Greetings!   

     I haven't talked much about tomatoes this summer in the newsletter.  From an eater's perspective, it's been a pretty good year:  the fruit for the last month or so has been tasty and relatively abundant.  The warm days and cool nights that have dominated this summer seem to ripen the tomatoes slowly and evenly.  We haven't had any of the extended heatwaves with hot nights that tend to speed-ripen the fruit and make it soft and highly perishable.  What this means to you is your tomatoes can probably spend more time on your kitchen counter without turning to mush -- as if that ever happens. 
Most of the tomatoes you've received this summer are probably Early Girls or other red tomatoes.  As it turns out, 2011 is the "Summer of No Heirlooms".  Not that we didn't plant lots of Brandywines, Marvel Stripes, Black Pineapples and other old timey varieties -- we did.  But heirlooms are notoriously fickle about the weather, and it's clear that many varieties simply decided to sit this year out.  Cold nights and days in May and June, and wet weather into July stunted the growth of many of the plants and encouraged foliar diseases that kept the leaves from getting large and lush.  As a result, when we did get some hot weather in July, tomatoes on many of the varieties that did set a crop simply cooked in the hot sun.

    Hybrid tomatoes often get a bad rap, or are compared unfavorably to heirlooms.  And while there are some tasteless hybrid varieties, most of the ones we grow are pretty darn tasty:  Early Girls, Lemon Boys, Orange Blossoms.  In a challenging year like this one, the reason to grow them is immediately clear to anyone who sees our tomato field.  The hybrid plants are bred to resist disease and bad weather, so the plants are much healthier.  And while some heirloom varieties have almost no fruit on them, the hybrids are loaded.  If we had chosen to grow only heirloom varieties this year, there would be far fewer tomatoes in your CSA boxes every week.

   When it comes to growing tasty tomatoes, the most important factor is not which variety you grow, but how you grow them and how ripe you harvest them.  The average supermarket or fast food tomato is picked completely green, and then gassed with ethylene to turn it pink.  We harvest our tomatoes when they a day or two from being ready to eat, which means we get them to you (mostly) without them becoming salsa en-route.

    One last note:  some subscribers have asked if our tomatoes are "Dry-farmed".  Some growers have been making this claim about their tomatoes lately, with the idea that not watering tomatoes makes them sweeter.  If anyone is actually growing tomatoes this way, they are not doing it in a hot inland valley.  Even in a wet year like the one we've had, irrigation of tomatoes is critical here.  Without water, the plants cannot produce enough foliage to shade the fruit from the intense sun.  And a  water shortage during fruit set here causes blossoms to fall off the plant, which equals no fruit.   

         We cut the water back on our tomato fields when the fruit begins to ripen so that the flavor doesn't get watered down, but even then, a little water is necessary to keep the 6 foot tall plants happy and healthy in the heat of summer.  Our observations are that the other important ingredient to a flavorful tomato is warm weather; so if farmers in cool, foggy areas are trying to grow good tomatoes, it's probably best for them to "dry farm" them to make up for the lack of sunshine and hot weather. 

Pablito