Tomato season opens today. Sweet cherry tomatoes, luscious red slicing tomatoes, pretty egg-shaped Romas and juicy heirloom varieties are summer’s top crop, and now is the time to plant.
Traditionally, gardeners in Kansas City wait until Mother’s Day to set tomato plants out in the garden. Of course, gardeners willing to gamble on the weather plant early, but plants will not budge much until warm weather arrives — tomatoes thrive in shirtsleeve weather, when daytime temperatures are consistently above 65 degrees. After a tough tomato year last year, gardeners’ expectations are high. We talked with some of Kansas City’s best, most experienced and most opinionated tomato gardeners and asked them to share their expertise. Here are their tips, techniques and strategies for the best tomato crop ever.
Growing tomatoes
James Worley has been growing tomatoes since he was a child, and he now grows more than 100 varieties in raised beds in his garden in south Kansas City. He sells heirloom tomato plants, blogs at KC Tomato Times, and holds an annual tomato-tasting in August.
“Kansas City is a wonderful place to grow tomatoes,” Worley says.
• Small is better. “Get away from the myth of trying to buy a big tomato plant 3 feet tall.” Start with small transplants, 6 to 9 inches tall. They’ll soon catch up. They should be stocky, not spindly.
• Growing conditions. Worley favors growing tomatoes in raised beds filled with compost or a mixture of compost (80 percent) and topsoil (20 percent), or compost mixed with perlite and vermiculite. The soil in raised beds warms up earlier in spring than soil in the ground, and drainage is excellent.
• When you plant, pinch off most of the leaves and set the plants in a deep trench or hole, with just a few inches of plant showing above the soil.
• Space plants 3 feet apart. “Four feet is optimal.”
• Fertilize at planting time with Tomato Tone. Just as fruit sets, fertilize again with a weak solution of balanced fertilizer. At summer’s end, fertilize one more time, to encourage late production.
• Water deeply. Worley recommends watering plants every five days at most, or once a week if you use mulch.
• Mulch conserves water, keeps roots cool and helps control weeds. Compost and grass clippings are excellent mulch (but do not use grass clippings if you use herbicide on your lawn). Worley uses reflective silver plastic mulch to help control insects and improve production.
• Remove leaves from the lower portion to prevent soil-borne diseases from splashing up on the plants. No foliage should touch the ground.
• Support your plants. They’re easier to take care of and more productive if they are staked up. Worley trains his tomato plants up inside cages, 18 inches in diameter, made of concrete reinforcing wire; he also has a few Texas tomato cages made of galvanized steel (see Resources).
• Shake things up. “I shake the cages to encourage pollination.” When you see blooms, it’s time to shake the cages. “Do it in midmorning after the dew has evaporated.”
• Pick tomatoes when they first show a blush of color. Worley lets his tomatoes ripen on the kitchen table. “Once a tomato blushes, the plant is done with it. All you’re doing by leaving a red tomato out there is telling the squirrels to come take a bite.”
Bountiful tomatoes
The best thing to do with a bumper crop of tomatoes is to just eat them as fast as they ripen, but in a good year, there are always tomatoes to spare. Barbara Fetchenhier, an interpreter at the Heartland Harvest Garden at Powell Gardens, works as a kind of concierge of the Heartland Harvest Garden, helping visitors with ideas.
• If you have too many plants, help a neighbor. Fetchenhier and her husband, Jeff, plant tomato plants in half barrels for elderly neighbors.
• Fetchenhier also always grows an extra tomato plant or two for tomato hornworms. If she notices hornworms on one of her more promising plants, she picks them gently off and moves them to one of the spare plants.
• Share the harvest. The Fetchenhiers give some of their ripe tomatoes to a local food pantry.
• Cook up some recipes. “We do a lot of canning,” Fetchenhier says, “and Jeff makes his famous tomato catsup.” She loves fresh summer tomato sauce made with tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, and fresh basil, and she makes lots of BLTs. This year, she is experimenting with frozen treats at Powell Gardens; a tomato-basil-mint-flavored frozen ice might just be nice, she says.
• Feed the birds. Tomatoes with spots, cracks, or bugs go to the chickens. “I don’t like to let food go to waste, and the chickens don’t mind,” she says.
Heirlooms: Your grandmother’s tomatoes
Many gardeners feel there is no tastier tomato than an heirloom. Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, and other varieties have been passed down (as seeds) from gardener to gardener for generations. They are available as transplants in spring and as seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Burpee and other seed specialists.
Julie Denesha, who lives in Merriam, grows 60 or more varieties of heirloom tomatoes. She writes a blog, Tomato Town, about her heirloom-tomato gardening experiences. She is also a professional photographer, and her pictures of heirlooms are funny, fascinating and beautiful. Here are some of her favorite heirlooms:
• “We love the black tomatoes,” Denesha says. Cherokee Purple, Black Cherry and Carbon are three of the best, she says.
• Tomatoes that never turn red are “really fun,” she says. It takes a little experience to know when to pick them. Denesha waits until they have a slight blush and are a little bit soft. She recommends Aunt Ruby’s German Green tomato. It’s great for tomato sandwiches, she says.
• One of her most productive heirlooms is ‘Carbon’. Black Krim is another good producer.
• Stupice is usually the first heirloom to ripen in Denesha’s garden.
• The “most delicious” award in Denesha’s garden goes to ‘Cherokee Purple.’ “It has such a perfect sweet and sour taste.” For sauces, she likes Opalka.
• “We like tomatoes with different shapes and colors,” Denesha says. Opalka is a pepper-shaped tomato, good for canning, salsas and salads. Tomatoes with wrinkles and lobes are called “catfaced” tomatoes; “we love those,” she says. “Anytime we find one, we like to take a picture of it and throw it up on the website.”
• Berkeley Tie-Dye is a gorgeous striped heirloom that ripens in late summer. Striped Zebra is another good striped tomato.
• Heirloom cherry tomatoes are delicious, too. Denesha’s favorites are Beam’s Yellow Pear and Sungold.
• Two of her favorite recipes for heirloom tomatoes are Tomato Pie, at organicgardening.coverleaf.com, and Green Tomato Relish, at mommyskitchen.net.
Tip-top hybrid tomatoes
Kansas City-area master gardeners are among the city’s most experienced tomato gardeners, with years of experience and a soft spot for delicious, productive cultivars known for resistance to diseases. Disease resistance is often noted in lists of variety names with the initials VFNT, which stands for Verticillum wilt, Fusarium wilt, Nematodes and Tobacco mosaic virus. Here are some favorites chosen by Master Gardeners of Greater Kansas City and Johnson County Extension Master Gardeners.
• Better Boy is productive with great disease resistance. Mary Lou Carson, a Johnson County master gardener, says it “produces in tough years when others don’t.”
• Jet Star is “productive, meaty, and crack-resistant,” says Sandy Hill, of the Master Gardeners of Greater Kansas City.
• Big Beef is disease-resistant. It was an All-America Selections winner in 1994.
• Celebrity was an All-America Selections winner in 1984, and remains a classic. “It’s easy to grow, dependable, with good flavor and disease resistance,” Carson says.
• Biltmore is a delicious, medium-large tomato.
• Early Girl is delicious and early — you can practically count on eating your first by July 4.
• Carson mentions two cherry tomatoes: Sun Sugar, which has yellow fruit, and Juliet, a grape tomato, “small enough to snack on but big enough to freeze, use in soups, stews, etc.”
Tomato trend: Get grafted
Grafted tomatoes are the latest thing to come down the garden path. Tomato plants grafted onto vigorous, disease-resistant tomato rootstocks are extraordinarily healthy and productive. Grafted tomatoes have caught on among commercial growers, and they are just becoming available to home gardeners.
Cary Rivard, assistant professor and extension specialist at the K-State Research and Extension center in Olathe, is one of the leading authorities on grafted tomatoes. His research for both his master’s degree and his doctorate was on grafted tomatoes. As a graduate student, he once grew a tomato with four different grafts, just for fun.
Grafted tomatoes cost more (Burpee is selling three plants for $23 plus postage), but it looks like they are worth it. Here is what Rivard has to say about them:
• Grafted tomatoes are very disease resistant, especially to Verticillum wilt and Fusarium wilt, to which heirlooms are particularly susceptible.
• You can expect more and larger fruit on grafted plants. The rootstock of grafted plants grows larger than non-grafted plants, producing bigger and healthier above-graft growth. “These plants just produce a lot more fruit,” he says.
• Do not plant grafted plants too deep: They must be planted with the graft above the soil line.
• Keep an eye out for suckers coming up from the rootstock below the graft, and prune them off.
• Pruning is a good idea. These plants can be “too vegetative,” Rivard says. Nip off the lower leaves to the highest leaf just below the first fruit cluster, and then remove about 20 percent of the leaves — one leaf in five — on the bottom 18-24 inches along the stem. “You end up with a smaller plant, but it sends a message to put the energy into fruit production,” Rivard says. It also improves air circulation around the plants.
• Grafted plants are efficient at extracting nutrients from the soil. Rivard works a little pelletized chicken manure fertilizer lightly into the soil. Compost is also excellent, he says.