Tuesday, May 14, 2013

As a little boy, one of the vivid memories I have is of eating tomatoes from my Grandma’s garden.  We sometimes traveled to Iowa to visit the family and most often stayed with my Mother’s parents on the farm outside of Griswold.  The farm was full of exciting mysteries for me; tractors and pigs and cows, the barn and hay barn, a pond for fishing and, of course, Grandma’s garden.  Grandma didn’t generally grow much corn, but always knew someone whose sweet corn was ready to harvest.  We would visit and pick and I would eat a dozen ears or so.  The tomatoes I remember because they were giant and tangy-sweet and so plentiful.  Compared to what we got from the grocery store in Phoenix, they were a different fruit. My in-laws have always gardened and their approach to tomatoes is to plant the tomatoes in the field and let them grow and then continuously harvest them until the summer heat kills them off.  They let the leaves overgrow to protect the tomatoes from the sun. Their tomatoes are also very tasty.  In the last 20 years or so, my Dad has returned to his roots.  He left Iowa when I was 2 wishing to never farm again, but he has turned a good portion of the back yard into a productive vegetable garden that he fusses with all year long with a plastic cover and companion plants to keep the pests away and timers for the water system and misters and a fan to keep it cool in the summer.  He is always very proud of his tomatoes and they are good.  We have tried to grow tomatoes since moving to Alaska, but have yet to be anything except disappointed.  We have started our own plants and bought seedlings and raised them to a respectable size, but have had very little ripe fruit by the end of the growing season.  I built a greenhouse years ago when we lived in Japan that was about 10 x 10 and 8 feet tall.  I had tomatoes growing all over it, but had almost no fruit.  Beverly, Jonathon and I toured the hydroponic garden at Epcot Center and I was fascinated with the many ways they had of supplying nutrients to their plants with roots that were submerged and roots that were stationary and sprayed at intervals and plants that moved past a sprayer that wetted the roots as they passed by.  Last year in our smaller greenhouse, we once again grew big plants with almost no fruit.  Part of the problem may be in the varieties of tomatoes we have grown.  It seems that most of the starts you buy at WalMart are of the determinate variety.  Determinates grow 3 or 4 feet tall, and bud and flower all at once, so the whole crop from one plant is harvested at the same time.  Indeterminate varieties bear for a whole season all along the plant.  Here, the short growing season and inadequate heat make for a bunch of baby green tomatoes from a determinate plant that never mature enough to eat.  We recently toured a greenhouse at BYU-Idaho that grew indeterminate tomatoes in a way I had never seen.  The plants were rooted in a plastic trench that had nutrients circulated through it.  The vines grew up and were suspended by strings and as a section matured and the tomatoes were harvested, the branches were plucked off and the stem was continuously wrapped around the whole 15 foot long section of plants at the base.  The active part of plant with flowers and fruit was always suspended along-side all of it’s neighbors and the whole assemblage grew slowly counter-clockwise.  The stems we saw were easily 20 or 25 feet long, and according to the gardeners, a year or so old.  We are about to give it a go again, but I think this year I will hedge my bet with a few shelves and a grow light in my boiler room.  That should keep it warm enough and by this time next year, it may look like Jack’s beanstalk decided to grow next to my water heater.