The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.68: Epic Tomatoes

Episode Date: January 23, 2016

I stumbled across Craig LeHoullier's book, Epic tomatoes, by accident one day when I was trolling the internet looking for episode ideas. I bought his book on a whim, and am I ever glad I did. Many years ago, Craig fell in love with growing tomatoes, and then, specifically, heirloom tomatoes, and he eventually put everything he learned about tomato history, and the art and science of growing beautiful tomatoes, down on paper. I roared through the book. And then, impressed with what I read, I asked Craig to come on the show to talk about his passion. And, it is a passion. Craig figures he has five thousand tomato varieties in his collection, and that he's personally grown out more than 2000 of them. This episode: part one of our conversation, which focuses on heirloom history, and practical considerations for starting tomatoes in the nursery and pruning them in the field. Part two, which includes a best-of varietal list for commercial growers, comes out next week.

You know, if I think back, I've probably been responsible for either reintroducing or introducing 100 or 150 varieties back into circulation, which is gratifying to me. Because we're getting to grow, people are getting to choose from varieties that all of their ancestors may have grown, but due to the rush to hybrids, have just been forgotten. We can't let seed saving and growing of heirloom varieties become a fad. There always needs to be a core of people sitting under the inevitable fads to keep them going, so that when the fads circulate back around to heirlooms, they're there and they exist again. We can't allow varieties to be lost, because once they're lost, we'll never have them again. This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant is a website and podcast that explores what good farming looks like. At theruminant.ca, you'll find photo-based blog posts, essays, gear and book reviews, as well

as show notes for each episode of the podcast. I tweet at ruminantblog, and you can email me day or night at editor at the ruminant.ca. Okay, on with the show. Hi folks. So the guy you heard at the top of the intro is called Craig LaHoullier. I stumbled across Craig's book, Epic Tomatoes, by accident one day when I was trolling the internet looking for episode ideas. I bought his book on a whim, and am I ever glad I did. Many years ago, Craig fell in love with growing tomatoes, and then, specifically, heirloom tomatoes.

And he eventually put everything he learned about tomato history and the art and science of growing beautiful tomatoes down on paper. I roared through the book. And then, impressed with what I read, I asked Craig to come on the show to talk about his passion. And it is a passion. Craig figures he has 5,000 tomato varieties in his collection, and that he's personally grown out more than 2,000 of them. And as you just heard him say, he has been personally responsible for helping to resurrect 150 varieties of tomatoes, including the Cherokee Purple, which, if you know your tomatoes,

is kind of a big deal. I'm going to release our conversation in two parts. The first one covers Craig's background with tomatoes, a bit of interesting history, and some practical considerations regarding starting tomatoes in the nursery and pruning them once they're planted out. In part two, Craig talks about how we classify the colour of tomatoes, and provides his list of the best heirlooms to grow if you're a commercial grower who really wants good flavour, but needs to be thinking about yields too. Okay, so here's part one of our conversation. I started by asking Craig how he got started growing tomatoes. It began with a simple home garden that he and his wife planted, and sort of took off from there. and his wife planted and sort of took off from there. As people who know me will tell you, I'm one of those people who get really bored with the ordinary and get really antsy and want to start

diversifying. So I started my own seed. And then when commercial catalogs seemed to be quite limited in the varieties they offered, I joined the Seed Savers Exchange. That was the key moment that pretty much not only changed my gardening life, but my whole life, just in the number of stories and the genealogy of varieties that have come into my possession over the years, which lead to the real answer to this question, which is since 1981, I have grown somewhere around 2,000 different varieties and have in my possession probably over 5,000 different varieties of seed. Quite a bit of that from some recent breeding projects that I'm helping to co-lead to create this or that type of tomato. So it's been quite a journey. It's always exciting. It makes

every garden worth waiting for and something unusual and different and as a foodie, absolutely delicious. The person who got me interested in gardening in the first place really was my grandfather when I was two or three years old when he used to walk me through his gardens. two or three years old when he used to walk me through his gardens. And my father picked up the weed from that. And when I was six or seven, he hand dug our first garden in the backyard. So all of these seeds that were planted in me of a love of gardening then went dormant while I grew up and dated and worked and did all that stuff. And it didn't pop out again until my early 20s when I was married. But that search for

the tomatoes that my grandfather grew that I loved was one of the things that fueled my searching databases and old seed catalogs to see if I could recreate the palette of varieties if I could recreate the palette of varieties that would have been available to gardeners in the U.S. in the late 1800s to early 1900s. So I could find and grow those varieties and then compare them to myself. So there is this class of heirlooms that are ones that seed catalogs sold. There's the class of heirlooms that families always had, whether they were from Europe or popped up in their garden through mutations or crosses. And my garden is populated with both types of heirlooms, as well as some of the better hybrids, because, you know, we grow to eat,

and we can't take a class of plants and say they're lesser or they're not good. What we have to do is understand the strengths and weaknesses and value of each class of plants and then decide for ourselves which we wish to grow in our gardens. So Craig, maybe I would love to hear about, I don't know, one or more tomatoes history. You've given some great examples of the book, and I thought maybe you could start with the Cherokee Purple, since it has a little bit of you in that history. It's kind of a personal one for you. So the story in Cherokee Purple is as frustrating as with many, many heirlooms, is that we know a little bit, but we never know quite as much as we want to know. So we know that a man named John D. Green,

who lived in Sevierville, Tennessee, received this tomato from a friend or neighbor. They themselves received it from the Cherokee Indians with a statement that it's at least 100 years old. And we know that there are Cherokee Indians in that area of Tennessee. So the Cherokee Indians gave it to the neighbor friend who gave it to Mr. Green. He happened to notice in a National Gardening Association magazine seed swap that I was someone who was really interested in collecting tomato varieties. So he chose me to send the seed to. 1990, when I received that envelope, was just a letter saying, here is a purple tomato the Cherokee means.

Gave my neighbors. It's supposedly 100 years old. Hope you like it. It was the very first of the so-called black, which are the tomatoes that retain some chlorophyll. The green over red gives them a darker flesh color and quite a darker color externally when you put the skin over it. It was the first. And I grew it and absolutely loved it.

And this was in Pennsylvania at the time. And this also raises an interesting attribute about most gardeners I've seen is that when we find something great, we want to give it away. So I couldn't wait to share this with people, and I called my friend Jeff McCormick, who ran the really wonderful seed company, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange at the time, said, Jeff, I've got a tomato for you I'm going to send you. He grows it, called me the next year,

said it's a really fine-tasting tomato, but it has a color that looks like when you bang your thigh into a table and you get that bruise. I'm not sure people are going to accept a tomato of that color, but I'll sell it in my seed catalog. And so he did. And another dose of serendipity about this is we then a few years later moved to North Carolina. There is a really good grower here named Alex at Corrigan Farms who was looking for a tomato to feature at the farmer's market.

And he read about Cherokee Purple and started growing it and loved it. And people came from miles around to buy his Cherokee Purples. All of a sudden, we're at a cooking school doing a course on tomatoes together. And he realizes who I am and I realize who he is, and we get to meet. And so there's a lot of six-degree-of-separation magic just around the story of Cherokee Purple. All I can say is I'm forever indebted to Mr. Green for sending me that tomato and incredibly humbled that just by putting a name onto a tomato and sending it to a seed company,

it has caught on to the degree it has. So when people say, what are your favorite tomatoes? I always have to mention Cherokee Purple at the top of the list because of just the personal value and uniqueness of that story to me. And in a way, it has led to a lot of what came after, probably including the book to some degree. So, Craig, maybe I would love to hear about, I don't know, one or more Tomatoes history. When you wrote to me, you mentioned specifically the Mexico midget as something you'd love to talk about. So what makes the Mexico midget as something you'd love to talk about. So what makes the Mexico midget special? Number one, Mexico midget is tiny. And when I say tiny, I mean the size of a pea. And one of the ways that I try to show that, I don't think it's a shot that was used in my book, but a photographer actually did it, is I went to a grocery store

and bought a sugar snap pea pod, surgically opened it up, removed the peas, and could fit four Mexico midgets in where the peas sat. So it's tiny, which means it probably is very, very similar to the tomato that was the origin of tomatoes thousands of years ago in the South American coast, the mountains of Chile. And if you were to go there and look for wild species, you would probably find tomatoes that just look like Mexico midget. So in a way, you get to grow an ancestor of everything there was to come. How I came to acquire it, I get this beautifully handwritten letter from a fellow named Barney Lehman in California, and he was 80 at the time.

This was back in 1990, so I'm sure Barney has passed on now. But he had this beautiful handwriting. So another point, handwritten letters, snail mail, imagine that in the time of the Internet. You don't even imagine what it was like to still get these wonderful letters in the mail. And I actually have a box with every letter that everyone who's ever sent me seed has sent me, hundreds and hundreds of letters, and I get to look at their handwriting,

and there's often a lot about their lives in there as well. But Barney shared this seed with me, and he said that his brother, who was a truck driver, acquired seeds of Mexico midget coming through Texas. He delivered hay in a route through Mexico into Texas. He suspected it grew wild in Mexico, and he thought it was a joke tomato because of its tiny size. And he said they call it Mexico midget, and he thought it was a joke tomato because of its tiny size. And he said, they call it Mexico midget, and he sent it to me. And I grew it, and I was amazed at its small size. I was amazed at how difficult it was to pick, because it didn't grow in nice, fruitful clusters like sun gold or sweet million. It grew more like blueberries, where they ripened only slowly on

any given little cluster. And so you had to hunt and peck through this monstrous plant to pick these tomatoes. My seedling customers here in Raleigh have become addicted to it because of the versatility of being able to use these tiny tomatoes in frittatas and omelets and quiches and salads. They're just little microbursts of the ultimate tomato flavor. So they become almost legendary here because nobody seems to have the accurate strain, the teeny tiny fruity one, but me.

The other seed companies that sell it it it has become crossed and the food is too large and i'm trying to work on that with companies like the seed savers exchange to get them to be able to offer this authentic strain something else unusual about it is it it is the most it is the hugest pain in the neck to germinate you'll seed it with all of your other varieties and everything pop up within a week sometimes me Mexico midget takes a month or more. So I think it's a relationship to being a wild tomato. It may need some other germination factor that I haven't discovered yet. And, in fact, the best way to germinate them is to take the pot that you grew them in the previous year.

It's inevitable that ripe fruit drop into that pot and the seeds go into the soil. Then just put it out in the spring and watch, and they start popping up. And you can get hundreds of seedlings just from looking in the pot that you grew it in the previous year, whereas if you intentionally try to seed it, it takes forever. So it's a tiny tomato that we just told a long story about. Isn't that interesting? It's so cool. So cool. I really just anyone who you mentioned the book too, and anyone who reads it, I certainly have to imagine just immediately wants to try them. So Craig, I'd like to turn the conversation towards some of the practical considerations

of growing tomatoes because a large part of your book focuses on that. And as a grower, I mean, I found it so helpful. I thought I'd start with a confession, Craig. You know, I'm a commercial grower and I think most people assume, most customers assume I'm probably therefore really, really good at growing all the stuff I grow. But the truth is that, and I'm a little bit embarrassed to say this, but I've struggled to grow consistently really good tomatoes. And even though I get the sense your book was slightly more kind of written for the home gardeners, there's a ton in here that I learned. And I guess I'm saying this because I try and maintain a faith that I'm

not the only one, that I'm not the only commercial grower who still hasn't mastered all of the crops that I grow or they grow. So anyway, it was really helpful. Well, one of the things I actually like to tell people at my talk is that tomatoes are quite ephemeral. And, you know, a saying I like to use is that the greenest gardener can turn over a plot of land in their yard and plant tomatoes and have outstanding success. And that will completely fool them into thinking that they've got it nailed. And the most expert gardener, and I won't say that I'm an expert gardener, but I've been growing tomatoes for a long time,

will have a season where it's nothing but failure upon failure. And so what you're describing is not uncommon. And I think people, it's important for people to understand that some crops are, I don't know if any crop is a slam dunk, but some of them you've got maybe a particular pest to control, or you've got a particular disease to control, or you have to pay particular attention to the weather. variety you're growing will not like where you're growing it, how you're growing it, the weather, the critters, or the diseases, or that particular variety just doesn't like your climate. So in a way, what I tried to do in the book is take people on the 30-year journey that

I've been on to identify some really good ones, some great ones. However, I still can't guarantee you that every one of those great varieties will grow great for me every season. But as you identified also, there are some things that I've discovered over the years that I think can help to encourage success more often than not. Well, on that note, let's talk about some practical considerations and try and help people grow better tomatoes. And we're not going to cover everything your book covers because it's pretty comprehensive, but I've just selected some stuff that jumped out at me and we'll kind of roughly stick

to, you know, the chronology of the growing season. So let's start in the nursery, Craig. And the first thing that I wanted to ask you, because you mentioned it in your book. So I farm on leased land and I don't have any long-term tenure where I farm. And for that reason, I haven't invested in a proper heated nursery or anything like it. And so I'm not able to maintain, you know, ideal conditions, and especially when I start seeds really early. But then you seem to suggest in your book that you, at least for large periods of your history growing tomatoes, didn't have ideal nursery conditions. And you seem to think that's okay. Yeah, I actually don't have them at all.

I mean, so what I'm equipped with when I start my thousands of plants is a sunny window, so it faces south and it gets sun. I've got a very inexpensive heat mat that I put my flats on. I've got an unheated garage with very inexpensive, just basic shop lights with fluorescent tubes in them. And then I've got my driveway. And just by using movement of the plants and understanding the needs of seedlings at different points, but that allows me without a greenhouse at all to produce 5,000 incredibly healthy seedlings

that hit the ground running every year. I've been doing this for a while, and it still seems to astound people because I'll get emails saying, I'd love to come see your greenhouse. I'd love to come see your setup. I'll say, well, you can come, but you're going to see a house and a garage and a driveway. A lot of me is scrambling around. Maybe the biggest breakthrough is realizing that I can plant 50, up to 50 seeds in a one, one and a half inch cell and produce two or 3000 seedlings in a one by two foot area. Well, that's the thing, Craig, sorry, I'll interrupt and say that was that jumped off

the page at me. And I don't know, I don't know how common that is with, you know, more experienced growers. But I think I think you've just given me a breakthrough. This, I call it, I mean, I just, I don't know if I read this in your book or I just named it, but I'm calling, I'm for this, for this interview, I'll call it cluster planting. So, so yeah, please, please explain that because this is what I assume is going to allow you to grow many seedlings in your house as opposed to needing the space of a larger nursery. Yeah. So what I love to use is the Rigid 50-cell plug flats. And the company I get them from is Johnny's Selected Seeds in Maine, but I'm sure other people carry them. And they've got a hole at the bottom. The total area that this takes up is about one by two feet. And I use a sterile soilless mix. You know, there's Phaffer 3B, there's Metromix 360, there's many other brands,

but it's the, and I guess what they are is they're made up of a combination of wood ash, perlite, et cetera, et cetera, but there's no dirt in them. And I think one of the mistakes a lot of gardeners will use is they'll go to a big box store and get a bag of garden soil and there's just not enough air circulation drainage and you have the propensity to get damping off in diseases so i've never lost a seedling to damping off disease using this method I fill my cells and water them and then surface plant. And I do this with lettuce, eggplant, herbs, most flowers, peppers, tomatoes. I'll plant, you can plant one if you want, but I'll plant up to 50 seeds to a cell.

And then I will sprinkle that mix over the top of the seed just until I can't see the seed anymore. So we're not even talking a sixteenth of an inch. It's probably a thirty-second of an inch. I mist it lightly with water and then drape plastic over the top and put it in the sunny window on the heat mat, and I flip that plastic every day because what I don't want is any fungal diseases to start growing in there and by flipping it you know if you're on if you get the sun shining you're on a

heat mat you'll get condensation that would build up on the plastic by flipping it the sun then comes each day and dries off the surface I get germination of tomatoes within three or four days peppers maybe six to eight, eggplant six to eight, basil and lettuce will take sometimes two days that way. But my germination is excellent. Usually between 98 and 100 with safe seed that's 10 years or newer, even sometimes back to 12 or 14 years, I get really good germination. So that's once most of the seeds have germinated, you remove the plastic and just make sure that it doesn't dry out. You've sowed those seeds very shallow. And so I will top water at that point just to make sure that they're good and wet and those

roots have a lot of moisture to take up. When they start getting to the point where a little bit leggy, I just turn them around 180 degrees so that they're stretching the other way. So we'll take it to there. That's how I get my seeds started. I find the success of it is in how you do the transplanting because clearly you now have 20, 30, 40 plants all growing together. And if you don't use that nice fluffy soilless mix, you can get a lot more root damage. But by using the materials that I do, the plants pop apart quite easily

and transplant very well into the next size container. So far, you're not taking up a lot of space and you're indoors in your house where it's nice and warm. So then how do you proceed when now it is time to transplant? Sure. Well, what I do is I try to get them, I don't let them stay in front of the window very long because they will get leggier and leggier. So what I have in my garage, and it gets down to 40, 45 degrees, which is fine, because what you want is good root growth.

You don't need a lot of top growth early on. And I lower the fluorescent tubes so that the surface of the light bulbs are within about an inch of the growing tip of the plant. And that's where they'll, once they leave the sunny window, they'll then go into the garage to grow on there. And what I do if there are days where it's partly cloudy or it's sunny and it's and there are days where it's partly cloudy or it's sunny and it's maybe 45 or 50, you want to start hardening them off even at this point. And I ease them into the sun.

So maybe it's a partly cloudy day. I'll put a table out in my driveway and I'll move those flats out and I'll give them an hour of sun. And then I'll move them back under the light. Then the next day, maybe I'll give them two hours of sun. But the sooner you can get them into the sun, then they won't be leggy at all. You'll get good root growth and good development. And a lot of times they'll only spend maybe a week or two under the grow lights, but they'll live in my garage until they get their first set of true leaves, maybe two or three inches tall.

until they get their first set of true leaves, maybe two or three inches tall, and then I start transplanting them. And my rule of thumb that I use is I take a plant out date. So for me, let's say it's May 1st. The frost has passed and I can put stuff in my garden. I'll work backwards a month, April 1st. That's when I'll transplant. And then I'll work backwards a month from that, March 1st,

and that's when I plant my seeds. And I find that using that plant your seed, wait a month, transplant, wait a month, plant out, that's kind of an easy thing to remember. And so you work backwards from your frost date or your plant out date two months, and that's when you start your seeds for things like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. outdate two months and that's when you start your seeds for things like tomatoes peppers and eggplant okay so so craig you've planted the seeds march 1st and are so so if i understand you're right you've clustered i'm going to call it cluster planting them 50 seeds to one cell is it is it april 1st that you're finally taking them separating them out is it do i have that right it's a month later that you're going to pot them out yes that's right so if i'm planting

march 1st i'm usually doing that separation april 1st and so some of the things i found that really work well is a nice warm evening in the garage with the lights buzzing and music playing and maybe a deer open and you can just kind of get into the whole rhythm of transplanting i what i do is i take i use 18 they're kind of floppy, 3 1⁄2-inch pots that fit into a web tray. I dry fill with that same mix, and I dry transplant. I lay the individual seedlings on each pot, and then using my index finger, I just push gently on the stem above where the roots meet the stem and just ease it in until you're up to what's called the cotyledon leaves. Those first two leaves that

come out tomato are seed leaves or cotyledons. They're not true leaves. But essentially, there's no stem. You've just got a plant. You've got foliage essentially coming out of the soil. And I do that because any place under the surface of the soil where there's tomato stem, roots will develop, and it makes for a stronger, sturdier plant. Once I get those 18 plants all settled in, I just water them and put them on the floor of my garage where they will reside for about a week as they settle in. Now, I'll open the garage door and let the sun shine on them. But what happens is once you separate, it's inevitable you're going to get some root damage. And a whole thing of keeping a plant healthy is water coming

out of the soil into the roots and up into the plant. The plant will go through some transplant shock. So if you were to do that flight of transplants and put them into the direct sun, the plant on the top can't take up the water fast enough to keep it growing well, and they'll wither and die. So having that kind of one-week settle-in period, I've found, is very important to help them adjust to get all the mechanism of water uptake flowing again. Then you can get your plants out out and they'll just be fine. So I can do about 200 to 250 seedlings per hour.

So I don't dilly-dally. But this is where it gets, I need to ask you, because this is where not having a large nursery, it seems like it gets complicated. You've got hundreds if not thousands of ceilings a year, don't you? Is your garage big? Like how are you making the room? It's not that big.

So I've got 18 plants to a flat, and I'll transplant just as many as I can fit flat since the garage, and then I'll probably let them sit in there a couple of days until I start transplanting again. But so I kind of work front to back, you know, get some transplanted. But, you know, I can, so when you figure you can do a couple hundred an hour, that means you can probably do a thousand a day.

And if I'm only doing, say, 3,000 seedlings, that's three days of transplanting work. So it's really not as challenging as it seems. And then, of course, there's writing out the tags. So I do things in batches. I'll do a bunch of transplants, stick just one stick in each tray with that variety. And then when I'm tired of transplanting, I'll sit at the table and write out tags for a while and then tag in all the rest of the pots and then they move out and uh you know they're they're on my driveway which is concrete and the sun's shining on them and they look like they're doing nothing for a while and in fact if you have cool

nights they sulk a little bit but once once the roots kick in and once they start getting some warm days and some mild evenings, they really start growing fast. And I did a study this year because I wanted to see how fast tomatoes grow. And I plant just about all my tomatoes in containers now. And once they were planted out, this is beyond May now, everything is rigorously growing, indeterminate tomato varieties grow about two inches a day. That is 14 inches a week so tomatoes are very very rapidly growing plants and uh you'll see that with your seedlings where

they'll look tiny and then a week later they're starting to grow and then wow they just start looking great and uh you know people should look for my blog on nc tomato man if they want to see pictures of my driveway with these seedlings. And they can look at my NC Tomato Man YouTube videos with all of this process, kind of me talking people through it. But it almost takes a leap of faith. Well, yeah, I need you to talk me through it, Craig, because I spend a lot of time – I guess one thing I haven't made clear is that I stress out about not having a proper nursery, partly because I can't maintain what I've been told is really important, like a temperature of at least 18 Celsius, which is around 65 Fahrenheit. So just like really

obsessively managing conditions for ideal growth, but it sounds like you're not super concerned. And I'm wondering, during that first week after transplanting, it sounds like they're not getting a lot of light. And it can't be that warm for them. Am I right? Or is it just so much different? No, no, no. No, in fact, sometimes I'll have a driveway worth of seedlings. And the nighttime temperatures go down to 34, 33.

And they're out there. And there'll be a forecast where it will say 32, 31 Fahrenheit. And I'll just get frost cloth or remay or floating road cover, whatever you call it. It's called different things. And I'll put a double layer of that over the seedlings, and they're fine. So, again, what I've found, you know, so people have bought my seedlings, and they say they have no transplant shock and they grow really great. And they'll compare them to greenhouse-grown seedlings that are really temperamental and often will not thrive because they've been coddled too much in the greenhouse conditions. So I've not done any direct studies. All I know is how I start my plants and how well they do and the feedback from my customers of having plants that have been exposed to the elements and they're really tough, they're well hardened off, they grow really well, really fast, and they yield really well. I'm sure that there is research that has fed into the needs of why people do things the way they do.

Okay, so another one I want to ask you, this is kind of a random one that jumped out at me. What is helmet head and what should one do when you notice it? So what I find is the inability of a germinating seedling to shed its seed coat can be partly related to the type of plant you're growing. So I found, and we call it helmet head because it's like the poor little leaves have a helmet on them, but they're adhered to so tightly that it can't escape. And what happens is essentially the plant strangles itself. You know, there's no growing top. So to me it happens far worse with peppers. And I don't know why that is.

I don't know if it's the fact that the seed is drier. What typically will happen with the seed is it starts to germinate and there is sufficient moisture and it softens the seed head enough so that as the cotyledon leaves are expanding, it easily pushes that off. And what happens with it, and this is a problem with old tomato seed I've noticed. Say that seed that I'm trying to germinate that's 14 or 16 years old, I'll plant 20 of those seeds and maybe 10 of them will really have trouble shedding their seed coat. So I think it's linked to moisture. And what I've found you can do is just use a spray bottle and spray those stuck seed coats just lightly

and see if that helps. If it looks like they're starting to shed but they need a little bit of help, I have been known to use tweezers, but that's kind of a 50% proposition. Sometimes in doing the surgery, you lose the patient, but you probably would have lost the patient anyway. Shouldn't happen with more than, with fresh seed, it shouldn't happen to more than one or 2% of your tomatoes, maybe three to 5% of your peppers, but the older the seed, the more likely it is. And it is related to the seed coat just being so dry from age and not enough moisture around to help it to loosen. So the emerging cotyledons will push it

off. Yeah, that's great. I think, I think that it off. Yeah, that's great. I think you've taught me that I've lost some emerging seedlings to helmahead and I just wrote it off as like fungus or something. But now that I think of it, I think there have been, especially with peppers, seedlings that are just getting stuck in their seed coat, so interesting. So Craig, let's now move out into the garden uh with with our talk about practical considerations one thing that that was really interesting to me and uh it's just it's just you talk a bit about the relationship well you

mentioned in the book one of the questions you get most about growing tomatoes is all about is about pruning and i'm sure you've spent untold hours talking to people about pruning and i have pruning questions for you but uh maybe you could start very briefly talking about the relationship between foliage density and flavor. So when you think of indeterminants, tons of foliage, the ratio of the foliage to the fruit is much more tilted towards the foliage because they're so rampant. They have a very high flavor potential. Determinants like Roma have so much fruit when compared to the amount of foliage that you'll very rarely, if ever, find a superbly flavored determinant variety.

But the whole point of determinant seems to be productivity. To prune or not to prune becomes about managing how you can support the plant in the garden to give you the best compromise between yield and health and spacing. Okay, so now we're going to talk about pruning. First thing I'm going to do is bust some maybe urban legends that I feel like I've just proven. So if you severely prune plants to one stem, you will get larger fruit. You will get less flavorful fruit. You will get more flavorful fruit. Not true in any of those cases.

flavorful fruit, not true in any of those cases. If you don't prune a plant at all, you will get less flavorful, more flavorful, smaller fruit, not true at all. So what I found is a tomato plant's size and flavor is dictated by its genes and i have not found that to be altered by a pruning technique so when we say prune we mean removing that growth that comes out at a 45 degree angle between the leaf and the main stem some people call them suckers some people call them side shoots all they are is a tomato plant's desire to make lots of seed. That's what they want to do. That's what all things that procreate want to do. They want to create seed. So a tomato plant puts out lots of suckers. If you remove every single one of those suckers and you end up with one stem, one plant that has blossom clusters, say, every 6 to 12 inches,

that's a single-stem pruning technique. Now, doing that, you'll end up with plants that you can plant quite close together. The risk in doing that, well, and this may be climate-related, each tomato variety also has a favored temperature and humidity that it will set fruit and the converse of that weather conditions where it does not like to set fruit. So for me here in Raleigh where it can be 95 to 100 degrees in June when the tomato plants are flowering, if I were to single prune a plant and a big beefsteak type say like mortgage lifter, it's conceivable that as the flowers on that six-foot plant opened, the conditions were never right for the flowers to pollinate,

which means I could end up with a beautiful six-foot plant with not a single tomato on it. And that is a frequent complaint that I hear in hot areas is that my plant's growing beautifully, but I have hardly any tomatoes. That is almost always a case of a variety that is not matched for your climate. It needs something different than the weather that it's experiencing. Now, the tomatoes' size and flavor on that single prune plant, let's say it does well for you and you end up with a six-foot plant, you've got lots of tomatoes, they won't be any larger or smaller or better or worse tasting than if you would have grown that plant in a cage and not pruned it at all. yield, whereas in a cage you could probably get 40 or 50 pounds of fruit off the plant, and maybe that single-stem prune plant, by the end of the year, you'd have 10 or 12 pounds of fruit off the plant. So really what you need to do is think of pruning in terms of, am I going to vertically stake the plant, and how much do I have to space? I use a compromise where I let,

much do I have to space? I use a compromise where I let now two suckers develop, meaning I have three stems and I tie those three stems. They'll work their way to the top of, say, an eight-foot pole. And I just use sisal twine to tie those two stems plus the center to the pole every six inches or so. And it looks like a topiary. I have a nice plant that I can plant those plants about two feet apart that way, and they'll still have air circulation. If you let more foliage go, and let's say you let two suckers develop, each one of those suckers are going to produce suckers. So you almost have to be vigilant daily pruning, because that plant can get out of control on you very, very, very quickly. So that's pruning and indeterminants.

Determinant plants should never be pruned because those suckers all will, the lead, everything on indeterminate ends in flowers. So any pruning you'll do will severely reduce the yield. So we're talking pruning really. It's just the indeterminate tall growing varieties. And there's a lot of info packed into there, so I'll pause and let you... Well, I do need a clarification. I thought... What I understood from your book is that there is...

When you remove lots of foliage, you are going to affect flavor. But it sounds like just now you said that's not the case. So which is it? Well, you're not pruning foliage. You're pruning, I'm leaving all of the leaves. I'm just pruning the side shoots. Yeah. So that, that doesn't affect the flavor because the plant is producing on each one of those side shoots on the main stem as much foliage as they would ordinarily produce. What a lot of people do is they then, if you're removing indeterminants, I think what it is is that determinants produce so many fruit that you've just got the ratio way out of whack,

whereby pruning an indeterminate, you've still got plenty of foliage per the amount of fruit, so you're not negatively influencing flavor. The determinants and indeterminants have such incredibly different yield potentials. Determinants are essentially tomato machines. You have pretty much as many tomatoes as you have leaves on them. Whereas indeterminants, you're always going to have much more foliage than you do tomatoes,

no matter what. In my, up here, here you know i'm never i'm i'm never i'm not usually by the end of the season i'm not seeing my indeterminates right with ripe fruit higher than about i'll just say four and a half to five feet okay does it make sense for me to tip the plants once they reach say six feet does it make sense for me to tip the plants like cut the tops six feet does it make sense for me to tip the plants like cut the tops off the plants will that arrest growth and will that ultimately help me reach get more ripening uh in in the in the ripening tomatoes so i have not done the exact study on that but i do top my plants and and the reason, I guess indirectly it does,

because let's say that you're growing a plant and you're feeding it X amount and you're watering X amount, and you've got one that you're letting go and you're letting foliage and fruit form above where you would ordinarily get ripening, another one you're topping. Whether topping it concentrates energy into developing those tomatoes that are already on there and that happens, allowing that superfluous growth to exist is drawing nutrients and water from the plant that could be going into the fruit. So what I do, and I did it much better this year than I usually do, because as you know, gardeners hate to cut anything living and healthy looking off a plant. It's like, no, I can't do that. So it takes discipline.

But I did do that this year, um, because just that extra growth often leads to, um, And just that extra growth often leads to, it's just more floppiness, more stuff to deal with, to tie up, and more water use. So you're probably watering a little bit more frequently and feeding a little bit more frequently, but it's not necessary. The key to topping is make sure you're using shears or pruners that have been dipped in bleach or detergent, hydrogen peroxide or something. You don't want to spread disease plant to plant just in case you're topping a plant that has some disease in its vascular system and one doesn't, you don't want to spread it plant to plant. But pruning is fine. And I think that's a hard thing for gardeners to do. But if you know from past experience where your last truss of ripe fruit is going to come from, then it's perfectly fine to top that plant above it and let, you know, everything, all the water and fruit that you're putting to that plant attend to those things that will succeed and will ripen right well there's there's a lot more i could ask you craig lajolier but uh i i think i think this is a good a good first go so

um craig lajolier author of epic tomatoes how to select and Grow the Best Varieties of All Time. Thank you so much. This has just been just so helpful and interesting, and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Well, it's made my day, and it's been a pleasure here as well. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Okay, so that's it, folks. I hope you liked that. Next week, you'll get part two, and you don't want to miss that. In his book, Craig includes an heirloom tomato top ten list for home gardeners, and I asked him to adapt the list to make it appropriate for commercial growers, and he graciously did that.

And that's what you're going to hear. But I'll tell you what, since many of you are probably already ordering seeds, I'll have a rough cut of the episode available at theruminant.ca. It's there right now. Go get it. That's it. Talk to you soon. each other a hundred dollars and maybe a roll of duct tape and we'll run right outside of the city's reaches we'll live off chestnuts spring water and peaches we'll own nothing to this world of thieves and live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us? A place that is trying to bleed us dry.

We could be happy with life in the country. With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking some real soul searching and here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house

or some fancy car to keep my love going strong so we'll run right out into the wilds and graces we'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be Bye.