happening worth commenting about. Feel free to contact me with questions, comments, suggestions, jokes, brain-teasers, etc. It gets dull around here in the winter. And don’t forget to sign-up for 2013! It’s going to be an eleven!
Happy Thanksgiving!