August on the farm: tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes!
Of course, tomato-growing starts much earlier than August, with sowing in late February, grafting in March, transplanting in April, clipping up and pruning in May and June, and our first ripe tomatoes in early July.
This year in July, along with ripe tomatoes, we had a late Father's Day surprise. The surprise had been percolating for some years, and involved those very tomatoes.
When we sow our seeds, we label each variety with wooden tags and an indelible marker, but between the mighty sun, the water in the irrigation system, and the soil itself, the marker becomes entirely delible (look that word up!). Thus, just about the time when my tomato-loving fellow is ready to compare varieties for taste, texture, productivity, size, and resistance to troubles, he can't read the tags anymore.
But this year, thanks to a whole other interesting farm project, I had a brilliant idea. The idea came from the mushroom yard, a lovely little patch in the woods where my fellow grows shiitake and oyster mushrooms inoculated on logs. This year we are getting a good flush of shiitake mushrooms, and it's easy to tell the history of each mushroom log, because, yes! there are clever little metal mushroom tags. The tags are bits of cardboard, wrapped in thin metal. Writing on the tag with a ballpoint pen leaves an indentation in the metal, and voila! a truly indelible label, impervious to sun and rain.
One Saturday morning in July, while my fellow was busy selling tomatoes and mushrooms (and other produce too) at the Farmers' Market in Keene, I took the mushroom technology to the tomato greenhouse. I also brought along the daughter who makes the Father's Day possible, and we spent the morning ignoring all other urgent farm projects. Instead we labeled tomatoes, tying the new tags at eye-level, cross-referencing with the still-legible tags in the soil and with the scribbled chart I make when we transplant.
Like pretty much every farm project, this one took a lot longer than expected, and it was a lot hotter in the greenhouse than we would have liked. But we accomplished it, and gee, was it fun to show my fellow the surprise! He marveled in a most satisfactory manner.
Once the tags were in place, my fellow could easily tell which variety was which. In fact, it was so easy that he soon reported that Great White, a pale yellow tomato, was turning red. Huh. We did some more chart and wooden tag cross-referencing. Seems one plant had died, which made for a glitch in the system. But it was easy to fix, and now Great White is its proper pale yellow.
Another day my fellow discovered a heart-shaped tomato labeled as a regular old round tomato. That was easy to fix too. Then there was the time when it appeared that Chef's Choice Bicolor and Vintage Wine were the same tomato, despite being planted in two different greenhouses, and bearing two different labels. (Gosh, we were getting awfully hot and hungry on labeling day, but I didn't think our efforts were that far off. Our tomato tags were turning into playing tag with tomatoes!)
That puzzle we didn't solve until we had one tomato ripe from each plant on the same harvest day. Both varieties are beautifully striped in green and red, but one is green and reddish-orange striped, and the other is green and reddish-pink striped. Whew. The labeling system held up.
By far the most satisfying moment was when my fellow discovered that one of the new standard varieties we were trialing seemed to be looking particularly fine in the leaf department. Normally, by August, we see quite a bit of leaf-yellowing in our greenhouse tomatoes, but the Caiman variety is still nice and green. Well! Perhaps we'll grow more of this variety next year, thanks to our wonderful new labeling system, and our reusable, indelible, mushroom-tomato Father's Day tags.
Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Aug 25- Aug 31, 2021