Ten Tips for Top Tomatoes Bob Randall, Ph.D. Winter 2003

Transcription

1 Ten Tips for Top Tomatoes Bob Randall, Ph.D. Winter 2003 Lots of people visit the Old Sixth Ward Community Garden where I and an ever-changing crew of dedicated volunteers garden. Predictably, like clockwork, when the tomatoes ripen in late spring and again in late fall each year, we get a chorus of questions. How do you grow them so well? Why are yours so much more productive than mine? Why don t you have stinkbugs? I can t believe you did this without spraying. What s your favorite variety? What I would like to answer to all these questions is that I have ten tips and you need to know them all. But it takes a lot of time to explain ten tips, so I say instead that its easy to be successful if you do about ten things and follow one rule. Here s a short version of the ten tips. Rule 1: Pests Need to Have Pests The easiest way to avoid pests is to design your garden to duplicate nature s pest control. Essentially, pests need to be controlled by creatures that bother them, and you need to set up your garden so that this happens often. Put another way, you cannot have a successful organic tomato garden by planting a few tomatoes out in the middle of a giant lawn. If you do, every pest will find the tomatoes and few pests of the pests will find what bothers the tomatoes because there is no place for them to live and reproduce. As well, if you use poisons, the pests of the pests will be dead before the pests. To learn proper design, see Chapter 4 of my book Year Round Vegetables, Fruits and Flowers for Metro- Houston ortake a class at Urban Harvest. We teach it in fall as part of the Hands-On series; in the winter as part of the Foundations of Permaculture course, and in the spring as part of the Organic Vegetable Specialist class. There is one bug that cannot be stopped in our area by natural controls. Nor will any pesticide do a good job on them. The leaf footed stinkbug causes blemishes on tomatoes so that parts don t ripen. These affect its flavor. One female produces perhaps 20 offspring per year, so if you do nothing you will soon have hundreds of them destroying your tomatoes and many other fruits. It is one of our worst pests. The best way to control them is to catch them with your hands and kill everyone you find. In many gardens where they have become a problem, this could be 500 or more. But systematic hunting quickly reduces them to a rare species.

2 It is important to correctly identify them. In our area, the young leaf-foots are red ant-like, ant-sized insects always found in clusters on some sort of fruit or vegetable. Young adults are red with darker colors, are often found alone, and are perhaps fingernail length. Adults are all brown and have upper rear legs that are wide and flat like a leaf. They will be seen on or near a vegetable or fruit. Keep in mind that young leaf-foots are the same color as the beneficial pest-eating hunter insect the assassin bug. These are also ant-like in appearance, but have sleeker bodies than the leaf-foot, are never seen in groups, and most particularly, do not have wide, flat upper rear legs. So, in sum, do not kill solitary ones without thickened hind legs, since assassin bugs are killing your pests for you. Do kill every leaf-foot you find as a top priority. Leaf-foots particularly like asparagus beans (long beans), so if you grow these on a trellis in the late summer, you will be able to catch them on the beans up where you can see them and catch them. Hunt them in beans, on tomatoes, or wherever and catch adults with your fingers. Then step on them or put them in soapy water. If you accidentally mush them and they stink up your hand, realize that the stink lasts no more than a few minutes. Vacuum up herds of tiny red offspring with a dust buster or shake them off the fruit onto the ground, or squash them with your fingers. There are many other pests that might bother your tomatoes. You won t find any of them to be a problem if you set up your garden ecosystem the right way with lots of water, and flowers that attract the parasites of tomato pests like year-round native flowers, and flowering cilantro, dill, fennel, mint, buckwheat and more. Rule 2: Give Birds Other Food & Water Birds eat an enormous number of insects and continually provide free chicken manure for the garden, but some of them - especially the mockingbird - will eat enormous numbers of some fruits, especially if they learn to. Birds usually attack tomatoes because they are thirsty and rarely because they are hungry. All birds are thirsty if they go without water or moisture from insects, fruit, or flowers. So give them fresh clean water in a shallow birdbath safe from predators and they will prefer it to occasional tomato juice! In my gardens, fruit eating birds go after many things (peaches, figs, grapes, grapefruit), tiny wild tomatoes, but they never bother more than a couple of tomatoes per year. Almost certainly this is because I provide them with lots of sweeter fare. There should also be small fruits the mockingbirds like such as small or tiny tomatoes, chile piquin, Barbados cherry, poke saled, figs, blackberries, grapes, possumhaw, lantana, and other small fruit and berries. Alternatively, just pick your tomatoes when they begin to turn pink and ripen them on a kitchen counter out of the sun until deep red. Only as a last resort, set up a trellis and drape a large bird net over a bed of tomatoes. Rule 3: Don t Grow Soil Diseases Septoria leaf spot, early blight (alternaria), fusarium wilt, blossom end rot, cracking, anthracnose, and many other common diseases of tomatoes are common in our area. Tomato fungus diseases thrive in hot humid conditions, so if their leaves stay wet for four hours or so, and the temperatures are right for the disease spores to become active, you will have leaf damage. If you grow tomatoes as six-month living annuals and plant them twice a year, this problem can be minor. Although there are

3 major differences between tomatoes in disease resistance, in my view efforts to control the disease through tomato selection are less effective than trying to keep the disease organisms off the plants. In spring, keep plants surrounded by Aqua DomesTM or other plastic to keep wind from depositing the fungal spores on the leaves. Remove the plastic when high temps hit 85. Instead of looking for disease resistant tomatoes, work at creating a disease-resistant soil. All the serious tomato diseases need to proliferate in the soil before they can get on the plants. If you mulch after planting with something that feeds calories to decomposing microbes, then disease microbes will get eaten by predatory microbes. Alfalfa hay, organic hay, a quality compost, or preferably a native mulch (shredded branches composted six months or more), will prevent the disease organisms from increasing. In general then, if you do not ever till the soil and put three inches of quality mulch down once a year, the soil s micro-organisms will devour virtually all the disease organisms, and your plants will flourish. Years of mulch will cultivate a soil food web high in predatory microbes such as nematode eating and fungus eating nematodes. For an excellent easy to follow explanation I recommend the Soil Biology Primer. Rule 4: Create Good Drainage It is often said that Houston doesn t have too much total rain, but often has too much at one time. Nearly every year brings a month with 6-12 inches in a few days. If water sits on top of the soil, oxygen leaves the soil, and disease promoting fungi and bacteria rapidly increase. Tomato roots that sit under water for even 15 minutes will suffer with reduced production or even death. In warm wet conditions, fungi such asphytophora will spread, infect roots and kill. So unless you have sandy soil, it is essential to grow in beds raised 8 inches. Rule 5: Get Large Transplants Tomatoes need to be transplanted into the garden because it is too cold in the garden to grow them from seed in early winter and it is too hot in the garden to easily grow them from seed in early summer. Small transplants, however, often get eaten by snails and other pests or just die in the February cold or August heat. So you need to do one of three things: grow them into large transplants (12 inches is nice) by the proper time for your area, or buy costlier ones at the few garden centers that have them at the right time, or buy them even earlier and grow them to a bigger size in a bigger pot. For a spring crop, grow plants from seed under lights inside starting about New Year s, or buy early tomatoes at a garden center that stocks them. To learn how to grow them, take our class in late fall every year from Arcadia Nursery s Diane Norman. Rule 6: Plant at the Right Time It is absolutely essential to plant tomatoes at the right time in your area. Tomatoes like the same temperatures as we do (60-80 F). Tomatoes grow poorly above 90 or below 60. More importantly, flowers fruit when the pollen is fertile, and that is only between night temperatures and day temperatures. At other times, they fall off without leaving fruit. A key strategy therefore is to plant seeds and transplants so the plants will heavily blossom at times in the spring and fall when temperatures are good.

4 In most of the region, those best flowering times are generally from the last week of March to the first week of May and from the last week of September to the first week in November. This differs somewhat across the region and in spring depends a lot on how much protection you have for cold weather and late freezes. In late winter, warmth makes tomatoes grow faster, so you get many more tomatoes from bigger plants if you use Aqua Domes. Transplanting dates for highly protected plants are as follows: Zone 9A is less than two miles from the Bay or Gulf, or inside loop 610 south of I-10 - Feb 1-15, and Aug Zone 9B is south of I-10 not in 9A - Feb 15, and July 21-Aug 5 Zone 9C is all other areas south of the Cleveland, Conroe, Navasota Line and east of Highway 6, most areas west of Highway 6 north of I-10 are also in 9C - March 1-7 and 1-15 Zone 9D is north of the Cleveland-Conroe-Navasota Line, as well as low lying areas of Austin and other counties west of highway 6 - about March 15. Some locations can plant until June. If the spring plants are not protected, you need to plant two weeks later than the above dates. Rule 7: Fertilize Correctly In older fertile soils, put about one handful of balanced organic fertilizer in the square foot where the plant will go and scratch it into the first two inches of the soil. Fertilize new soil with about one cup per square foot of balanced organic fertilizer. Balanced organic fertilizers do an excellent job of providing what is needed. Common good ones include Microlife, Soil Food, and Earth Essentials. Cottonseed meal is not as good, but is available at any feed store. To plant, dig a hole for the transplant and put 1-2 tsp. of soft colloidal phosphate in the hole. Don t mix it with the soil. Put the plant in so that only the leaves are above the ground line. When the first small tomato is found on the plant, throw another handful of fertilizer around the base of the plant and water it in. Rule 8: Give Tomatoes Proper Support Tomatoes must be kept off the ground so that the branches avoid mashing together, creating moisture and rot. If they are staked as was once done in our area, the multiple stems will become unmanageable, so the vine must be pruned. This reduces production, increases work, and increases the ways tomatoes get diseases. Instead, we use tomato cages. Use 5 ft. high reinforcing fencing (remesh) or galvanized tomato cages to keep plants off ground and plenty of air around leaves. Stake well and tie the cage to the stake. Cages can be made by cutting 5-ft.-high remesh into 7 ft. lengths. This will create a cylinder 2 ft in diameter. Buy remesh in rolls from a home supply company, lumberyard, or garden center. You can make reinforcing mesh cages at $2 each. Alternatively, you can buy some costly but outstanding cages. The galvanized collapsible ones are the best cages on the market at the highest price. For the last several years, a grant from Treesearch Farms has allowed Urban Harvest to distribute large numbers of these cages to community gardens. Rule 9: Protect from Bad Weather As we mentioned earlier, it is important to keep spring plants warm until night temperatures are over 55. Aqua Domes are best, but plastic wrapped around the cages with a gallon jug of water next to the plant for night warmth works well too. In fall, the new plants need to be protected from the sun until they have good roots. Expect to lose about 1 in 5 plants, so plant extras. Plant seeds in June in

5 large pots in light shade. Sun at this stage will heat the plastic pots and burn roots. Cherry types like Sweet Chelsea do best for fall. When you transplant late in the day, you need to create light shade over the plants for two weeks. The best way to do this is to put two 1 by 2 inch boards at least 18 inches above the plant through the tomato cage. Then put a flat, wide object (such as a piece of house siding) on top of the boards to create shade. Overturned 5 gal. Nursery pots with a wide board on them will work but there is not as much light. If a freeze is expected, harvest light green, pink, or red tomatoes. They will ripen indoors if away from sun and vermin. Leave the dark green in case there isn t a freeze. Rule 10: Eat Ripe Tomatoes Most tomatoes should be deep red when you eat them and never refrigerated. Oh yes there are thousands of varieties; they all grow here if you follow the ten tips, and they all taste good. Enjoy! Urban Harvest, Inc Canal Street, Suite 200, Houston, Texas 77003, , urbanharvest.org