Endless Questions:
Farming is a lot of guesswork. Even though Nathaniel and I were both Biology majors in college and fancy ourselves logical people based in facts, we find ourselves following our guts in this farming field more than we’d prefer.
When we got back from our trip to North Dakota the majority of our heirloom tomatoes were squishy on the bottom and oddly translucent on the tops— aka terribly unmarketable. What in the world? We had to get to the bottom of this conundrum as our tomatoes are by far our most valuable crop each season. Was it heat, uneven watering, some combination of blossom end-rot and sunburn, a lack of a particular nutrient, a disease or something else? Wouldn’t we like to know!
A few weeks prior, we’d sent a leaf tissue sample of our tomato leaves into a university lab to see how the fertility levels were in our tunnels. Even with these reports in hand, we still couldn’t ascertain with certainty what caused our tomato terribleness. Based on articles and our experience we’re going with “heat stress” but still added some extra water, additional pruning, balanced fertilizer and put up the sides of the tunnels for airflow- just to cover our bases. Luckily, the plants responded well to something or another, but we’ll never know for sure what it was or what helped.
Every Fall, we submit soil tests for each of our fields (at least 6 tests for a price tag of $400) in hopes of applying an appropriate level of fertility for our mixed vegetable fields. Every Summer, we submit a handful of leaf tissue samples ($60 a pop) when things aren’t looking quite right. Even with this hard data, we have to lean on our experience, time intensive research, and ultimately our best guesswork to decide what the precious crops are going through and how best to respond.