2012 Tomato Tour

Tomato Seedlings

 The seedlings under lights.

Amish pasted tomato seedlings in small soil blocks. they are ready to go into 2" soil blocks where they will grow for 4 weeks and than be transplanted

A close up of the newly germinated maters (I believe they are 2 days old)

Tomato cotyledon leaves ready to lose the seed covering

Tomatoes under 24 hours old

Summer Summary

Fall is here which means the summer of 2009 is officially history. It was a really good summer growing and marketing season for us. the weather was cool and for the most part dry. but when we did get rain it was generally a lot and at just the right time. Still we are down over 4" on rain for the year but perhaps this fall will be wetter than normal and we will make it up.

We grew the best melons ever (and Eugene is an excellent melon grower). Maybe 2% of them were not absolutely excellent. we had several customers (and these are people who's opinions about such things I respect) tell us that our water melons were the best they have ever eaten.

The alliums out did themselves again this year, meaning they are better this year than last and last year they were incredible. Sublime garlic, gigantic leeks (and so far, all we have harvested are the small fall leeks, the winter leeks which should be 2x to 3x larger won't be ready for another month or so), beautiful onions and wonderful scallions.

The tomatoes, despite the plants succumbing to some sort of local blight (not late blight but rather something we contend with every year) fairly early, still produced a lot of huge fruits. Or at least most of them did. We did have some failures such as Black Krim which gave us few very cat faced fruits. I believe we got about 4 usable maters from 15 plants. I do not believe we will grow these again. The Paul Robeson did not do well for us but when the plants did produce typical fruit it produced some gorgeous tomatoes. I saved seed early on and this will get a second chance. The Green Zebra was something else-I believe a small red saladette type mater, something we have far too many of already. Baker Creek messed up on that and as this was about the 7th time they have messed up with us, we will not be ordering from them in 2010. I do like their philosophy but they will have to do far better with selling us correct seed, good seed and getting orders to us in a timely fashion. There are several other seed houses that do heirlooms that give us better service such as Seed Savers Exchange.

Ah enough ranting, back to maters. The great White tomato, while a bad seller, was a great producer of beautiful ivory white fruits with a good acid bite. they came on early and produced longer than just about anything else except early girls which, while early and prolific were a bit of a disappointment this year. The early girls were not as big as last year and found the flavor lacking. fortunately we had GL-18 (AKA Glick's Pride) as our mainstay red mater and they far exceeded our expectations. they were far bigger than they have been before. The shape was about perfect and they rarely cracked and had zero cat facing. It would have been nice if they could have held on a week or two longer but they got us through most of September and we had big red maters when no one else did at the farmers market, cha-ching!. The other reds we grew-the canners did really well for us but I don't think as well as last year (or was it two years ago?). We grew Amish paste and Opalka again. The Amish paste out produced the Opalka about 4:1. We grew enough of these to make and can ourselves plenty of tomato sauce, ratatouille and salsa plus we sold about 300 pounds to others so they could put up tomatoes.

The cherry tomatoes were only so so (which is actually a good thing since when they do really well that means someone has to spend several hours daily picking them and than we have to figure out what to do with the excess). We have decided never to grow green grape again since it does not sell. This means it will produce hundreds of volunteers all over the farm in the future. It is hard to get people to try the green maters. Though it seems when I can get someone to try a green grape they get hooked quickly. they are a very nice mater but for most it is hard to get past the color. The yellow pear barely produced and a lot of them were green again this year. I think it is time to get new seed. the Sun sugar did well for about 3 weeks than quit producing much and the plants now look like hell. This is good as everyone at the farmers market(s) grew this kind this year so the market was flooded and sales were way down. I think next year we will cut back a lot on the cherry tomatoes. We do not need all that many for the farm share-maybe 20 to 30 plants and it seems they have become passe at market. that will free up beds for something else next year.

Unlike last year, we have a lot of ripe peppers. Last year the peppers were very late and we got a killing frost before they got ripe. It did not help that on Sept 14th 2008 we had hurricane force winds for about 6 hours that knocked down all the pepper plants. This year things are completely different. We have a lot of huge bell peppers and they are getting ripe well before it gets cold. I have also learned to take them off the plants when they show color and they ripen up just fine indoors away from pests and diseases that tend to ruin about 50% of the ripe peppers (which is why red, yellow and orange (ripe) peppers cost twice as much as green peppers).

the raspberries out did themselves again this season. The Lathams, our early summer raspberry, was spectacular again. Heavy production and excellent quality. My only complaint was we did a piss poor job of pruning in the early spring which made parts of the raspberry patch almost impossible to harvest. Next year I am cutting back a lot more than Eugene will deem necessary (he has a problem with thinning out plants and wants to leave a lot more than should be left). The Heritage raspberries, which we mow down in early spring, had quite good production and the flavor has been sublime, far better than the Lathams (which, as I said were excellent). Eugene has this crazy notion that we should let the heritage grow and produce in spring. I have this crazy idea that he can do all the harvesting as well as tilling, seeding, transplanting and other spring chores if this happens. You see we do not need a second kind of spring raspberry when the Lathams are pumping out over 30 gallons of fruit. As it is we do not sell all the Lathams produce (we come close but in order to get rid of them we have to sell in bulk and drop the price 33%). We do sell pretty much 100% of the Late summer berries and if we allow the Heritage to have 2 crops we will lessen the fall yield by about 60% and not have enough for the FSI, store and farmers market in August and September. In other words, Eugene's idea of more spring/summer berries is a bad one on many levels.

The strawberries have not been the best. I don't think we have them in the best place and they need to be replaced this fall with new day neutral berries. the yields have been down and disease problems up. We did get a very nice crop of April may berries because we put a hoop house over them. Granted, the hoop house got nailed twice in the winter-once by heavy wet snow and than a month later by high winds. But neither incident seemed to have any effect on the berry production. it is ironic that the first year the berries have been less than great we do a farm tour and in November a workshop on sustainable berry production. I will say the farm tour attendees did not seem to care what kind of shape the berries were in. Next season we should have a new crop of berries in a new and better spot and hopefully we will be swimming strawberries all spring summer and fall next year.

The greens have been around all season. In spring we had lots of lettuce, spring mix, arugula, kale and various Asian greens. Summer we lost the lettuce-we did try to grow some several times because it was cool most of the summer but every time we started lettuce we would get 5 to 8 days of heat and humidity, always a week or two after germination and that would cause the baby lettuce to get bitter and bolt to seed. now that it is autumn we have several beds of nice lettuce growing as well as volunteers coming up around the market garden. the same thing happened with spring mix. After late June it got impossible to grow it though we did try. We did get several harvests of arugula for our efforts through the summer but nothing else from the spring mix beds. Kale and chard were the summer mainstay greens, they always are.

Broccoli did badly for us but we did get some decent cabbages. I dunno why we have such problems with broccoli, perhaps we should quit growing it. Spring radishes were hit and miss and the early red meat radishes were a complete failure. But we do have a 1/2 bed of them now that are very nice. We got really nice early rutabagas as well as red turnips. the fall red turnips are ready to harvest and store for winter, though it will be early next week before that will happen.

Finally, the Farm Share Initiative has been a great thing for us. It allowed us drop a farmers market and make more money while being allowed to stay home and get more work done. Definitely a win, win for us and the fact very few people seemed to notice there is no longer a Tuesday evening market in Oxford (maybe 10 people have asked about this this summer) tells me that we would have made less money this year than last at that market. So it is good that we are doing the FSI.

I think I will change a few things on how the FSI is run next season. This season I allowed members to sign up for the entire season but pay monthly. That will stop as it is not fair to the members that ponied up the cash for the entire season upfront. And the members who did this have all dropped out for the last month, not good. They also got a few extra weeks as I was treating them like the paid in full members as I expected them to go through the entire season. I think the monthly farm tour/pot luck will go as well since we only were able to hold two this year mostly because of a lack of interest on the part of most of the members. I think a once a year farm tour/pot luck will suffice. I am having a hard time getting it through to the members that farm visits are a very important aspect of the farm share/CSA experience. This is how one connects to their farm and without farm visits one might as well buy their food from the farmers market. I also think it is time to drop the month to month deal. This has the potential of getting very confusing which will lead to mistakes -especially when the FSI grows to more than 30 members. It will be replaced by what I used call "Share Cycles" where I break the season down into 2 or 3 month increments for those who cannot do an entire season for whatever reason.

Well, that's the summery of our summer

Tomatoes

I haven't posted in a while. Between long days working the farm, marketing food and Facebook I haven't made time to post here in weeks.

Like all summers it's been busy at Boulder Belt Eco-Farm. We have had a great summer-the weather, for the most part has been cool and dry and the crops have loved it. we have huge tomatoes this year, despite the evil specter of late blight which has been stalking the tomato patches of the eastern US this summer. We don't seem to have that problem. Our tomato plants look pretty bad as they have once again been struck with whatever crud we have in our soils but it is not late blight as our crud rarely effects the fruit. It just kills the vines which can lead to sun scald problems but not fruit with disgusting lesions and rot. At any rate, the fruits are huge.

I did not know that Glick's pride was a beef steak tomato as it never has gotten all that big for us in the past 12 years we have grown it. But this year we have a lot of 1 pound+ fruits.

I notice the paste tomatoes, Amish paste and Opalka are also both huge this year. Usually the Opalka come in at about 1/2 pound or less. This year they are at least twice that big. Same with the Amish paste.

The early girl are not all that big this year but quite prolific

The Paul Robeson are all over the place on size-some are teensy and catfaced, others are big and beautifully round. the taste is good but not quite as good as I expected. still seeds have been saved for next year

Great White tomatoes like others are huge and for the most part perfectly round. And they taste really good for any tomato, but especially for a white tomato which generally are pretty insipid. unfortunately because they are strange they do not sell well (I guess I will have to get aggressive about them and convince people to try them)

The Nyagous are perfect cue ball sized black tomatoes again this year and they taste fabulous. these have become one of my favorites.

The Black Krim are just wrong. 95% of them have catfaced horribly making them pretty unusable for anything other that displaying as a freak of nature or sauce/juice. I dunno what happened there, but it ain't good.

I don't know what happened to the Green Zebra, but with pretty much all the different types of tomatoes we grow ripening to at least the point of identification, we don't seem to have any. But we do seem to have a lot more red saladette types than I remember starting. It's been years since we have grown Green Zebra but I remember them being pretty early so if we have them we should be harvesting them by now. We got the seed from Baker Creek. I do like the philosophy at BC but this is not the first time we have gotten wrong seed from them. I doubt we will order from them again as we cannot afford to spend money with such a lax seed house.

The Costoluto plants died early but they did produce a crop of beautiful fluted medium red tomatoes before they succumbed

The cherry tomatoes are doing well this year. We have way to many sunsugar about the right amount of Cherrywine (which is nearly stable this year-I believe there was only one sport-a pink saladette). The yellow pear plants are not dead and generally they are the first to die of our home grown tomato ick. The green pear seem to be stabilized their first year of selection-100% of the plants are producing green pear maters. As a mater of fact, I found a couple of green pear plants in with the yellow pear plants. The red grape are going gang busters and the green grape are nice and healthy and just beginning to ripen.

It looks like we got 2 crinckovich plants this year and they are noting special. I do like the fruit so I think it will be worth seeking out a good seed source as I do not have enough to keep seed from (you really need a minimum of 8 plants and I have 2).

The Sunray tomatoes are just now ripening up and they are about perfect in every way. huge round deep yellow fruits with great flavor and very prolific. I am surprised the plants have not broken under the weight of all the fruit.

The Dr Wyche's Yellow is almost over for the year and they were, like so many other tomatoes pretty spectacular. Very few deformed, catfaced fruits. Good flavor and good yields.

The Boulder Belt Striped was very good this year. As far as I can tell, we had zero off types so I will declare this a stabilized breed. the flavor is good to boot.

The Matina has been great. Wonderful small tasty fruits and very very prolific

So That's the August rundown of our maters

Overwhelmed

Life is getting overwhelming. Lots of big harvest jobs have all come in at once. Lots of mowing needs to be done so a belt on the mower had the excellent timing to break this evening. Though Eugene did get about an acre mowed before it broke. But now he will have to run into town to buy a replacement.

The raspberries are going nuts. I picked 20 half pints and that was maybe 1/3 of them. There will be more to harvest tomorrow. Along with beans, cucumbers, zucchini, strawberries and other things to harvest.

There is the farm share to deal with-A news letter needs to be written tonight or early tomorrow (tomorrow morning is looking more and more likely). I do have a food list in mind. hopefully the market garden is in agreement.

There is food to be put up for winter. I did get snap peas frozen but raspberry jam needs to be made ASAP and that takes several hours to do. I will likely be freezing beans in the next several days if I can find the time.

Beds need tilling for fall crops. Eugene says there are about 35 beds that need crops taken out or tilled in and than prepped for carrots, rutabagas, beets, etc,.

Tomatoes need tying. Fortunately I was able to get 2/3 of the tomatoes tied this morning-around 300 of them. They do look good and one already has a tiny mater on it.

To make life more overwhelming we are getting chickens tomorrow. 50 day old peeps that in 6 to 8 weeks will be in our freezer for our personal use. At least we are prepared for them. Have feed, a brooder tractor, feeders, waterers, etc.. The chickens will suck at least an hour a day from other tasks (but they are fun to have) which will continue the overwhelmed feeling we are having here.

At least the hot humid weather has been replaced by crisp cool weather. And we have a lot of good things to eat (If I ever get the time to cook)

CSA: Week Two

I have just finished packing up the second installment of the Boulder Belt Eco-Farm Winter CSA shares.

It was a cold experience, let me tell you. All the food is in the store and we have yet to turn on the heater in there because we are cheap (and green). So it is no more than 35F in that building. It is definitely above freezing because nothing outside of the fridges has frozen yet, but it's still damn cold. It took a good 15 minutes for my hands to thaw out. Yow!

The shares this week contained:
1 6 oz bag of spring mix
1 pound of rutabagas
a pound of carrots
1 charantais melon
2 pints of strawberries from the hoop house
2 green peppers
1 pound of mixed chard (wasn't planning on including this but the weather dictated that it should all be brought in. Now we have about 20 pounds of chard.)
6 or so pears
5 leeks (we have a lot of leeks)
3 tomatoes
A bag of Italian Parsley and 2 other kinds of fresh herbs (Dill, Cilantro, Thyme or sage)

Not a bad haul for the middle of a cold November.

Autumn Update

Fall has finally arrived and with it a lessening in the work load and nicer weather in which to work. the market garden is pretty much done with tomatoes, we have planted a fall crop and they have tomatoes on them but there are only 30 or so plants vs the 450+ tomatoes planted for the main crop.

The peppers in the hoop house are about over for the year. Heat or blight or bacterial wilt or arm worms or something did a real number on them. We got one good one for every 5 to 10 on the plants that rotted in some way (and this is why green peppers are generally 50% to 75% cheaper than ripe peppers-it's easy to grow a green pepper but quite hard to get a pepper from green to ripe without problems). the 200+ pepper plants planted after the hoop house pepper have not done much at all. I am getting some beautiful green fruit from one bed and the jalapenos are doing okay but there are very few peppers ripening and those that are are very under sized. These plants should have had ripe peppers at least 4 weeks ago and they don't. Most barely have 1/2 grown peppers on them. Bad pepper year. But if it stays mild for another 6 to 8 weeks we should get some ripe peppers out of the main crop. There is always next year.

As we get away from the summer crops the fall things are coming in. We harvested the first spring mix (yes I realize it is autumn so the stuff should be called fall mix or something but changing names on a product don't work good for no one) this week. It looks wonderful but since it is selling well we have not had any yet. We also dug the first parsnips and they look fabulous! I don't believe we have ever grown such nice parsnips.

We have been pulling leeks for about 3 weeks and will continue to do so until we run out (sometime in March or April). I have been using a lot of leeks and they are yummy, much better than what you can buy at the grocery in both taste and the fact we take great pains to get long white shanks on the leeks and that means extra work hilling them numerous times during their long growing season.

The winter squash was a disappointment this year. Last year we had a bumper crop of butternut but not this year. this year the plants went in a bit too late (actually the went in about the same time as last year but the rains had stopped and it got hot) and they were not able to thrive and produce a lot of high quality squash for winter storage. Instead, we got rather small fruits and many had to be harvested too early before they matured because they were being badly attacked by squash bugs (like the bugs were swarming over the squash so you could not even see them under the insects). We did get a decent crop of delicata and sweet dumpling squash but everything else was just so so at best.

The pear tree was loaded with pears until Ike's winds came and knocked down 8 bushels of pears. We did go out and pick up all the drops (which is why we know that 8 bushels came down). We will sell and use the pears but will not be able to get top dollar for them because they are damaged. I supoose in about 5 weeks we will be making gallons of pear wine and pear jelly among other things out of the dropped pears. Despite the wind there is still about 5 bushels of pears still up in the tree. That tree must have had well over a 1000 pounds of pears hanging off it. That's a lot of pears for a single tree. I am very surprised that the tree did not lose several major limbs in the wind storm. It did lose 2 minor limbs. It is in a very protected spot and that is likely why it did not get more damage.


The barn roof has been fixed and it stronger than it was before along with far fewer holes in the roof thanks to a lot of silicone caulk being applied over the whole roof (not that the roof is covered with caulk).

The remainder of fall will be taken up with several fall tasks including the unexpected hand watering. We are starting water certain things daily by hand because the drip irrigation just ain't doing the job, especially for seeds and seedlings that have just emerged. Than there is planting crops for winter and early spring, putting up hoop houses for the late fall and over wintering crops, hoeing and harvesting and putting the beds to sleep for the winter. Which means taking up any mulch (we use landscape fabric which has to be cleaned of roots/weeds and than rolled up for winter storage), drip tapes (these we roll up onto garden hose caddies), planting cover crops in beds that won't be used until mid May and removing all debris such as tall weeds and the dead crops. We have found over the years that getting the garden cleaned up in fall is very important. If you don't do this you will have a bug and disease problem the following year. The plant corpses go on the compost piles and thus feed the soil next year.

The season officially ends with the garlic planting in late October/Early November. In reality, the work never ends it just ebbs and flows.

Eugene and Lucy At Market

I realize I have not posted anything for a while but it has been nutz busy what with harvesting, fall planting, weeding, tilling, marketing, the new windows (which are just about all done-just have a bit of caulking to do and a final coat of paint) and putting up food (I have a 5 gallon pot of tomato puree cooking down to sauce which I will can tomorrow). So for enjoyment are photos of us boulder beltians at the Oxford Saturday farmers Market Aug 16th

Here I am selling fresh produce to Dixie Utter, one of my teachers from High School. She taught English and speech at Talawanda High School for years and years. I took her speech class back in 1979 and that class has served me well as I have had many opportunities to do public speaking over the past 25 years.

Eugene showing off some of our heirloom tomatoes.
photo by Nellie Bly Cogan

Canning Tomato Juice

After yesterday's tomato juice disaster (okay, perhaps not a disaster) I got the cleaned up Victorio out again, put if back together, got a bushel of various tomatoes out of the store (anything that looked like it would not last the day) and got to work making tomatoes into juice. After an hour of vigorous grinding, I had 3+ gallons of juice in a 5 gallon pot. Soon it was simmering away and around noon I seasoned it with homemade garlic powder, kosher salt, rice wine vinegar and Worcester sauce. let the tomato juice and the seasoning marry for about 2 hours than got the canner out, cleaned up jars and lids, sterilized them, filled the jars with juice and now the first batch is boiling away. In another 15 minutes they will be done and I can sterilize the second round of jars, lids and rings and I should be done with 14 quarts of homemade and delicious tomato juice by around 6:30pm.

New Windows are In Place

windows today. The plan was to get about 1/2 of the windows installed but as I write this they are finishing up installing all but one window (one was damaged and was sent back to Our buddy Mark showed up late last night in order to help Eugene put in our new pellaPella when we picked them up at Lowe's. It will be here in a week or two), pretty slick.

While they took out the old nasty very untight old windows, I spent my time cleaning up some of the many onions we have curing, cleaning dried dill that has been sitting in a dehydrator for a couple of weeks waiting for me to do something with it (dill is a very tedious herb to clean so I avoided doing so for a long time). Now I have around 1/2 pound of dried dill in a freezer. I doubt I will dry any more of it, I have enough to sell and use for the rest of the year.

Waited on a few customers while I was cleaning the dill. Sold some tomatoes, strawberries and green beans.

Than I decided it was time to process tomatoes so I got the Victorio out and put it together, brought in a crate of tomatoes and got to work putting them through the Victorio. After 15 minutes the thing jammed and than fell off the table and tomatoes, tomato juice and tomato waste flew everywhere. I angerly tossed the contraption into the sink (avoiding the thawing turkey) and grabbed a mop to mop up all the tomato crap all over the floor, chair, crate (that was still half full of maters) and table. Took the crate of tomatoes outside and hosed everything down (which meant I found a rotting tomato) and got the crate and fruit really clean.

Now the house is a mess. The boys used some sort of expandable foam that looks a whole lot like marshmallow fluff and that has gotten all over the place (mostly where it needs to be). I have not gone upstairs yet (I think I will avoid doing so until bed time as I heard a lot of crashing up there) but I assume it is messier than the kitchen.

The good news is everything is in place and now all that needs to be done is the finish work, which will start next weekend. Oh yeah and one window is MIA and still needs to be done start to finish.

I gotta say the new windows are marvelous and already are keeping the heat from pouring in the house (and I am certain will keep the cold out of the house). They have an R value of 25 which is far better than the walls that surround them. I don't know what the R value of the old windows was but probably well below an R15. We will be using a lot less energy this winter to keep the house warm and that is a good thing on a lot of levels. For one, it is a very green thing to do and to me, that alone, is worth the $2100 or so this project has cost so far. I am sure by the end of this winter the windows will be close to paying for themselves, certainly over the next 5 years they will in fuel savings alone.

Farm Pictures

The onions, garlic and leeks in the foreground and row covered crops (carrots, broccoli, beets, etc..) in the background. This is what you see first going up to the garden from the barn or store

Early tomatoes, about 2 weeks from being ripe. We transplanted these into a hoop house April 15th and it looks like we will have ripe tomatoes by July 4th. I believe these are Yellow Taxi, an heirloom that we have been saving seeds from for over 12 years

The raspberry beds looking north. we have around 300' of these things. two kinds latham (which is pictured in the fore ground) and heritage which you can kinda, sort of see in the distance. the latham are loaded with berries. I have never seen as many raspberries as we have. this is scary and exciting. as long as nothing major goes wrong (disease, hail, large flocks of fruit eating birds) we should have a bumper crop of berries to sell. The berries have been very very good so far this year and they have just started to ripen and the weather has been about perfect the past 5 days or so for raspberries and strawberries to develop the best flavor they can.

The State of our Garden

It's almost summer and that means new crops coming in. We have peas (snow, snap and shelling), raspberries, beet greens, garlic scapes, red salad turnips, broccoli, basil, oregano, zucchini and green onions coming in now. The spinach is over, the asparagus is over the lettuce is nearly over. Spring mix we thought would be nearly over but now that it is getting cool again we will do another planting of it and see if we can keep on cutting it through early July. Radishes are about done too, maybe another 10 days of harvest.

The tomatoes we started in mid April in a hoop house all have green fruits on them. None are full size yet but soon they will be and than after a 100 year wait they will ripen to either red or yellow. Why does it take FOREVER for the first tomatoes to ripen and than after that you can barely keep up with the harvest?

The early pepper plants (also started in a hoop house in late April) are about 2.5' tall and are in full flower. Ought be getting tiny green peppers in a week or so. this is the first time we have tried early peppers and so far it has been a stunning success. they are 3x to 4x bigger than the peppers we put out 10 day ago and, as I already mentioned, in flower. If things continue as they have been, we should have the first green peppers at market in Oxford. Usually we have the last peppers.

We planted zukes and cukes early in a hoop house. The zukes have been poky-not many flowers and mostly male flowers which do not give us zucchini. We need female flowers for squash. the cucumbers were coming on strong in May and than the voles found the baby cukes and ate every last one of them. #@!!^^&%*(% voles. We set up traps and caught many but not all of them and than the cuke beetles exploded and started ravaging the cuke and zuke plants so it was decided to pull the plastic off of the hoop house about 8 days ago to see if that would not break the cycle of bugs. It did not, but it did make the voles go away (or maybe we killed them all) so now, a month later, we have some 1/2 sized cucumbers on the vines and should be able to harvest a few this coming week. Pulling the plastic also allowed more pollinators in the area and also made it a lot easier for us humans to work around the plants. Hoop houses and 92˚F days do not mix what so ever. I have noticed since the plastic has come off the zukes are producing a lot better. It must have been too warm for them and now they are much happier.

All in all, the market garden is doing very well. We have all but 22 beds filled up with crops and those will be planted with potatoes, dried beans, popcorn, green beans and likely spring mix. We have been getting too much rain but the garden drains extremely well so we are not getting too much rot. I have found a couple of rotted kale plants and some seeds have rotted in the ground. This has been especially true of the French filet bean seed and some winter squash. If it decides to dry up we will be in great shape. If it decides to do to us what has been done to Iowa, Wisconsin and much of southern Indiana than we will lose the entire crop planted to date and will be pretty well screwed for the summer. But will likely be able to plant for fall and winter.

Being an optimist I will figure things will continue as they have so far this season which has been the best we have ever had, thus far.

Tomatoes For 2008

We love heirloom tomatoes here at Boulder Belt Eco-Farm. We started this love affair back in 1994 when we were given the seeds of a pink Brandywine tomato by Susan Domonkos, a friend of mine from my horsey days at Old Stone Riding Centre . we dried the seeds and planted them that spring and got wonderful pink beefsteak maters and we were hooked.

This year's roster of tomatoes is as follows
Dr Wyche's Yellow-a huge orange beefsteak mater with great taste
Great White-bought this seed last year, misplaced the packet and wondered in august why we had no white tomatoes, even though I knew I had ordered seeds. Found the seeds this spring (exactly where they were supposed to be) and planted them. These will be white or ivory in color. I have no idea what they will taste like.
Nayagous-we grew this black tomato for the first time last year and it was wonderful. The plants are prolific producers of golf ball sized perfectly round black maters, taste is excellent
Crincovich-a huge pink tomato from Czechoslovakia with an unpronounceable name. Like the Nayagous we grew these for the first time last year and loved them.
Black Krim-our friend Wyatt gave us a couple of black krim plants last year so we saved seed. I was introduced to black krim back in 1989 or 90 while I was working at DiPaolo's restaurant in Oxford, OH (which is not to be confused with the current DiPaolo's restaurant in Oxford, OH which has nothing to do with the DiPaolo family or the incredible cooking they used to do there on North Beech St). George DiPaolo Jr. ordered black tomatoes one day and we in the kitchen were fascinated by this strange fruit. Sometime in the 1990's I grew Black Krim in one of our early market gardens and was not too impressed (and I discounted the fact I didn't really know what I was doing back than and the land where they were planted was in great need of soil improvement). Burt the Krim's we grew last year were beautiful and tasty so they are now in the tomato rotation.
GL-18-a wonderful red mater that is the rarest of all out tomatoes. You can sometimes find these seeds via the Seed savers Exchange annual yearbook but known as Glick's Pride. We saved this variety from extinction back in 1994 or 95. A colleague, Wendy Carpenter, at the Richmond farmers market had found seeds for these while visiting her dying grandfather-in-law who had been a tomato breeder in the 1940's. She planted the thousand or so seeds and got 3 plants and from one of those plants I got two tomatoes and saved the seeds and have been growing them out each ever since. This season they are the main red tomato as all the hybrids we used to grow as our main red crop are now owned by Monsanto and we will not buy their products. I will miss Big Beef but GL-18 is an excellent replacement.
Amish Paste-Grew this for the first time last year and loved them. They make incredible tomato sauce and are prolific as hell. these replace Opalka which got crossed pollinated with other tomatoes so we lost the strain. I love Opalka but they are not great producers and in market farming you need to pay attention to yields and always opt for the heavy yielders.
Red Grape-one of our cherry tomatoes. It's red and shaped like a grape. Nice tasting
Cherrywine-a cherry type we are developing. We had a pink brandywine cross with a sunsugar and got these wonderful pink cherry tomatoes with great taste. Boulder Belt is the only place you will find these as we have not gotten this stable enough to start distributing seeds. It takes about 5 to 10 years to get a tomato strain to stabilize into an open pollinated variety.
BB Striped-another breeding experiment. We got these wonderful striped (red and yellow) tomatoes when a pink brandywine (the slut of the garden) crossed with an opalka and we got these rather misshapen striped tomatoes. For the past 6 years we have been selecting for taste and color and this year we should have a stable open pollinated variety. These look a lot like the German Johnson striped (which we grew last year but dropped because our BB striped is a better tomato).
Costoluto Florentine-A wonderful red tomato from Italy. We grew these for the first time last year and at first I wrote them off as bad tasting, diseased plants not worth bothering with. But a month later these determinant plants were producing these beautiful red fluted fruits with a taste that is second to none. So I kept seed
Yellow Taxi-this is the oldest of the tomatoes we save seed from each year. After discovering the world of heirloom tomatoes via the pink brandywine we ordered yellow taxi seed, probably from seed savers exchange. This is a wonderful determinant lemon yellow tomato. When we started with this it would mature in about 65 days which is quite early for a tomato but through 14 years of selection I have gotten our strain to mature in 52 days, about the earliest tomato there is. We use these for early hoop house production as for this is what we have been breeding them.
Sunsugar-one of the few hybrids we grow. this is the best tasting cherry tomato we grow by far. these orange beauties are early , prolific and tasty as well as our best selling cherry mater. once people taste them, they tend to get addicted.
Early Girl-We felt we needed a red hybrid to replace Big Beef so we are trying early Girl, one of the oldest of the hybrid tomato varieties. I have not grown an early girl tomato in probably 20 years. We will see if we like them.
Early Big Red-I have no idea what these will be like. We ordered something from Schumway's and they sent us this "experimental Variety" to try so I started some seeds from the packet. Sounds like they are red, big and early. they just might be our hybrid replacement for Big Beef
Opalka-Eugene found a volunteer Opalka plant last year that was true to type and saved seed. Maybe these will be pure and we can start growing them again. Though with the Amish paste being as good tasting and far more prolific I don't know why we would continue to grow this variety other than for old times sake.
Sunray-we got these from our friend Wyatt. these are a beautiful yellow orange fruit, egg shaped with great flavor and an heirloom, though I do not know the history of them.
Yellow Pear-A pear shaped cherry tomato that is yellow. these are perhaps better to look at than to eat, though they are one of our most popular sellers.
Green Grape-This is reported to be one of the oldest heirloom tomatoes around. these produce a green round fruit a bit smaller than a golf ball with a really nice taste. We have not grown these in several years but i found some seed from 2002 and decided to see if the seed was still viable. I started about 150 seeds and got 10 plants which should be more than enough as they are prolific and due to their color not our best seller (though once people eat one they are usually hooked)
Matina-an early red tomato we got to try as a hoop house tomato. I know nothing about them other than they have a strange shaped leaf and will be big plants and they are an heirloom.

So that is the list of the 20 kinds of tomatoes we will be growing this year

More Seed Orders

A post I made a couple of days ago about inertia and being done with seed orders was all lies.

It turns out we were not done with our seed orders because we were bored and there were two catalogs we like, Baker Creek Seeds and Gourmet Seeds International, sitting there tempting us with their purty pictures and tantalizing descriptions. So Eugene ordered some winter melons, Piel de sapo (aka toad skin) and Verde da Inverno and a yellow, Italian, heirloom pepper called Melrose from Gourmet Seeds. Eugene has wanted to grow winter melons for several years and now he will have the seeds to do so.

I ordered a blue poppy and two heirloom tomatoes-Paul Robeson, a very hard to find heirloom I have been wanting to try for about 10 years as I love about everything about Paul Robeson-great actor/singer as well as humanitarian. I also ordered Tomesol, a white beefsteak tomato that is said to have the best taste of any tomato. We grew a white mater last year but I was not impressed. It was not really white, the taste was okay but not the greatest and the fruits tended to split. I probably would have been more impressed with it had I started the seeds and dealt with it the way we deal with our plants. But this white came from our friend Wyatt (he gave us something like 8 heirloom varieties last year) and the plants were too big to put with the other tomatoes on landscape fabric. So they went into their own area, unmulched, no irrigation and quite stressed from travel and living on the porch of the store for 2 weeks. So I am thinking these white tomatoes did not give us their all. This is why I am trying out another white tomato. The other thing we ordered from baker Creek intrigues me. The Cassabanana (aka melocoton) which looks like a large bright red cucumber. the flesh is bright orange and sweet. the vines can get to 50' long and it takes these things a long time to grow (It doesn't say how long but I am thinking 120 days). This will have to be started in April so it can be put into the garden in early May (with at least a row cover over top to keep thing warm if May is at all chilly) and than I am sure a hoop house will be erected over top come October. I know we have the technology and know how to get these puppies to ripen. If we can do cukes and zukes in November we out to be able to get these to ripen.

Along with the 2 seed orders was a big order to Nolt's produce supply for irrigation equipment (a new filter, some more drip tape and a reducer) as well as a couple of cases of pulp pint and 1/2 pint tills, 5# of rubber bands and a couple of rolls of 3' wide landscape fabric. We used to use Monte Packaging for our marketing supplies but found that Nolt's is about 33% cheaper across the board. So Nolt's gets our money.

I am hoping this is it on the seed ordering this year. I am pretty sure it won't be the end of seed orders. We will run short of something or realize we forgot to order something important or will find a back order is not an out of stock item. But I believe that we are done for the most part, except ordering chickens to be raised on pasture for meat (and maybe layers if we can get a coop built this spring summer)

Thanksgiving Brew

It's thanksgiving and we at Boulder Belt are not eating a turkey dinner (mainly because I did not hop to it and order a pastured turkey from the Filbruns a month ago and when I asked 2 weeks ago if they had any left they said no, they were sold out) this year. nor are we going to anyone's home to feast upon their turkey and trimmings.

No, we are staying in and the plan is to brew beer all afternoon. We shall consume the first of this beer on New Years Day. So truly a holiday brew.

Our friend Wyatt says he is coming over with home made bread and a wort chiller. Eugene made a green tomato chutney yesterday so I am thinking making a vegetarian curry for dinner. We have a lot of greens left over from last Saturday's Winter market that need using as well as peppers, onions, snow peas and leeks. I could also throw together a salad (we have a lot of salad greens too).

This is the first Thanksgiving I have not celebrated in my life. Usually I am cooking at least one meal. Some years when I was working in food service by Thanksgiving day I had cooked over 10 different Turkey day feasts. This year nothing and I gotta say it is nice not to be responsible for dinner for many.

My sister quit celebrating years ago (20 years?) when her infant daughter suddenly died of meningitis the day before Thanksgiving (nothing thankful about that!). Go forward about 16 years and the Owsleys are in Detroit dealing with our mother dying of a stroke. She died 2 days after Thanksgiving that year. The T-day dinner that year was leg of lamb, a big salad and lots of wine and beer. Not very joyous but we made the best of it. At least we were all together (except Mom who was dying in a hospital) for the first time in decades for a Thanksgiving.

So today will be about watching Parades on the TeeVee, drinking home brews and craft beers while making beer and curry.

Tomorrow will be all about Buy Nothing Day

2nd to Last Saturday Market Day

This past weekend went by fast. We did two farmers markets in Oxford.

Saturday was the Uptown market that we have been going to for the past 3 years. It was one of the few gray and rainy markets we have had all year (a great thing about drought is lots and lots of sunny days. Makes doing outdoor markets easier). It was a cold one too, with a nice damp stiff breeze cutting through things. And because we are almost into November it was quite dark because the sun was still in the process of rising when we got there around 7:40am (market starts at 7:30am, we were late).

So we did not have high hopes for a good market. We were wrong, we had our second to best market ever by selling a lot of tomatoes, peppers, leeks, scallions, arugula, basil, potatoes, etc.. I believe the bulk of our sales happened in about 1.5 hours. It was intense. That's over $700 in sales in less than 2 hours. not bad. I suspect we will do better next year because the market will be better (it gets better every year and right now has the rare combination of a good manager and a good governing board and I believe Larry will be back next year to run the market and most the board members still have a year left in their reigns).

We went home via the Streits so we could pick up our raw milk for the week. Talk to Joe and Janet for about a half hour. Met a young hippie couple from Yellow Springs who were also picking up milk and other things. Eugene marveled over the fact these people drove over an hour to buy milk and other organic items. He forgot that were are doing the same thing to get raw milk (though we do live a lot closer to the Streits than the folks from YS) and if we did not raise most of our produce and poultry needs we too would drive hours to get the food we need.

Finally, got home around 2pm hungry and we still had to unload the van (which was not nearly as hard as loading at 6am because we had sold a lot of stuff and had around 15 empty crates), make lunch and get a nap. Together we unloaded the van and put food where it needed to go and than had tuna sandwiches and took a much needed nap (you would too if you had already worked a 8 hour day by 3pm). Eugene got up before me and went out to the garden to cover the few crops that were not already covered because frost was predicted for Sunday morning (and we did get a light frost, finally!). I got up as the sun was beginning to set, quite groggy from sleep. Fed the dogs because they demanded feeding and did not do a whole lot after that because Saturdays wipe me out.

Our Season So far

Despite the drought, we have had a good growing season. Not everything has grown well but most of our crops have done well for us this year. Roots have not been all that great for us. The carrots have been ravaged by carrot maggots and we have lost about 1/2 the crop. Beets have been hit and miss all summer. We have generally had a few but they have rarely been great beets. Some kinds of radishes have done exceptionally, other types have barely made roots. Onions, garlic, leeks and scallions, on the other hand, have done very well for us this summer (and will continue on into fall and winter).

Kale has been spectacular, though lately it has not been growing well. The chard was doing well until early August when it got some fungus that looks like black pepper has been sprinkled all over the leaves before the leaves turn brown and rot. The leafy cool weather greens did well in spring and we have had arugula since early August. Who knew arugula will grow well in hot dry conditions with no irrigation? Annual herbs have done especially well. We planted a lot of basil this year and all of it has produced abundantly. Parsley has also done well, though we had some major germination problems this spring so only have 12 plants. Dill has been a surprise. Eugene planted some in early summer and it got forgotten until late August so it went to seed all on its' own and has done a super job of thickly reseeding itself making for a gorgeous bed of cutting dill. Cilantro has been real hit and miss. It hates hot dry conditions so has not grown very well most of the season, that should change in a few weeks since fall has now arrived.

Winter squashes have done well but by mid summer the summer squashes had begun to give up on life. Same with the cucumbers, we had great cukes early but the main season cukes were hit and miss. Probably because we were growing several new types and did not know what we were doing with them. Melons were decent. Not terribly prolific, well, they were but so were the voles early on. The voles damaged at least 75% of the early melons. But Eugene and the dogs got on the ball and got good control of the varmints so we got many cantaloupes, Winter squashes have done well though, by mid summer the summer squashes had begun to give up on life. Same with the cucumbers, we had great cukes early but the main season cukes, charantais melons and watermelons all through August and September.

Corn was another disappointment. We rarely do good sweet corn. It is very hard to get clean well filled ears producing it organically. We do not use treated seed so we cannot plant until the soil is at least 60˚F which this year was mid May, well after they rains had left. So from the get go we had some serious issues with the sweet corn. What we ended up with was basically crappy corn. About 10% was sellable another 15% we froze for winter and the rest was composted. I don't know if we will continue to grow sweet corn. In theory, we need it for the farm stand, though our sales were not horribly impacted by not having much corn this year and I believe that we can get our customers not to expect sweet corn but to look forward to over 100 other produce items we grow at the store. For all the time and cost put into growing sweet corn it is one of our least lucrative crops. But I am positive Eugene will hanker to plant sweet corn next year and so it will be planted.

The nightshades-tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes have all done quite well. I have noticed these crops tend to do much better in dry conditions than wet. Last year we harvested, maybe, 200 peppers the entire season and most went into the freezer and were not sold. This year we have already harvested close to a thousand sweet peppers and the season is far from over. The hot peppers have loved the hot dry conditions and have been extra prolific. Tomatoes would have liked a bit more rain, I think, but overall they did well, though it seems the season was a bit short as after this week we will likely not have any tomatoes and I noticed at market this week very few other farms still have 'maters. Eggplants have done better for us in the past but this was a good year for them, no the less.

The strawberries have been a real workhorse all season. Early and mid September was not a great time for the berries but other than that they have produced high quality fruit. The raspberries have been a disappointment. Between the Easter freeze, birds and Japanese beetles we have not gotten a good harvest from either the Latham which produce one time or the heritage that produce spring and fall. The berries we have managed to harvest have been excellent, just not at all plentiful.

Now that it is autumn we will be harvesting spring mix and lettuces soon. Hopefully, we will get some rainy weather this fall, though I am not counting on it. Lettuce, especially, likes rainy conditions. Thankfully we have a drip irrigation system and we know how to use it so the leafy greens will grow well enough for us.

Roasted Peppers and Tomatoes

Yesterday I believe I finished putting up tomatoes for the year. I did my 3rd 5 gallon pot of sauce which yielded 11 quarts. That will go with the other 20 or so quarts of tomato sauce. I also did some salsa (I do not remember how many jars) and tomato juice (IIRC I have 21 or so jars of that.) Next on the agenda is apple sauce.

I have also been freezing. Right now peppers are the main thing I am freezing as they are coming in. I like to have at least 8 well packed gallon freezer bags of chopped sweet ripe peppers and a couple of bags of roasted peppers to get through winter. So far I have 5 bags of peppers and none of the roasted variety. I am thinking Sunday may be a good day to start a fire in the Webber grill and roast and skin a bunch of peppers. They are so good roasted. They add a wonderful smokiness to any dish you add them to.

Last year I was lucky to get 5 gallon bags. It was a bad pepper year for us-too wet I suppose. Those 5 bags were gone by April meaning we rarely had peppers all spring and most of the summer. I rarely will buy peppers at the store as ripe peppers simply cost too much for my budget (but I understand why they cost so much-a lot can and does happen to a pepper between green stage and full ripe stage and about 1/2 to 2/3 will not be sellable at ripe stage). But because I grow peppers I am used to being able to use a lot of them every time I cook with them.

This year has been a good pepper year and I should have more than enough to get through winter and spring. I already have about as many frozen as all of last year and we are still picking lots and lots of peppers and I will be freezing quite a few more in the next 10 to 20 days.

How to Roast a Pepper

Over a flaming wood fire (you can do this with charcoal but wood gives you a much better flavor and you won't have petrochemical residue left on the peppers from the fire starter. I guess a gas grill will work as well but again there is the flavor issue) put on as many peppers as you can fit. Let the flames blacken the peppers and split the skin. Turn every 15 to 30 seconds (this is fast cooking over high heat). When the peppers are black, flaky and ugly on all sides remove them and place in a paper bag to steam for a 5 to 15 minutes. Bring the bag of peppers inside to the kitchen sink. Take a pepper out of the bag and start removing the skin (which is charred). The skin should come right off. If it does not that means you did not cook the pepper quite long enough. Don't try to re-char it just take some extra time to get the skin off and next time take more time to roast the peppers. Cold running water will help in removal. Once the skin is off slice open the pepper and remove the seeds and the placenta (the thing the seeds are attached to at the top). Now, you can either use the roasted peppers right away or slice them into thin strips and place them on a cookie sheet and freeze them. Once frozen, pop the strips into a well market plastic freezer bag and store for winter use. These peppers can be used anywhere a smoky sweet flavor will work like fried potatoes, chili, macaroni and cheese, soups (I can see using these in a butternut squash soup).
Bon Apatite

Tomato Hell Redux

One of the compost piles we are currently building. It looks so festive with all the colorful tomatoes in and around the pile.

So now the cherry tomatoes I harvested on Thursday, that did not sell at market Saturday, are beginning to soften and split. This is bad as it attracts fruit flies who lay eggs in the slurry. It also smells bad and drips foul smelling tomato goo on the floor or ones feet. So for an hour this morning I sat in a chair in the back of the store and patiently removed good sun sugar maters into a clean crate and bad sun sugar tomatoes into a compost bucket. The result was about 1/3 were keepers.

I still have around 6 crates of big tomatoes to go through yet this afternoon. I am sure I will get 4 to 6 buckets (5 gallon sized) of tomatoes to take out to the new compost pile to go with the other 20 to 30m buckets already there.

Cherry Tomato Hell

Cherry tomato hell has hit Boulder belt. This happens every year when we have more cherry tomatoes than we can possibly sell but they have to be harvested anyway. If we do not pick them they will start splitting and rotting on the vines which will attract the wrong insect crowd as well as a lot of fungi, bad bacteria and viruses. The result will be dying vines loaded with inedible fruit long before frost kills them off. Something we want to avoid

So yesterday afternoon I went out with a gray 3/4 bushel crate in hand and started harvesting the loaded vines. I started with Cherrywine, a pink cherry we are breeding/stabilizing. I plopped the crate on the ground and sat down in front of the first plant and started in on picking. I picked handfuls at a time, careful to toss on the ground any that were split, bitten into by hornworms or army worms or were soft and/or off color. All of these things means that the tomatoes will start rotting in their bins after picking and as we all know, one bad tomato spoils the whole bin. After 45 minutes I had the cherrywines finished meaning I had about 30 ponds of small maters and my head, arms and hands were greenish black from picking. So I went back to the house to wash up and have a smoke.

After my break I unloaded the garden cart which had about 100 pounds of butternut squash Eugene had harvested earlier in the day. I took the squash into the store front and loaded the cart with 4 gray crates and went back out to the mater patch and got back to work. This time out I harvested the sunsugar tomato. These are a cherry orange cherry tomato with a fantastic flavor and our best seller. Because this sells so well we had an entire 50' bed devoted to them (plus around 10 other plants that I got in a seed trade that were supposed to be 4 other kinds of heirloom tomatoes, not sunsugars). So once again I plopped down a crate and sat down in front of the vines and proceeded to pick. The sunsugars despite not having been well harvested for at least 10 days were in pretty good shape. After doing the Cherrywines I expected a lot of splitting and other ills but most were A-OK. I did have to deal with the problem of these plants being on short stakes and not well tied up so the tops were draped over and touching the ground meaning I had to lift up the vines with my left hand so I could pick the interior of the plants with my right hand. Next year we will buy some more fence stakes so we do not try and support tall plants with short stakes. I found several small hornworms while picking and I made sure I did not destroy any garden spider webs as they are helping us keep the white fly and cuke beetle population under control. An hour later I was done with the sunsugars and had around 50 pounds of them.

Next I was off to harvest the yellow pear which were a mess. These are on shorter stakes than the sunsugars and the plants are taller. The good thing is there is only a half bed (25') of these guys. So once again I sit down in front of the plants and start taking hand fulls of yellow, pear shaped cherry tomatoes. Unlike the sunsugar and cherrywines, these guys fall off the vines at the slightest touch. So I had to pick a lot up off the ground. These also decided that it would be best if the majority grew in the middle of the vines (i.e. underneath where the vines had flopped over. So I had to sit literally under the plants holding them up with one hand while picking handfuls with the other. All the while, at least half were falling to the ground. The good news was there were very few split or chewed fruits despite being ignored for at least a week. I was surprised to find 4 hornworms and an army worm on these plants since they had so little bug damage. Now they will have a bit less.

I took the crates of yellow pear and sunsugar back to the storefront, where we are storing the tomatoes. I ran into Eugene who asked if there were any more cherry tomaotes to pick and I said yes, the Red Pear and red grape still needed harvesting so he took a crate and brought in red pear. I went back to the house to wash the green/black crap off of my hands and arms and than went back out and harvested some okra and than half the red grape.

I stopped when I got 1/2 bushel because these are not our best seller and the red grape are a mishmash of tomato types because we planted seed we saved last year from an F1 hybrid. This means we have 4 different kinds of tomatoes growing in the red grape area, including a couple of red grape plants. We also have a round red cherry, a mini paste and a red saladette. I will save seed from the kind that are true to type and hopefully, next season most will be what we want.

Anyhoo, we now have well over 100 pounds of cherry tomatoes. Today I will go through them and the large tomatoes (of which we have around 1000 pounds) and toss into the compost any that are getting soft or, worse yet, have deflated. Than I will make pint boxes of cherry tomatoes in preparation for tomorrow's farmers market in Oxford. I like to have around 60 boxes made up and ready to go. It makes life easier at market if we do not have to be constantly refilling boxes with cherry tomatoes.

I hope we have a good market for them Saturday, I have no idea what I will do with over 100 pounds of cherry tomatoes if they do not sell. I can dry some and I suppose I could make tomato juice out of them if it comes down to that (of course I also may have hundreds of pounds of big tomatoes to deal with as well.). I will cross that bridge if and when I come to it.