Growing Trust
(Page 4 of 7)
June/July 2007
By Barbara Kingsolver
First, though, we had to eat the breakfast they’d made in their tiny, efficient kitchen. Everything locally produced: yogurt and strawberries, eggs, salsa made with Amy’s enviable tomatoes. We lingered, talking farming and housing, but the day called us out to the fields where rows of produce were already gulping morning sun. Amy, a self-described perfectionist, apologized for the state of what looked to me like the tidiest rows imaginable — more weedless than our garden on the best of days. Part-time interns sometimes help out, but the farm runs on Amy’s full-time dedication.
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A mid-June New England garden, two weeks past the last frost, is predominantly green: lacy bouquets of salad greens, Chinese cabbage, cilantro, broccoli and peas. A tomato of any type seemed out of the question, until we crested a hill and came upon two long greenhouses. These are the sturdy workhorses of the farm, with heavy-duty plastic skins supported by wooden trusses. Amy no longer grows tomatoes anywhere except in a greenhouse. Cool spring soil, late frosts and iffy New England weather make the season too short for noteworthy harvests of outdoor-planted tomatoes. But she doesn’t grow them hydroponically, as is the norm for large-scale tomato houses. Her greenhouses are built over garden soil, her tomatoes grow in the ground.
“They taste better,” she said. “It’s probably the micronutrients and microfauna in the soil that give them that garden taste. So many components of soil just aren’t present in a more sterile environment.”
Heating greenhouses through the Massachusetts winter didn’t appeal to Paul and Amy either. After a few years of experiments, they’ve found it most cost-effective to heat with a combination of propane and woodstoves — or not at all. One of the houses is exclusively a cold frame, extending the season for salad greens, spinach and other crops that can survive temperatures down to the mid-20s. Amy’s greens will sell all winter for about $7 a pound.
Her second greenhouse is heated, she said, but only in spring. As we approached it I peered in the door and actually gasped. Holy tomato. I’ve never seen healthier, more content-looking plants: 10 feet tall, leafy, rising toward heaven on strings stretched from the ground to the rafters. If there were an Angel Choir of tomatoes, these would be singing. The breed she grows is one meant especially for greenhouses, a variety (perfectly enough) called ‘Trust.’
Amy was inspiring to watch, a knowledgeable farmer in her element as she narrowed her eyes for signs of pests, pausing to finger a leaf and study its color. We walked among the tall plants admiring the clusters of fruits hanging from bottom to top in a color gradient from mature red fruits below to the new, greenish-white ones overhead. The support-strings were rolled around spindles up above that could be cranked to lower the plant down gradually, as the top continues to climb. Tomato plants habitually lose their lower leaves as they grow; the point of this system is to coil the leafless stems on the ground and let the healthy growing part keep twining upward. But these plants were so healthy they refused to lose any lower leaves. Our daughter Lily played hide-and-seek in the tomato wilderness while Amy showed me her growing system.
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