Well, I’ve seen it coming for couple months now ...and early end to the tomatoes.  We’ve had about a pound of tomatoes for each of the shareholders (plus some cherry tomatoes) for six weeks now, but all that has come to an end.  To begin with, Arcata is not exactly tomato country; and while this doesn’t mean you can’t grow awesome tomatoes here, it does mean that they’ll require extra work (and a greenhouse to reach “normal” yield levels).  I’ve grown tomatoes in unheated greenhouses in Arcata for several years now, usually with a pretty high level of success, but this year the problems were piling on:

Mistake #1:  Starting the tomatoes too early.  I was excited about early harvests, and while we did get those early harvests, that early start also meant that the vines spent too much of their lives with the greenhouse doors shut (it was just too cold outside), and with no fans to move air and remove humidity, this led to an early outbreak of leaf blight.  Applications of the organic fungicides Serenade and neem oil slowed it but did not stop it.

Mistake #2:  Weak support system.  I trellis my tomatoes by wrapping each stem around a twine hanging from a lateral wire supported by the frame of the greenhouse.  Because my greenhouses are 14.5 feet tall at the apex, however, I needed some kind of sub-structure in order to reach any vine-supporting wire.  Now ...they make truss systems for my greenhouse just for this purpose, but  I thought I could do a good enough job myself on the cheap.  I was wrong.  The trellis sagged to the point that the vines flopped into all the aisles (making mobility near impossible) and the tomatoes proceeded to smash each other and to lie on the ground, creating lots of rotten tomatoes.

So ...lessons for next year?  In addition to addressing the above issues, I may take a different tack and just grow cherry tomatoes in a couple different successions, and leave the big heirlooms to the folks in warmer climes.  But I do so love a good Brandywine.  We’ll see.