Thanks to a wet, mild June we’re still a little ways out from tomato season, but even still, we are spending an inordinate amount of time with our tomato plants. They’re kind of the divas of the farm scene. Every week, four 125ft beds of field tomatoes get string added to their t-post trellis system (check out “Tomato Florida Weave” if you want to see our technique) and 5 beds of greenhouse tomatoes get their two main stems gently twisted up strings tied to the greenhouses’ purlins to maximize airflow. Lower leaves and suckers get snipped off all tomato plants as does anything remotely damaged or diseased. With around 750 tomato plants, that’s a lot of time spent.
Do we really need to do all that? Indeedio, we think we do. The PNW just doesn’t get enough heat units to guarantee quality tomato production, so we really have to coddle and beg them to realize their potential for us. Without picking the right varieties and pruning off excess growth, they are very likely to fall victim to early blight, late blight, verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, any number of other ailments, or just produce low yields or low quality fruit. Even with all this effort there’s no guarantee one of these fungal catastrophes won’t strike – it’s only happened twice in the 14 years we’ve served as Senior Tomato Cajolers. So far so good!