Leonard Moorehead, the Urban Gardener: Tomatoes Supreme

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Leonard Moorehead, GoLocalProv Gardening Expert

Urban gardeners are practical people. Consider the tomato. The search for high yields, astounding variety, outstanding flavors and easy cultivation is over. Once lowly and ubiquitous in mass market production the tomato enjoys a renaissance among gardeners. The secret to their appeal is found at hand. No home grown vegetable can surpass the tomato’s sublime taste. Sun warm tomatoes picked right out of the garden have no rivals. Their taste and many flavors create disciples of the most doubtful. Many gardeners encounter their first home grown success with the tomato and you can too.

Native American peoples brought the tomato into cultivation thousands of years ago. Europeans sought precious spices, gold and silver, in their 15th century quest for shipping routes to the far East.  Yes, the route to the fabulous riches of eastern Asia is west across the Atlantic. A New World beyond imagination hindered the direct sail to Asia’s pepper and cinnamon.  The indigenous peoples of the New World had much more to offer the world than gold or silver. Plants and medicines returned with explorers from the very beginning.  The West met the tomato. 

Tomatoes are a tropical vine of 2 general types, indeterminate and determinate. Always growing in their sub-tropical homelands of Mesoamerica, each general type yields fine fruit. Cultural requirements are a bit different and work to urban gardeners’ advantage. Like other vines, tomatoes do well staked or trellised. Offer tomatoes upright support or vice versa, a place to hang, and they flourish. Tomatoes require six or more hours of direct sunlight to thrive. Their vining habits hint at their small garden footprint: tomatoes are the ultimate container plant. 

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Thankfully, the tomato gene pool is huge and offers endless variety. Marketing and transportation needs have conditioned many people to expect a red, round, tomato. Our ancestors asked for more from their foods. Much taste and flavor was lost as the tomato experienced concentrated efforts to become conventional. As the tomato traveled from America to destinations around the world it became ever more responsive to local needs. Many regional and national types survive. Explore the tomato world. 

All tomatoes require is rich soil, sunshine, and regular watering. Most people select seedlings from local nurseries and transplant after the last frost date in May.  Prepare supports before planting seedlings, five foot stakes are classic. However, inexpensive 48” tall green clad wire fencing is easy to work, adaptable to shape into any space, and lasts for many seasons. Wire fencing offers many places to thread and weave flexible new growth or tie off with jute twine. Upright tomato cultivation is easier on gardener’s backs and saves space for companion plants like basil. A once in a lifetime and affordable tomato trellis is only $7 at local box stores: standard 4x8’ heavy duty wire mesh laid down on gravel beds as an anchor for poured cement has a standing role in my garden. At any box store it’s not found in the garden section, but in the cement and construction sections.  

Put on good gloves and lay out the wire sheet of small gauge steel conveniently formed into large six by six inch squares on a level space. As always, space is a concern, give yourself plenty of room to work such as a driveway or parking lot. Count out the squares on the longest side of the rectangular sheets of wire mesh and divide by four, mark each quarter section on each side for reference. “measure twice, cut once” prevails here.  Lay a sturdy board evenly across the wire mesh as a straightedge. I like a wider board to stand on and keep in place as I bend the mesh at right angles to the board, repeat 3x and presto! A four foot tall square trellis is formed. Unite the free ends with plenty of heavier gauge steel wire at each intersection of square openings. Neatness counts. 

Urban gardeners are often people more accustomed to keyboards and video screens than handiwork. Our fingers are highly trained in specific movements, for example, I learned to type on a blind keyboard and have no visual concept of keyboard  arrangement. My fingers long ago learned through touch to navigate the keyboard. Moreover, so many of us do not move our bodies. Much of our motion is in fixed positions, sitting in vehicles, at the table to eat and socialize, laid out on couches and beds to observe sports. Our bodies evolved to perform much more complicated and complex movements. Gardeners are people who sense if not acknowledge the manifest benefits of fresh air, sunshine, and unrestricted movement. We are healthier and happier people as we bend and stretch or use hand tools such as spades, trowels and pruning shears. 

Breath deep and wire the loose ends of the squared wire mesh together. Do a nice job, the work will show and be visible for many years to come. Fabricate a few of these square trellises. Locate your tomato section in the sun, tomatoes are intolerant of shade. Anchor the square mesh trellis in a six to eight inch trench or drive stakes at each corner and tie the trellis to form a sturdy support for rampant tomato vines. It’s easy to stack 2 square sections together for higher trellises, simply repeat wiring edge to edge. Indeterminate tomatoes will grow as high as you’ll allow. Cucumbers and beans are other plants for this kind of trellis, indulge the imagination. 

Have fun and seek out heirloom varieties of tomato. Most heirlooms do not conform to conventional shape or color. White, black, green, striped, and yellow tomatoes are only the beginning of their colorful palette. Shapes? Tomatoes reach far beyond round. Plum tomatoes do not taste like plums, they resemble them. Some, such as Brandywine, a favorite of mine, are routinely huge and irregular, no two are alike. Moreover, Brandywine and another favorite, OxHeart, named for its shape although I’ll have to take our ancestors’ word for it, ripens from the “end” to the stem. They are both so large the tomato may begin to rot at one end while the end closest to the vine is green.  Consider your taste buds.  Home gardens are customized, cultivate your favorites, experiment and find flavors unknown to mass marketed, industrialized agriculture. Cherry tomatoes are the sweetest, golden or white tomatoes are least acidic, plum tomatoes have thick flesh and least juice.  Grow the types you enjoy the most, Brandywine for slicing into BLT’s, cherry types for out of hand or salads, plum for canning, drying or sauce making and so forth. Turn the page away from the latest genetically engineered types useful of course in their place and enjoy the exploration of shapes, sizes, colors, and tastes of the vast tomato tribe. 

Plant transplants deeply, roots easily form from tomato vines and will wherever the vine touches soil. A deeply planted seedling will develop a drought resistant root system.  Mulch heavily. If you’ve made a square trellis as described or circular trellises, fill the interior with rough compost. Add humus or soil once in a while to add microbes and the compost will act as a fertile anchor and water reservoir to slowly settle over the growing season. Tomato seeds are easy to save and have high germination rates. Select the finest of the most favorite fruit. Seed separators made for caning tomatoes are durable and inexpensive, buy or borrow, dry the multitude of seeds and store in cool darkness for the winter. Label. Does a friend or neighbor have an attractive but unknown variety? Take a pencil thick cutting from the sprouts usually removed at the juncture of leaf and stem, moisten, roll in rooting hormone and plant in a six inch clay pot, keep moist until firmly established and transplant. As a clone, these cuttings are true to the parent plant and retain all of its virtues. 

Gardener’s traditionally set out transplants in my climate zone. However, tomato seeds invariably sprout in my compost or somehow manage to emerge through the permanent mulch. I enjoy these mystery plants from uncertain backgrounds. Many times these volunteers come into fruit at nearly the same time as greenhouse grown transplants.  The volunteer this year is a cherry tomato and offered the first ripe tomato of the season. Tomatoes will bloom before but only set to form fruit when night temperatures remain at 65 degrees or higher. They will continue to grow into cold weather and often a fine crop of tomatoes are on the vine for the first frost. The culinary properties of tomatoes are endless. Packed full of vitamins and other nutrients, tomatoes are universally cherished. Were one to have one choice for a “vegetable” plant, the tomato is head and shoulder above the crowd. 

Urban gardeners are savvy folks. Our magnificent supermarkets hide darker truths. Many urban districts are food deserts. Supermarkets are a suburban creation. Fortunately, the forces that encourage suburbs also create vacant lots or encourage volunteers and municipal governments to create community gardens. Participate in your community garden, if only to have a tomato patch of your own. I guarantee there will be a sunny day, a sunny day and a ripe tomato on the vine. Pick and eat your sun warm tomato, ignore the juice running down the chin, savor, enjoy, enjoy. Muy Gusto! 

Leonard Moorehead is a life-long gardener. He practices organic-bio/dynamic gardening techniques in a side lot surrounded by city neighborhoods in Providence RI. His adventures in composting, wood chips, manure, seaweed, hay and enormous amounts of leaves are minor distractions to the joy of cultivating the soil with flowers, herbs, vegetables, berries, and dwarf fruit trees.

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