As the sun just begins to show its face over the horizon, things are already heating up at our booth at the Farmers’ Market. It’s the first Saturday in June, and we have the first local tomatoes arrayed on our table. Their bright red glow can be seen from either end of the market, and customers are lining up. It’ll be a fast-paced hour or two until we sell out. Some customers will leave with fewer pounds than they wanted – vowing to arrive earlier next week. Nothing (except maybe sweet corn) packs in the crowds like luscious, vine-ripe tomatoes. So, as market farmers, tomatoes are one of our foundation crops for the entire market season, and it’s important to do as good a job as possible growing them.
Tomatoes come in all sizes, shapes, colors and growth habits. It’s important to understand some of the jargon to help in selecting the perfect tomatoes to grow. First, tomatoes are designated as open-pollinated or hybrid. In a nutshell, open-pollinated tomatoes will come true to type if you save seed from them, and hybrids typically will not. Yes, there’s a lot more to it, but for us, as market growers, this suffices to help us make variety decisions. Well, what about heirlooms? Heirlooms are by definition, open-pollinated, are usually defined as having been in existence since before WWII, and come in an amazing variety of shapes, colors and tastes. Heirlooms may be just the ticket for attracting a crowd to your market display.
Tomatoes are typically designated as determinate or indeterminate (and some sub-categories). Determinate varieties produce a fruit cluster between each stem, and the stem terminates in a fruit cluster. They can be as small as 18 inches or as tall as 5 feet. They usually have a concentrated fruit-set, and don’t continue to produce as well past a few weeks. Indeterminate tomato varieties reach a height of 5 to 8 feet, and produce a fruit cluster on a stem between every third leaf. In the absence of disease, they continue to produce fruit over a much longer season. They will need more attention to fertility over the season, and a sturdier support system.
How important are the disease resistance designations? Hybrids often come with an array of disease resistant designations after their name, such as VFN (Verticillium, Fusarium, Nematode), or F2TMV (Fusarium race 2, Tobacco Mosaic Virus). Usually, the catalog will “decode” these for you, and if you have a particular disease problem on your farm, it may be helpful to select varieties that are resistant. But, the fact that most OP tomatoes don’t have those designations doesn’t mean they don’t have disease resistance, only that they haven’t been tested in the lab or field. And, with OP varieties, if you select the best, healthiest plants when saving seed, you’ll “breed in” resistance to the diseases most prevalent on your farm.

Choosing varieties
The size, shape and color are also important to selecting varieties. Your market will determine a lot of these choices. Our market wants a slicing tomato, so a variety that is 4-6 oz. will likely go unsold – or have to be sold at a lower price. For slicers, we like varieties over 8 oz., and 10-12 oz. is even better. Our market likes yellow tomatoes – and, hey, they’re always more expensive in the store! So, we always select some yellow tomatoes to grow. And, what would a market booth be without cherry tomatoes? We love them – and more importantly, so do the customers. All these considerations go into variety selection. That said, we’d like to share some varieties that work really well for us. For red, we like Bush Celebrity in the high tunnels and Tropic outdoors. Tropic is an open pollinated tomato that has good disease resistance (VFN), is indeterminate, has nice 8-10oz fruit, and can also work as a greenhouse tomato. It has taken us a long time to find a large gold that we really like, but we have finally decided on Carolina Gold, both in the tunnels and outdoors. Does that mean we won’t grow anything else? Come on, we’re market growers, of course not, but for now, it’s our main choice. Cherry tomatoes are really important. We market them as a mix of several varieties – really eye-catching. We like Sungold (who doesn’t?), yellow pear, Green Grape (makes neat tomato sauce!), Dr. Carolyn (light yellow/white), Sweet Chelsea(our red for years) and this year we are trying Sweet Baby Girl – it has great reviews! Plus, we use 3 grapes – Sweet Olive (red), Chiquita (pink) and Morning Light (yellow and EXPENSIVE!, but worth it).
In most production systems, tomatoes produce best when grown from transplants, so producing top quality transplants is really important. First, don’t skimp on cell size. Some recent research at the University of Florida’s Southwest Florida Research and Education center suggests that for an early market, bigger is better. To read the entire report, go to this URL: http://www.imok.ufl.edu/veghort/trans/biggeris.htm. For our early, high tunnel tomatoes, we use jumbo (deep) 606’s. Because we are expecting a very early tomato to capture those early tomato sales, we want an 8-week transplant that is ready to bloom on our transplant date. To have enough soil volume for the root mass necessary to grow that large plant, we use the deep cells. For later transplants, we often use 806’s (48) cells, although we have better transplants when we use regular 606’s. Also, we don’t skimp on fertility. If the transplants aren’t a healthy bright green, they’re probably missing on fertility. They will catch up once they’re transplanted to the field, but we’d lose time getting that first ripe tomato. We also need to think about light, warmth and moisture. Light is really critical for a sturdy transplant. A bright, sunny greenhouse is the best option. It doesn’t have to be tropical warm – we leave our thermostat at about 45F. With a germination mat for bottom heat, the cooler air seems to help keep our transplants shorter and thicker, rather than tall and spindly. All transplants need appropriate moisture – don’t let them dry out or over water. I have to admit we have sometimes forgotten to water, and had some pretty pitiful plants that recovered once we remembered to water, but it’s not an ideal situation!
We push the season with our high tunnels, so no longer push it outdoors. If you do set tomatoes out before last frost date, be sure to have some row cover on hand ‘just in case’. It’d be a shame to lose your tomato crop to an untimely late frost. The row cover is good insurance. In cooler climates, you also might want to use row cover just to boost temperatures early in the season.
In most climates, irrigation is essential for a commercial planting. Mid-season drought is very common, and can really decrease production. Drip and overhead are common ways to irrigate and both work well. However, drip irrigation has some advantages: it uses less water because it puts it right at the root zone, there is little evaporation, it doesn’t get moisture on the leaves which helps in foliar disease prevention, and it can be run on a low pressure system.
Mulch can be very advantageous. Black (and other color) plastics have the advantage of warming the soil and helping to manage weed growth. Organic mulches cool the soil, help manage weeds and build soil organic matter, but can be expensive to buy, and labor intensive to apply. Both types help keep moisture in the soil and help with prevention of foliar diseases by preventing soil splashing on the leaves. The advice seems to be: mulch with something if at all possible.

Trellising
Most tomatoes need a support system of some type. Although folks have let tomatoes sprawl on the ground for years, we find that too many fruits spoil with that method. Even with good mulches, there is a lot of spoilage. There are several ways to support tomatoes. Some growers still stake each plant separately. A lot of growers use a cage method. This is particularly effective with vigorous determinate plants. A great cage can be made using concrete reinforcing mesh. A six-foot section makes a perfect size for most tomatoes. Just be sure to stake it to the ground in some way if you have high winds. The method used by most commercial growers is called ‘Florida weave’. It involves driving a stake between every two plants and ‘weaving’ twine around the stakes and in a figure 8 between the plants. It works well with determinates, and less well, but okay, with indeterminates – just get taller stakes. Your extension office probably has a production sheet on tomatoes with drawings that can explain this a lot better than we can in words. Or, if you have Internet access, just do a search on “Florida weave tomatoes”.
We don’t find that well-grown tomatoes have a lot of pests. In early spring, we sometimes have an aphid problem – especially in the high tunnels. If it gets ahead of our natural predators, we will use a soap spray to control them. Some of the most spectacular damage is done by the hornworm. They can defoliate plants and damage a lot of fruit. In the high tunnels, we combat it by closing the windows before dusk, which keeps the moth out. Outdoors, we find that the Braconid wasp does an excellent job controlling hornworms. Don’t kill any hornworm that is parasitized (has a bunch of white cocoons bristling on its back), and they’ll work for you too. We do handpick and crush any that are not parasitized. BT can be used for hornworms, but the problem has never been large enough for us to bother with spraying. Books about tomatoes usually have several pages on pests, but these two are our primary ones, and don’t do a lot of damage. Because we grow without synthetic sprays, we think our predator population is our best pest management tool.
Tomatoes do have a lot of possible disease problems. The two we see the most of are early blight and blossom end rot. We control most blossom end rot by keeping the tomato plants evenly moist with appropriate irrigation – which also helps control splits. Early blight is another story. It is indigenous on our farm, and we don’t control it. We know it is going to defoliate our plants and shorten their productive season, so we use successive plantings of tomatoes to combat it. When the plants get less productive, we take them out and start harvesting the next planting. Your local extension office will surely have a publication on growing tomatoes that has a lot of pertinent information on the diseases prevalent in your area, with suggestions for control. We suggest growing healthy transplants from resistant varieties, in full sun, in healthy soil as the best ways to avoid most diseases.
So, to grow those healthy transplants in healthy soil, what is needed? Again, there is a lot of information published on tomato nutrition. We think there are two very important parts to this. The first is to have healthy soil, with good organic matter levels and lots of microbial activity. If you’re growing using organic methods, you’re probably already there. Secondly, to make sure the nutrition levels are there, we use a commercially available, pelleted chicken manure product with a 3-4-3 analysis. For our tomatoes, we use about 10 # per 100 sq. ft. and find that level grows great crops. That’s about 125# N per acre for the entire cropping period. If you have terrific, on-farm compost, or a great cover crop program, this supplementation might not be necessary, but we consider it good insurance.
Now, you’ve grown and transplanted the prettiest plants in three counties, attended to proper fertility in the field, set irrigation ‘just in case’ of a dry spell, protected those babies in cool weather, mulched and staked them, and, hardest of all, waited 65-80+ days for that first harvest. So, harvest one or two, take them into the kitchen, and enjoy them for supper. The best thing (except for the money; no, forget that; THE best thing!) about market farming is getting the first harvest of those great veggies for your own meals. In a few days, you’ll have enough for the masses, which brings us to our last topic, harvest and post harvest handling.
We try to harvest tomatoes when they are cool – like first thing in the morning. ‘Course, that’s when everything needs to be harvested, so we don’t always make it. We harvest into 2 gallon buckets so those ripe tomatoes don’t get crushed. Then, in the shade, we take each tomato, wipe it with a damp cloth, and sort it into grades. We find that they sell better if a box contains only one size range – and the customers do less damage looking for that biggest fruit. We also sort out culls into another box and sell them separately at a reduced price. We use tomato boxes and never put tomatoes more than two layers deep in the box. Then, we put the boxes in a cool spot to wait until market. Be careful if you have a cooler, tomatoes can get chill injury under 50 degrees F, which is warmer than you’ll keep most of your produce. Since we harvest the day before market, we just put ours in the basement or an air-conditioned room. Cherry tomatoes are mixed and put into pulp pint boxes and into a cherry tomato master that holds 12 pints. It’s a beautiful presentation on the market table!
Marketing? If you’re selling at a Farmers’ Market, having the first ripe tomatoes will capture the market for the season and keeping tomatoes on your table all season will keep those customers. A well grown, ripe, bursting-with-flavor tomato markets itself. Just put them out on your table, and be ready to catch the money thrown at you – and HAVE FUN!

Paul and Alison Wiediger are the owners of Au Naturel Farm in Pleasureville, Kentucky. Besides being veteran vegetable growers, they are experts in hoophouse production. Their book, Walking to Spring, provides detailed advice on growing year-round in unheated hoophouses. It is available for $15 from GFM Books at 800-307-8949; www.growingformarket.com