Grow and Sell Heirloom Tomatoes
(Page 3 of 6)
December 2006/January 2007
By Walter Chandoha
As home gardeners learned of Kennedy’s interest in heirlooms, they gave her seeds from tomato varieties that had been in their families for generations. She grows these in an isolated section of her garden (to preclude any cross-pollination) for at least two years. She tests them for flavor, productivity, growth habit and resistance to disease and insects. If they meet her standards, she’ll grow these previously unnamed plants for sale in subsequent seasons.
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Planting and Transplanting
By the first of each year, Kennedy has received her mail-ordered seeds and scheduled her planting dates. She staggers the dates since her customers request plants at different times. For each group, she starts the plants six weeks before the target availability date. Market growers want their plants in late April, because the sooner they have ripe tomatoes to sell, the greater their profits. Nurseries normally want their plants by Mother’s Day, regardless of the weather. And home gardeners usually wait until the last average frost date has passed.
Kennedy’s tomato growing is a study in patience. For planting, she uses tweezers to place two seeds atop a moistened soil mix loosely packed into conventional, plastic six-pack cells. Then she barely covers the seeds with a pinch of the soil mix, and shields the planted cells with plastic domes. Next, she places the cell packs atop heat mats to accelerate germination, which usually starts in three to five days.
As soon as the seeds sprout, Kennedy removes the dome covers and places the six-packs on stands with fluorescent lights that sit in front of a bank of southwest-facing windows (see photo). Her husband, Bruce, made the stands using 4-foot shop lights. The lights are adjustable, allowing her to position them about 1 inch above the seedlings’ topmost leaves. Automatic timers turn on the lights for 18 hours daily. Natural sunlight also comes in through the windows.
When the tomatoes get their first set of true leaves, Kennedy transplants them. If germination was near 100 percent, resulting in two seedlings in each cell, one is not simply snipped away and sacrificed — Kennedy can’t bear the thought of destroying a perfectly healthy plant. Instead, she separates the seedlings, and each gets its own 2-inch plastic pot. When the plant is four weeks old, it’s transplanted one final time into a 4-inch pot. Both times, the plants are watered with half-strength kelp or fish emulsion. A thin layer of sphagnum moss atop the transplanting medium helps protect seedlings from damping-off diseases. Kennedy thinks double transplanting encourages development of a larger root ball, which makes for hardier plants.
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