Tomatoes: that ubiquitous yet elusive fruit

As August unfolds, I am delighting in my first taste of summer's most luscious yet frustratingly short-lived fruit. For how ubiquitous they are, their harvest window is awfully short in this part of the world - 2 months of fresh tomatoes is a really exceptional season. Sometimes we just get 1. Amazing. I am going to enjoy every mouthful of this month.

They begin here, in April:

6-8 weeks later, depending on last frost, we plant them out:

We've had lots of trouble with blight in past years, so this year I decided to try a new approach. Fewer tomatoes & more infrastructure. We mulched them to keep the soil from being splashed up on their leaves.
(Johnny was carrying the last bale out just before this picture was taken..I swear!)

Then we set up some high-tensile trellising to support them up off the ground, and have been pruning them weekly to encourage lots of air flow and allow the leaves to dry out. Blight loves hot, damp conditions, so we're out to foil it. I bought high-tensile electrical wire, tensioners, and lots of T-bars. It started out well, with volunteer Thomas taking the lead on stake pounding:

However, the wire, which was only available in a 2500' roll, quickly sprang to disaster when unclipped. Imagine 2500' of stiff wire crossed and tangled like a 100lb ball of yarn. I swore a lot. Occasionally, Thomas & I found some good humour. I only took phots of the good-humoured moments. Don't be deceived...

 

 We did finally get the wire strung and pulled taught with the high tensile reels. 

The next task was to prune the tomatoes down to 2-4 main stems & clip them to the wires. Nobody tell me I don't have a green thumb.

We've been pruning them & clipping them to higher wires weekly ever since - here they are recently with their 1st fruits ripening!

And finally...their 1st CSA appearance last Friday!

Now...lest you mistakenly think we have won the battle this year, I need to point out that I'm pretty sure I've seen early signs of blight in the crop. We're diligently pruning out any affected leaves to try to stave it off. So far so good but Tuesday's rain may have worked against us. Also, we've had a brand new alien appear at the farm this year: Hornworms! These disgustingly large beasts are a nasty brute to squish and many of us have been seriously gooed in the process already.

Yes..that is a bucket of its companions in the background... here's a close-up. My intern Carrie & I had a squish-fest with these guys after an understandably queasy-stomached volunteer collected them while pruning...

Here's to plenty of blts, pastas, salads, salted slices, quiches, wraps, sauces, salsa and other tomato-y goodness. I'm just saying, these fruits are elusive at a farm scale...they better be GOOD.