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The Awesome Red Fruits
By Niki Hayden
After
tilling, planting and harvesting, it’s been estimated that the cost of that
first exquisite bite of a home-grown tomato costs about $15. No other vegetable
is as widely grown, fussed over, bragged about or expensive.
Gardeners
queasy about insects bravely pluck off giant tomato hornworms. Penny-pinchers
spring for row covers and ‘Walls o Water’ protective gear. Growing
tomatoes defies logic and, sometimes, common sense.
Certainly,
it’s obvious for anyone to see that the foothills of Colorado are a most
inauspicious place to grow tomatoes. They like rich, humus soil, not our thin
clay or sand. They prefer even moisture. We offer deluge or drought. Slightly
acid soil is their choice; we give them alkaline. They demand warm days and
nights. Our nights hover at or below 50 degrees when we first set the tiny
darlings out.
Despite
these drawbacks, summer is not quite right without tomatoes. And hapless
gardeners who grow nothing else in their summer gardens are compelled to fiddle
and toy with the awesome red fruits.
“This
isn’t really good tomato growing country,” admits Clairelyn Dexter from
Dexter Farms in east Boulder County. “We do everything that home growers do,
try black plastic, drip lines. But it all depends on the year. We plant ‘Early
Girl’ although I’m not sure they’re that tasty. We also have good luck
with ‘Celebrity’ and an early form of ‘Big Beef.’ I like the French
tomatoes of ‘Marmande’ and ‘Dona’, but you need production as well as
good taste on a farm, and they’re not as productive as others.
“And
then we’ll plant a couple of ‘Roma’ and little cherry tomatoes. Sometimes
we get blossom end rot, it’s no different than what happens to the home
grower. But I do think it’s important to start with a plant that is not
stressed. Some people go for those tall plants that already have tomatoes set,
but all they’ll get is green leafy growth. Instead, choose short plants with
small leaves and sturdy stalks.”
PREPARE THE BED
There
are a few tricks to growing tomatoes anywhere: find the right varieties, tinker
with your given weather and soil conditions. We are blessed in Colorado with
fewer diseases than you’ll find in the South, where heat and blight wipe out a
promising crop. Instead, we have to warm the soil. When summer has
arrived in the day, it hasn’t arrived at night. Tomatoes prefer night
temperatures of 60 degrees.
Botanists tell us that tomatoes, eggplants, peppers and potatoes, as members
of the nightshade family, originated in Peru. While tomatoes basked in the
moist, warm, rich soil at the foot of the Andes, potatoes acclimated to the
thinner, drier, poorer soil higher up.
That’s
why some gardeners turn to raised beds, filled with the rich humus they know
that tomatoes adore and Colorado cannot provide. Compost, peat moss and leaf
mold are the ingredients for good tomato soil. Tomatoes need nitrogen—but not
so much that all will go into leaf rather than fruit growth. They adore
phosphorus, which you’ll find in bone meal as well as prepared chemical
fertilizers. Other needs such as potassium and calcium usually exist abundantly
in Colorado soil. If you have any doubts, test your soil.
Come mid-to-late May, serious gardeners stretch plastic across their prepared beds, slicing
holes for the plants. Then they tilt the plant nearly horizontal, with the top
set of leaves exposed and pat down the earth. Laying the plant sideways improves
chances for a sturdy root system and much of the buried stem will transform into
roots. Water deeply, surround the tender stem with a collar to protect against
cutworms, fill ‘Wall o Water’ tents around the plants. Get row covers out.
Whew! No other vegetable will demand, and receive, such attention.
Set
in drip irrigation and a thick mulch by mid-June. Stake the stems. All the
while, gardeners are counting the days until that first fruit turns bright red,
or green, or gold—whatever the cultivar delivers.
FIND THE RIGHT VARIETY
The
other half of growing tomatoes is to choose a variety that appeals. Tomatoes are
the kind of coddled plant that prompts experimentation. One year heirlooms are
popular. The next may be cherry and pear tomatoes.
Carol
O’Meara, horticultural assistant at the Colorado State University Cooperative
Extension is a vegetable enthusiast. Her choice is the heirloom Brandywine.
“In blind tasting tests, it always wins. People are nostalgic for that
old-fashioned tomato flavor,” she says.
But
even an expert gardener like Carol faces obstacles. Tomatoes won’t set
fruit with temperatures over 90 degrees. Since it takes at least 80 days for a
Brandywine harvest, she plans to grow her Brandywines in a tunnel of pipes
similar to an arbor, and drape a shade barrier cloth over the tomato plants when
temperatures rise. It’s an experiment, she explains, hoping to cool the plants
just enough for optimum conditions. “We’re a short season, so start
early,” she says.
Here’s
a list offered by fanatical Front Range tomato gardeners. For heirloom tomatoes,
‘Brandywine’, is the favorite. That’s followed by ‘Black Krim’,
‘Green Zebra’, ‘Big Rainbow,’ 'Red Siberian' and ‘Aunt Ruby’s German Green’
Hybrid
(that means the offspring are the seeds of two different plants, the seeds will
not reproduce true) favorite cultivars are: ‘Celebrity’, ‘Early Girl’,
‘Better Boy’, ‘Northern Exposure’, ‘Fourth of July’ and 'French Rose'.
Favorites
among small tomatoes are ‘Sweet 100’ and ‘Sungold’.
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