This time of year, Chris, Matt and I are literally spending
50% of our time at the farm harvesting, and probably a third of that harvest
time is spent on TOMATOES! I have a love/hate relationship with tomatoes. They
definitely require more work than any other vegetable on the farm and are also
one of the most fickle, sensitive, delicate, disease-prone vegetables as well.
We lay down black plastic mulch, stake them, trellis them, prune them, cull the
bad tomatoes, and repeat the last three steps multiple times throughout the
year. You can’t harvest them in the rain or when the plants are wet because
disease spreads too easily from plant to plant. And we plant A LOT of them,
partially because people LOVE them, and partially as a buffer in case we get a
disease. Every year I tell myself to plant fewer tomatoes, and when I do, it
still feels like I plant a ridiculously large amount. Currently we have 660
large, heirloom tomato plants, 220 cherry tomato plants, and 120 paste tomato
plants. I have lost track of exactly how many varieties, but it is around 25.
And when tomatoes start coming in, they really produce
heavily. Last Friday morning, 6 people helped harvest tomatoes for 6 hours and
we got 410 lbs, for a grand total of 860 for the week! Some farms have a
farming position that is just dedicated to looking after the tomatoes! Friday
when we were harvesting right up until the CSA pick up started, I was wishing we
had someone like that on staff! In the middle of the harvest someone from the
Weavers Way store stopped by to drop off some things. He walked down to the
field and saw me standing in the middle of an array of about 12 bins, full of
tomatoes. He asked how the season was going. I could only laugh and wave my
hand around me, I felt like a queen in the middle of her kingdom, overflowing
with bounty.
We tallied the harvest and divided it by the number of
shareholders. At the end of the pick up’s we still had tomatoes left. I called
the Weavers Way stores, and they took all that they could. We still had
tomatoes left over. I called my coworker to see if he could take any to the
weekend farmers market. He laughed because he was drowning in his own tomato
harvest. On Saturday I called 11 restaurants in the neighborhood. This weekend
our beautiful tomatoes made it onto the menus of Earth Bread and Brew in Mt.
Airy, Derek’s in Manayunk, and Gee Chee Girl in Mt. Airy. By the end of the day on Saturday I
finally had only a small handful of cracked and oozing, delicate tomatoes that
were unfit for any CSA share or restaurant sale. I happily took these home in
the back of the pickup truck and thought about the many different places our
tomatoes were at that moment. I almost wished I could put honing devise on them
and map their dispersal from the farm.
I imagine it would have looked like a small exploding star, with many rays,
but none reaching more than a few miles from Henry Ave and Cinnaminson St. The
tomato marathon did not end until late last night in my kitchen when the last
tomato was put in a bag and frozen. I went to bed, knowing that as I fell
asleep more tomatoes were ripening at the farm and this would all be repeated on
Monday.
Any shareholder who would like to purchase left over
tomatoes at the end of the pick-up is welcome to. There is no way to predict
how many will be left, but anyone is welcome to come to the pick-up at 7pm on
Tuesdays or 6pm on Fridays and purchase extra tomatoes at our wholesale price
of $2.00/lb.
