Would you look at all those cherry tomatoes! Erin and Tracy harvested over one-hundred pounds on Friday. Our tomato harvests happen twice a week, and we’re just coming into the peak season for these tasty treats. We’ll harvest again on Monday and probably get a similar amount. This season we are growing two types of cherry tomatoes, a red variety and a yellow variety. We picked these two because they taste great, but also because they are abundantly productive plants that grow a dependable fruit.
If you have been out here to the farm, you have seen the "caterpillar tunnels" we have along the south side of our drive. We grow our tomatoes inside one of these tunnels so we can regulate the flow of moisture to the plants--we use drip tape to irrigate and leaf mulch to preserve moisture in the soil--which goes a long way to keep the fruit from splitting. Growing tomatoes under protection also keeps their leaves dry, which prevents diseases from spreading since many tomato diseases take hold when rain splashes soil up onto the plants' leaves. The tunnel also makes it easy to trellis the tomatoes for better airflow and easier harvesting (which keeps the plants happy AND the farm crew happy).
These indeterminate plants will produce fruit until the frost kills them or they get ripped out of the ground to make way for another crop. If we were growing them in a stationary hoop house, we would have to pull out the tomato plants before they were done producing so we could plant fall and winter crops like lettuce, spinach, and kale. But our tunnels are MOVEABLE, which allows us to establish our cold-season crops next to the tunnels. The tomatoes get to grow for several more weeks before we remove them and move the hoops over the fall crops. By doing it this way we are able to harvest cherry tomatoes well into October--and who doesn’t love an extended tomato season?!
