I finally made it around to pruning the tomato suckers and ended up taking off about 65% of the plant mass. It’s hard to bring yourself to pruning something so vibrant and lush that makes garden visitors extole about how gorgeous your tomato plants are. Suddenly they have a bad haircut.
But they have great airflow between the plants now which are really packed in together – and that is normally critical in the Pacific maritime grow region this time of year. Removing the suckers also gets the fruiting parts of the plant more sunlight which translates to more fruit. It still looks like a bad haircut though!
Here are the tomato plants before pruning:
And after:
To prune you take off the suckers, or the branches just below the fruiting branches. They are the ones that usually slope downward and they don’t bear any fruit themselves.
In this picture it’s the branch I have my dirty little hand on. Once I pruned I could get a better idea just how many tomatoes I have – a LOT! Which is good, I plan on canning, freezing and drying enough tomatoes for my family to eat until next summer. We eat a lot of tomatoes! Between pizza, snacking on dried tomatoes, barbeque sauce, ketsup for two small kids and that secret sauce on meatloaf, sloppy joes, tacos and tamale pie that means a lot of tomatoes. And I haven’t even gotten to the soups yet.
Since I stopped buying food at the grocers January 1 I’ve been acutely aware of just what foods we eat and how much. Tomatoes are the one canned food that I haven’t been able to give up. But that was so pre-summer of 2009. There is a new, local, seasonal BPA-free wind blowing in my yard.
How about you? What have you had a hard time giving up?
The hardest part for me is having a bad crop year and then having to do without or with much less until the next harvest season. It is at those times that my husband finds it very hard to remember why it is that we choose to eat and live this way!
My husband is chronically short on time and not as fond of gardening and yard work as I am frequently questions this too. He supports it from an ethical and health standpoint but it is easy to lose sight of it when you want orange juice for breakfast in July for instance. I bought him a carton for his birthday.
I am trying to find a farm in eastern washinton to buy boxes of canning tomatoes, either u-pick or not. I have searched all over the internet with no success. Would you have any ideas?
Hi Pixie, when I went to food alliance and plugged in WA tomatoes I found two, one in Wapato and one in Bingen:
Dickey Farms
Bingen, WA 98605-0405 USA
Phone: (509) 493-2636
dickeyfarmsinc@embarqmail.com
Certified Crops: Green Beans, Cabbage, Cherries, Cucumbers, Eggplant, Onions, Peppers, Spinach, Summer Squash, Tomatoes, Zucchini
Inaba Produce Farms, Inc.
Wapato, WA 98951 USA
Phone: (509) 848-2982
inabafarms@embarqmail.com
Certified Crops: Green Beans, Cabbage, Corn, Cucumbers, Onions, Peas, Peppers, Summer Squash, Tomatoes, Winter Squash, Watermelon
If that doesn’t get you what you want this site should: http://smallfarms.wsu.edu/farms/locate_search.asp.
Good luck! And now please come back and share your processing technique since my canning tomotoes are hanging heavy on the vine…
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