Tomatoes: 2011
This is from the newsletter I get every week from the Seelys at Springdale Farm along with a lovely box of freshly picked, organic vegetables. (See June, 2011 issue of Milwaukee Magazine.)
On the farm: As the tomato plants in the greenhouses wind down, (after harvesting from them for 10-12 weeks), we rip them out and prepare the soil for some fall greens that should be ready for us in November. With the days getting shorter, and cooler, each delay by a day in planting something like lettuce or spinach can result in a delay in the harvest for nearly a week later on. To help speed up the process of getting the new crops started in the greenhouse, we transplant a lot of them, having started them in another greenhouse. At this point we only put crops in a greenhouse that can take a hard freeze, since without a lot of additional heat, the temperature inside the greenhouse after a long, cool, night can come very close to the ambient temperature outside of the greenhouse. (During the day it is another matter entirely, though, as with a little sun the temperature inside the greenhouse can be 30-50 degrees warmer than the outside temperature.) As crops finish in the field, we immediately till them under, and plant a cover crop that will keep the soil covered over the winter, with the exception of the one final major planting of the year, the garlic. Garlic cloves get planted in late October, start to send some roots out before the soil freezes for the winter, then growth takes off in the spring, when they shoot up and make the bulbs that we will be harvesting in July of next year. We’ll still be giving out garlic a few more times this fall… Seely Newsletter
And we also have tomatoes from our tiny city garden, not in the variety of colors—yellow, orange, purple—that we get from the Seelys but still, a joy to pick, to look at and to eat. And soon to freeze for the leaner months when we stop eating tomatoes because the ones in the stores all taste like cardboard.
It’s also time again for my tomato poem:
Tomato Love: a tritina
A September sky, sun warming my back,
I walk between the beans and tomatoes,
hear distant farm noise, think of my mother.
The daughter of a farmer, my mother
left for the city, didn’t look back.
But never lost her tomato
lust, longing for the sweet, ripe tomatoes
of her youth, an elixir like a mother’s
love, or the sun warming your tired back.
This: a tomato love song to mothers.
2008—Chris Christie
