Back in late July, when the tomato harvest dried up, I started saying there will be more tomatoes in September. Now it is fall, September is almost over, and there have only been a handful of tomatoes.
What happened? We still have tomato plants in the ground and we still hope to get a good haul of tomatoes. Problem one was the chickens, and they have been fenced out. The plants were looking lush and green until the last round of rain. Suddenly there were yellow with dying branches everywhere. Part of the problem is the soil. At the end of the season, we plan to retire the two rows where tomatoes is currently growing and turn it back into lawn. Despite the fact that there is more organic matter (the holy grail of organic farming) in this soil than in the “big field”, everything we have grown here has failed to thrive. The soil dries out much more quickly, and I suspect also gets waterlogged when it rains, starving the roots for oxygen. So, bad place for the tomatoes. Thirdly, pest problems have been escalating all summer.
The result of all this is that the tomatoes have been rotting on the vine before they are ripe. In a last ditch effort to get around this problem we have started picking them at the mature green or first blush stage to ripen them indoors. A tomato ripened off the vine is not as flavorful as a vine ripened tomato, but still better than a grocery store tomato and certainly better than no tomato.
Other than biting our nails about the tomatoes, the week has been busy with compost pile maintenance, disking, pest control efforts (which obviously failed on the bok choi), digging sweet potatoes (in the shares next week!), sowing seeds, transplanting seedlings, and trying to keep everything watered. We have spotted what we think is a Cooper’s Hawk harassing the chickens and are enjoying the beautiful sunsets over the cotton gin and stargazing through the clear fall sky.