Even Alaska Growers Can Warm Up to Tomatoes

Linden Staciokas

1. Tomato plants are always labeled by their growth habit: determinate, indeterminate, or dwarf indeterminate (also known as ISI, as in indeterminate short-internode). Determinates have a bushy growth habit that stops at a certain height, and each plant puts off a set number of flowers before quitting for the season. The tomatoes all ripen about the same time, often earlier than indeterminates. In the Interior, most tomatoes grown outside of a greenhouse are determinates.

Indeterminates are perennial vines that will keep growing until weather or you stop them; in the right climate they can reach 50 feet and grow for years. Indeterminates produce blossoms as long as they grow, without the genetically preset limits of determinates. Their fruits ripen over a long time period, instead of all at once, and are generally considered more flavorful than those produced by determinates. Around here, indeterminates are usually classified as greenhouse tomatoes, although I have managed to grow several of the cherry varieties outdoors.

Dwarf indeterminates produce all summer, like traditional indeterminates, but the growth habit is short and bushy, like determinates. The fruits of existing dwarfs do not reach the size of some indeterminates, nor have taste tests judged them to be as sweet. I have never grown dwarf indeterminates, but I do know several Fairbanks gardeners who were satisfied with the way they performed in their regular garden plots.

2. A rich soil is essential to the development of healthy tomatoes. You may elect to provide all nutrients with a mixture of compost/manure/blood meal, or with commercial fertilizer, or with a combination of both. Regardless of the method, it must provide your tomatoes with the big three: nitrogen (good leaf and stem growth); phosphorus (photosynthesis, root development); and potassium (growth, disease resistance, carbon dioxide utilization). In addition, a well conditioned garden will furnish the nine other nutrients tomatoes require: sulfur, calcium, magnesium, copper, zinc, molybdenum, manganese, boron and chlorine.

3. If you are growing indeterminate (i.e., vining) tomatoes, and want to see the maximum number of fruit ripen before the snow falls, cut the tops of the vines off in early August. The existing blossoms will never form mature green tomatoes, let alone red ones, but sacrificing them will cause the energy of the plant to go toward ripening the already formed fruit.

4. If your tomatoes seem dry and excessively meaty, or not sweet enough for you, it may be that you planted the wrong type of tomato for your needs. Gardeners and seedsmen have a variety of ways to classify tomatoes, but a common typology divides them into four groups: tiny tomatoes (which includes cherry, small plum and currant types): salad, or slicing, tomatoes; large tomatoes; and processing, or paste, tomatoes.

The "tiny" category is usually restricted to tomatoes 1[1/2]-inch or smaller. Designed to be used whole, they are juicy and generally quite sweet. Examples of well regarded tiny tomatoes include Sweet 100, Pink Pear, Peachvine, Sun Gold, Broad Ripple Yellow Currant and Green Grape.

Salad tomatoes, which range in size from 2- to 6-inches in diameter and up to two pounds, include well-known varieties such as Stupice, Champion, Early Girl and Big Beef. They tend to be firm and somewhat seedy.

Large tomatoes have a girth over 15 inches and tip the scales at more than two pounds. These giants often have large "shoulders," due to the number of carpels (seed chambers) and the fact that these cavities can have differing rates of maturity. Popular entries in the large tomato classification include Mortgage Lifter, Giant Belgium and Oxheart. Many connoisseurs fold large tomatoes into the salad tomato category, instead of separating them out into a distinct grouping.

Paste tomatoes are the ones grown for processing into dried tomatoes, sauces and, well, paste. They are smaller in size and have a significantly higher ratio of meat to seeds and juice. People who plant these for eating generally do so out of ignorance, for the results are not very sweet, juicy, or easy to cut for sandwiches and the like.

5. Until September 1991, when I read the reasons in an article in Organic Gardening, I never understood why some of my stored green tomatoes ripened, while others just wizened. It turned out that I had been saving every globe in sight, failing to distinguish between mature and immature greens. According to authors Barbara Pleasant and Scott Meyer, `Tomatoes have two distinct growth phases: cell division and cell enlargement. Shortly after the flower is pollinated, the tomato ... produces ... as many cells as it can. After the fruit reaches a peak number of cells (about two to three weeks later), the little cells swell. The swelling stage takes much longer, requiring most of the season to complete."

Immature greens have not reached the point in their development where they can begin to ripen--they are still growing. To ripen, the tomato must be essentially beyond growth, old enough to experience "a sharp rise in respiration .. lose chlorophyll, (the source of its greenness) and develop lycopenes and carotenoids which give the fruit its final color." The later in this process, the more likely the fruit is to ripen.

Since reading this lucid description, I have restricted my storing to larger, lighter green tomatoes. The small, hard, dark ones are used in recipes, chopped up with a bit of sugar and fed to the chickens, or consigned to the compost heap.

Tomato "Tidbits"

At the end of last summer, after five years of writing this column, I decided it was time to switch from weeding the garden to weeding out my files. "A" through "S" were no trouble, but "T" was a disaster: more than 400 articles on tomatoes, and 148 of them had those big stars I put next to the title when I plan to develop a column around the information.

Drastic action was needed to prevent the literature on the love apple from beginning a lava-like cascade out of the file cabinet. The solution? Combine all those pieces of information too short to merit an individual article. So, this week and next will be a collection of all the tomato tips and facts I always meant to tell you and never did.

I kept the June 26, 1990 issue of the New England Farm Bulletin around with plans to expand upon this interesting but totally useless fact: Although tomatoes were considered poisonous and Thomas Jefferson a brave man indeed for growing them and actually eating the harvest, in 1825 a store owner in Boston made what is thought to be the "first commercial offering" of tomato seeds meant for culinary uses. There was only one variety, and it took 10 more years for two varieties to be offered, and five more years after that for a total of four varieties to appear on the shelves.

My next fact is a bit more relevant to the home gardener: We all know that the strongest tomato transplants are those reared with plenty of light and water, and that bottom watering is superior to spritzing the top of the soil. But why?

Barbara Pleasant offered a hypothesis in a March 1991 article she wrote for Organic Gardening, "Here's How To Care For Your Young Tomatoes." Her theory is that since tomatoes originated in the western Andes, mimicking the environmental conditions of that region will yield the healthiest transplants.

"There, in early summer, dry ground becomes saturated as rivers swell and flood, and since the equator is not far away, it's quite warm, while the sun shines brightly. Although the ground is soaked, the water comes from high mountains to the east; little moisture is provided by actual rainfall. Cloud cover is sparse. These facts offer two cultural techniques: bottom watering and use of bright lights."

The same article provided some welcome reassurance for those years when cold weather plagues early transplants. Clemson University conducted experiments two years running, in which tomato seedlings were subjected to 35-degree temperatures for as much as 18 hours a day for two weeks. When conditions normalized, these plants caught up to and kept pace with the control group: "Earliness, productivity and quality of the crop were unaffected."

Long-time readers may remember that for a few years I played around with hydroponic culture, a nonsoil system of plant-rearing in which roots dig into aggregate and are periodically bathed in a nutrient-rich solution. (Aggregate is a term referring to various non-soil mediums. Examples include gravel, lava rocks, washed sand, or an expanded oil shale product called haydite.) Both the plants and I became decidedly disinterested in the experiment about midway through the season.

If hydroponics leaves you cold, consider ring culture, which is said to combine the best aspects of hydroponics and dirt gardening. Tomatoes are planted in sleeves of paper or plastic, measuring about 10 inches around and filled with a sterile growing medium. These cylinders, open at top and bottom, rest on beds of aggregate. The plants end up with some roots in the soil, while the others go searching for the nutritious water that pulses over the aggregate. This technique came to my attention through a 10-line mention in an article that long ago had its origin and title ripped off, so you are on your own if you want to explore ring culture further.

Ever had one of those years when the blossoms seem to have a hard time understanding that they are supposed to turn into tomatoes? Faced with recalcitrant plants, many gardeners resort to Blossom Set, a spray that tricks flowers into setting fruit by convincing them that pollination has occurred.

I never could quite understand the mechanism that brought about this miracle. And it wasn't like I could bring the topic up in casual conversation, so I did what most people do when the unfathomable strikes, I developed my own mythology, centered around a vision of cloistered monks collecting excess pollen that an obscure European factory then pumped into cans. Until, that is, the January/February 1996 issue of The Tomato Club newsletter enlightened me: "Tomatoes, like all plants, have...hormones... When a tomato flower is pollinated, natural auxin is released from the base of the flower. This signals the plant to start the first stages of fruit development. If pollination does not occur, auxin levels do not rise, flowers fall off and no fruit is set. By spraying an auxin substitute like Blossom Set, you can trick a plant into thinking pollination has taken place and fruit will develop!"

And speaking of myths, every successful tomato gardener I know has a favorite recipe that he or she feels is the only way to guarantee success when growing this vegetable. I, too, have my own formula, and seldom pay attention to the rituals followed by others. However, the November 1995 issue of Organic Gardening carried a sidebar called "Gordon Graham's Prize-Winning Tomato Techniques."

Given that this guy has held the Guinness World Record for the heaviest tomato ever grown, I think it may profit readers to consider his methods. He has nine points: (1) "Find the Right Variety for You!" Don't try to grow a deep South favorite in Fairbanks; (2) "Extend Your Growing Season!" Protect them from cold and winds at both ends of the gardening season; (3) "Let the Sunshine In!" Provide at minimum eight hours of sun (real or artificial) a day; (4) "Give 'Em Room!" before and after transplanting; (5) "Build a Better Soil!", well-aerated, full of organic matter and with a pH of 6 to 6.5; (6) "Keep it Not Too Wet--Not Too Dry!"; (7) "Provide Good Nutrition!" Pay attention to what additions your soil may need in order to keep plants well-fed; (8) "Offer Support!" with stakes or cages; and (9) "Prune Well and Pluck Wisely!" by allowing just a single main stem and picking off all but a pair of tomatoes, thereby forcing the plant to put all its energies into those fruits.

For those people whose gardens don't seem to attract enough bees to assist in pollination, gardening writer Scott Meyer has a novel suggestion--interplanting snapdragons. These flowers do a good job of luring bees, and apparently there is some evidence that sprinkling yellow snapdragons amidst the vegetables fools the bees into visiting the nearby yellow flowers of the tomato plants.

I prefer to gently tap each of the flower clusters on each plant, as tomatoes are good self-pollinators, but this practice certainly can't hurt the process.

This same article,"15 Great Tomato Growing Tips," which appeared in the March 1995 issue of Organic Gardening, gave another piece of advice I don't remember hearing before. Actually, author Meyer was discussing tomato maniac Steve Draper, who had become quite frantic about damping off. With good reason: Draper typically starts seedlings for more than 80 tomato varieties, so this problem is no minor inconvenience to him.

According to the author, Draper "makes sure that his seed-starting medium is exceptionally well drained by mixing extra vermiculite and perlite into the already V and P rich store-bought mixes he buys. `Since I started making my seed-starting mixes extra light I never have damping off problems (a disease caused by excess moisture that can wipe out a tray of otherwise healthy tomato plants overnight),' swears Draper."

Here's another idea for improving crop production, albeit more bizarre than simply growing snapdragons: giving tomato plants carbonated water to drink. According to Stephen Reiners, Ph.D., who is the technical editor of The Tomato Club newsletter, "...researchers at the University of Colorado have discovered a way to apply CO2 in the field that has resulted in tomato yield increases of 8-15 percent. Carbonated irrigation water was applied through the trickle irrigation system."

Reiner understands that home gardeners cannot hope to duplicate this experiment, since the process of injecting carbon dioxide into water flow is prohibitively expensive. However, he suggests an alternative: "...take a plastic 2-liter bottle, make a small hole in the bottom, fill with carbonated water and place the cap loosely on the top. You can control the flow of water from the bottle by adjusting the cap so it takes about one hour for the water to flow out." (If you care to receive more information on this process, contact The Tomato Club; 114 E. Main Street; Bogota, NJ 07603 for a copy of the September/October 1993 issue, containing the article "A User's Guide to Photosynthesis.")

National Gardening magazine carried a feature called the "Maniacal Gardener." Amateur enthusiasts were paid about $600 and provided 800- to 1,000-words worth of space to describe their special gardening techniques.

In the January/February 1992 issue, a woman named Brenda Ramponi gave the seven steps she uses to guarantee that she has tomatoes by June 1, even though the frosting in her part of Indiana goes on until the third week of April. She starts the plants early and coaxes them along by transplanting repeatedly until each plant is so tall it outgrows its chimney-shaped pot (formed by taping one half-gallon milk carton on top of another). By the time she puts them outside, during the second week of April, the plants usually have not only blossoms, but baby tomatoes. So far, there is nothing unusual (except for the fact that she dilutes her seedling fertilizer to half strength by adding hot chamomile tea, which she believes prevents damping off).

What was new to me, was her method for keeping the tomatoes snug until the weather moderates. She transplants into holes 14 inches deep. The tips that are left showing are surrounded by a thick circle of densely packed straw, towering some 2 feet beyond the top of the plant. The doughnut is large enough that the outermost leaves have about two inches before they reach the sides. At night Ramponi covers the open center with very loose straw, uncovering the hole to sunlight every morning. After all danger of frost is past, she stops the nightly cloaking; in early May she removes the circle of straw entirely. I keep meaning to try this, but haven't managed to do so during the four years this snippet spent crammed in my file cabinet.

Frankly, the best advice is often found closest to home. Sometime ago I obtained a two-sided, one-page gem called "Tomato Fact Sheet," put out by the UAF Cooperative Extension Service. Among other things, it elaborated on the common notion that a tomato plant that produces little fruit but a mess of foliage is suffering just from an excess of nitrogen. The situation is not nearly so simple.

"If you feed it lots of nitrogen and flowers don't set, then you get a lot of vine growth. But nitrogen is not responsible for a tomato plant's failing to change gears from the vegetative to the fruiting state." Rather than providing a laborious explanation, the unknown author gave an example, using a garden that was home to six tomato plants: two Fantastics, two Delicious, and two Yellow Plum."

The gardener was picking ripe fruit from the first blossom cluster of Fantastic, the early blossoms of Delicious had dropped, and fruit was setting on flowers, 5 feet above the ground. The Yellow Plum was at 7 feet producing from the ground up. What's the explanation? Night temperature--not too much nitrogen."

Since the type and amount of fertilizer applied had been the same for each of the plants, it seems that "the Delicious needs a higher night temperature than the Fantastic for fist blossoms set. Variety, night temperature and fertilizer are important."

Linden Staciokas has gardened in Alaska for more than two decades and writes a gardening column for the Fairbanks newspaper.

For more tomato tips, see my article "Growing Healthy Tomatoes"