Well I do remember the first tomato I ever saw. I was ten years old, and was running down one of those old-fashioned lanes, on either side of which was the high rail fence, then so familiar to all Ohio people. Its rosy cheeks lighted up one of those fence-corners, and arrested my youthful attention.
—A. W. LIVINGSTON, Livingston and the Tomato, 1893
Of all the vegetables I grew my first year, tomatoes turned out to be the most complicated. There was so much to know, and so much that could go wrong. Tomatoes suffer from all kinds of nasty diseases for which there are really no cures, organic or otherwise. Diseases are everywhere, it seems—they spring from the soil, they blow in on the wind, and they spread from plant to plant. There is not much you can do about them. Keeping the plants spaced a few feet apart helps. Watering with drip irrigation keeps the leaves dry, and that helps, too. There are copper soaps you can spray on the leaves and microbial fungicides you can mix into the soil, but mostly, it seems, you have to stand by and watch, wincing at the first sign of a yellowed leaf or a lesion on the fruit.
“Destroy all infected plants,” the gardening books advised heartlessly. This was poor advice for a first-time gardener. How could I destroy my tomato plants, after all the care I’d lavished upon them? I had built up the soil with compost and manure, and I had dutifully purchased every organic tomato product on the market, all the powders and sprays and even the red plastic mulch that was supposed to reflect up just the right spectrum of UV light for proper fruit growth. I’d spent so much on tomato-related products that I probably could have had the very finest tomatoes shipped to me directly from Italy and saved money.
So of course I didn’t rip out my tomatoes the first time I saw a spot or a little leaf curl. I stuck with them, nursing them along with my crude and ineffectual remedies, feeling like a Civil War doctor who has nothing but snake oil and dirty bandages to offer the wounded. Some tomatoes fared better than others under my inexpert care. Mammy’s Holland tomatoes and the cherry tomatoes both flourished, growing tall and sturdy, putting out loads of tiny green fruit. The Brandywines, with their enormous potato-shaped leaves, got wilty and spotty occasionally but seemed to put out plenty of new green leaves to replace the ones near the bottom that died away. The others were usually scraggly and anemic, with more leaves turning brown every day, but they kept producing fruit, so I encouraged them.
I was interested in heirloom tomatoes, with their funny names and colorful histories. While there is some argument over exactly what is meant by the term heirloom, it generally seems to mean any tomato whose seeds date back to before 1940. Heirloom tomatoes are grown for their extraordinary taste, but it was their unusual names that drew me in at first. Brandywine sounded heavenly, divine, and in fact, they were—I’d bought some from the farmers market and tasted them while mine were still small and green. I understood at once why they were considered the tomato lover’s tomato—they had that full, ripe, height-of-summer tomato taste that tomato lovers dream of all winter long.
One of my favorite tomato names was Black from Tula. The seed catalog described it as “dark, purply brown with green shoulders” with a “perfect acid-sugar balance and wonderful, fine texture.” But I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted to be able to say the name when people asked me what tomatoes I was growing. Black from Tula could be an obscure Miles Davis record, a spy novel set in a dark Russian bar, or a kind of forbidden caviar served with ice cold vodka. I might not have been hip and avant-garde enough to grow this tomato, but I had to try.
There were others I picked just for their names too. Eva Purple Ball called to mind crushed velvet, dance cards, and the way your grandmother looked when she was very young. Mammy’s sister back in Texas is named Lillian, and when I read about a tomato called Lillian’s Yellow Heirloom that had been passed down from one generation of a Texas family to the next, I got homesick and had to give it a try.
My all-time favorite tomato name, though, was Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter. The seed catalogs tell the story of Mr. M. C. Byles of Logan, West Virginia, who earned the nickname Radiator Charlie from the radiator repair business he opened at the foot of a steep hill on which trucks would often overheat. He didn’t know the first thing about breeding plants, but after a few years of cross-pollinating the four largest tomato plants he could find, he produced a delicious—and enormous—tomato and sold the plants for a dollar each, an exorbitant price back in the 1940s. People traveled from up to two hundred miles away to buy his seedlings. Radiator Charlie raised enough money from the tomatoes to payoff the $6,000 mortgage on his house in six years.
The tomatoes in my garden were still small in early August—although a few Sungold cherry tomatoes had ripened, and some of the larger tomatoes were starting to turn colors. Though they weren’t quite ripe, I had already figured out that heirloom tomatoes, even in their best moments, were funny-looking things. Brandywines are flat, misshapen fruits with deep lobes radiating out from the stem. Their skins are so thin that they would hardly survive a trip to the grocery store, which is why it is so hard to find them anywhere but at the farmers markets, where the farmers handle them as if they are made of blown glass. Many heirloom tomatoes are marked with catfacing, a kind of harmless scarring that happens when they are pollinated in cool weather, or concentric cracking, a ring of split tissue around the stem. I loved to throw these terms around once I’d learned them. Living this close to the wine country, anyone can talk about a wine’s “accessibility” or its undertones of chocolate and cassis. But how many people can comment on the distinctive catfacing of Dr. Neal, or praise the perfect sugar/acid balance and light citrus notes in Amish Gold?
• • •
OVER TIME, the tomatoes became the primary focus in my garden. They had won me over, with their strange habits and peculiar names. I was determined to get them through the summer, no matter what. But I never expected that my loyalty to the tomatoes would be tested the way it was one day when I stepped outside and found a pile of finely crumbled dirt in the path next to my tomato bed, and next to it, a hole in the ground about the size of my fist. My blood froze. Gophers. And they had gotten to within two feet of my Brandywine.
I knew this was serious. Unlike an infestation of aphids, which can take days, weeks, or even months to kill a plant—and whose damage can often be reversed—gophers kill with swiftness and certainty. They can plow through a bed of freshly planted spring bulbs and eat every last one before they have had a chance to sprout. They can pull an entire plant into their tunnel with one swift jerk, leaving behind only a bare stake and a small hole in the ground. All my neighbors had done battle with them; I wondered why I hadn’t seen any yet.
A friend of mine once told me that when she first moved to Santa Cruz, she spent the fall pouring over bulb catalogs and choosing the rarest, most exotic, and most expensive bulbs she could find for her garden. She planted hundreds of dollars’ worth of bulbs, and every one was gone within ten days, thanks to the gophers. She was pretty philosophical about it, shrugging her shoulders and saying to me, “Well, I bought them dinner, and I even buried it in the ground for them, so why should I be angry that they ate it?”
I had no idea how I might go about getting rid of a gopher or a mole. I didn’t think I could bring myself to kill them—after all, they are mammals, and one could even make the argument that they are cute, with their brown fur and little pointed noses. Mole was my favorite character in The Wind and the Willows, and I just can’t imagine how Ratty or Mr. Toad would have felt if their little chum were poisoned to death during a nice luncheon in the neighbor’s garden, or flushed out of his snug, cozy underground home by a rush of water or poison gas.
I couldn’t bring myself to trap them in a humane trap, either. I just didn’t want to come face-to-face with them. There were granular poisons I could have bought and poured down their holes, but I would have felt just terrible about poisoning them. I would have been kept awake at night by the thought of some mother or father gopher clutching its furry brown belly in agony while the rest of the family wailed inconsolably nearby.
For a while, I thought LeRoy might be able to catch a gopher. I saw him staring down a gopher hole one afternoon, thrusting his paw in as far as it would go, his ears tilted forward to listen for any sounds from the tunnel. He looked like he was onto something. I looked around for Gray, but she was sound asleep on the kitchen floor. Her gopher-chasing days were over, but as a young cat, she had been a quick and cunning hunter. She could have given LeRoy a lesson or two if she’d felt up to it, but apparently she didn’t. I stood at the back door, watching him circle the hole, his nose twitching. I took away his food dish quietly, to give an edge to his hunger.
He waited all day by that hole, and I let him. After all, he’s a cat—he has no job, he can afford to spend eight hours waiting for a gopher. That afternoon, staking my tomatoes, I heard a terrified chatter and spun around: Yes, he had cornered one, chased it into a bushy oregano, where he took turns batting it with a paw, thrusting his head in for a better look, and pulling away in amazement when it bit his pink nose.
I sat, frozen, thinking of my fragile heirloom tomatoes, glad that my cat had at last found gainful employment. The gopher was a goner for sure. I was already beginning to wonder what I would do with the body, if LeRoy left anything behind after he killed it. Should I throw it away, or should I leave it out as an example to the other gophers?
But in a flash, the gopher darted out of the bush and LeRoy, who was accustomed to a more leisurely kill, let it skirt the flower bed and vanish, unharmed, into its hole. LeRoy was not used to dealing with animals that burrowed in the ground. He looked totally amazed that his prey had disappeared like that. He stood over the hole, bloodthirsty, whipping his tail around madly. I wanted him to learn something from this experience, to remember what could happen if he toyed with his prey too long, so I left the garden quietly, locking the door behind me, leaving him to stare forlornly down the gopher hole, wondering what had gone wrong.
CLEARLY, I COULDN’T count on LeRoy to keep the gopher population in check. I searched around in the catalogs until I found something called a Mole Chaser and decided to give it a try. This device emits an underground vibration that according to the picture on the box, sends moles and gophers scurrying out of the garden with their ears covered but otherwise unharmed. Even better, the Mole Chaser is wind powered, which meant I wouldn’t have to fuss with rechargeable batteries or electrical cords. “Oh, but there’s one thing,” Scott said, reading the instructions while I took all the parts out of the package. “It says here you’ll need a few feet of galvanized pipe.”
Eight feet of galvanized pipe, to be exact. Contrary to the picture on the box, which showed gophers practically ducking to keep their heads clear of the churning windmill blades, this structure towered above the rest of the garden and appeared to work by sending wind-generated vibrations underground for a 100-foot radius. I put the windmill section together, ran down to the hardware store for my eight feet of half-inch galvanized water pipe, and mounted the Mole Chaser in the vegetable garden, near my half-ravaged tomato patch.
I stood watching the blades turn lazily in the afternoon breeze. The instructions reassured me that “a few minutes turning intermittently during a 24-hour period is all it takes,” but I gave the blades a good fast spin anyway, then listened closely for the sound of little gopher feet running in every direction. Silence.
“How will we know if it worked?” asked Scott, skeptical but trying to be supportive all the same.
“Oh, it’s working,” I told him. “Just wait.” I could already imagine the gophers picking up the first of these underground vibrations from somewhere under my vegetable garden, packing up their dishes and their books, and maybe a few family photos, and trundling off to the river for a nice long visit with Rat and Toad, who would make them feel right at home and invite them on many adventures, and even help them find a new home far away from the menacing, but otherwise harmless, vibrations of my tall, shining new Mole Chaser. It didn’t get rid of the gophers altogether—they reappeared from time to time, leaving distressing holes in the ground, then disappearing again—but it lorded over the vegetable bed in a sturdy, protective way, and I never lost another tomato plant.
In his book, The Great Tomato Book, Gary Ibsen remarks, “I’m sure there are many gardeners who are blessed with good soil year after year and don’t need to add any fertilizer to their tomato plants.” But for the rest of us, there is a full arsenal of organic tomato potions designed to strengthen the plants and protect them from pests and diseases. I use all of them, every year, and they keep the nutritional deficiencies and the wilt and the rust at bay.
Here’s what I do to ensure that my tomatoes grow up big and strong:
Start seedlings in flats with a sterile seed-starting growing medium. Tomato seedlings require uniform dampness; the sterile mixture is best for preventing mold and mildew.
Provide a strong light source during germination. Tomato seedlings respond best to up to eighteen hours of sunlight as the seeds are sprouting. I haven’t gotten around to buying a grow light, but I do keep my seedlings in the sunniest part of the house.
Feed early and often. I use a diluted liquid fertilizer that’s high in nitrogen and designed especially for young seedlings.
Move seedlings up to four-inch pots when they are a few inches tall, and introduce them to organic potting soil at this point. Plant the seedling as deep as it will go, burying part of the stalk in soil. It will grow roots along that part of the stalk, making it stronger and more able to adapt to the outdoors.
When plants are one to two weeks from planting time (April 1 in Santa Cruz), start to harden them up, or adapt them to the outdoors, by putting them outside for a few hours a day, and gradually increase the length of time until they are spending the night outdoors as well.
Plant into ground that has been well amended with compost and manure. At planting time, feed with a balanced, organic, granular fertilizer. Add bonemeal if you’ve had heavy rains, to replenish the calcium that might have been washed away. This will prevent blossom end rot, the squishy gray spots that sometimes appear on the bottoms of tomatoes.
Cover the ground with a red plastic mulch, available from some seed catalogs. The red plastic reflects light up to the plants from a particular part of the UV spectrum, encouraging bigger fruit.
Spray periodically with copper soap, available from many organic catalogs, to prevent rust and mold.
Spray with a mixture of dish soap and water to kill aphids. Sticky yellow traps also work well.
Water regularly, but do not overwater. Add a granular fertilizer one more time as the plants are setting fruit.