Hoophouse tomato varieties

Tall tomatoes with beans and cucumbers in our hoophouse.
Photo Wren Vile

Our hoophouse tomatoes are doing well this year. Apart from the determinate Glacier, they’ve reached the top of the stakes and as high as we can string-weave or pick. We transplanted them March 15, a month before our last frost date. We harvest each of our hoophouse beds every two days,alternating them to smooth supplies.We plan to harvest for ten weeks from May 25 till July 31, by which time our first outdoor planting is yielding well. In the South many of us grow only our early tomatoes in hoophouses, as outdoor crops produce abundantly once the weather warms. We harvest our outdoor tomatoes (sown 3/15) from July until frost, initially overlapping with our hoophouse earlies, then on their own.

Ken Dawson in Cedar Grove, NC, has a succession planting plan for outdoor tomatoes. He makes four field plantings at three week intervals. In cooler climates, because yields will be higher, it is more common to grow tomatoes in hoophouses whenever possible, and keep them growing for the whole season.

Glacier tomatoes in our hoophouse in late June.
Photo Pam Dawling

It is possible to grow successions of determinate tomatoes in a hoophouse, but any advantages are usually outweighed by the disadvantages of disease spread and the extra time plants spend before they reach production. In the past we grew a late hoophouse crop, to take us beyond the first frosts. We sowed June 18 and transplanted at a relatively young age (tomatoes grow quickly by that point of the year). We gave this up in favor of growing more leafy greens.

Each year I take notes on the varieties we have in the hoophouse, and often we run a taste test. I have also been gathering information from other growers, on which varieties do well for them. Before I get into talking about specific varieties, I want to say a bit about types of tomatoes.

Determinate Varieties

Varieties can be divided into two main growth types and then the exceptions. Determinates (bush tomatoes) are compact varieties that stop growing at a height of 2′-4′ (0.6-1.2 m). The number of stems, leaves and flowers is part of the genetic makeup of that variety. The number of leaves between one fruit cluster and the next decreases by one each time a cluster is produced, until the terminal cluster forms. No more leaves or flowers develop after that. The fruit ripens and the plant starts to die back. Harvest can be 1-3 months from start to finish. Because they are faster to mature than indeterminates, they are often chosen for early crops. Determinate varieties usually bear lightly the first third of the  harvest period, heavily the second, then lightly for the last third, so it is not very productive to plant crops so late that they don’t reach their second (main) month of production before frosts. Determinates need no pruning as the yield of fruit is inherently limited. Most need little staking, but some determinates are quite tall, and produce for quite a long season.

Tomato Mountain Magic in our hoophouse.
Photo Pam Dawling

Fast-maturing Tomato Varieties

Currently Glacier (56d det red) is the only determinate we grow. We simply choose varieties for our early bed based on days to maturity, past experience and inspiring catalog write-ups! They have to be 71 days or fewer from transplant to maturity. We like Stupice (61d ind red), Mountain Magic (66d ind red), Garden Peach (71d ind yellow) and the very fast and delicious cherry Sun Gold (57d ind orange) and Five

Sun Gold cherry tomato in our hoophouse.
Photo Pam Dawling

Star Grape (62d red). We found out the hard way that growing too many cherries is not wise – they take a long time to harvest and when you compare yields it’s clear they don’t add up to much. We grow two plants each of Sun Gold and Five Star Grape, 6 each of Garden Peach and Mountain Magic, 13 Stupice and 16 Glacier. Very biased towards the earliest.

 

Indeterminate Varieties

Jubilee tomato in our hoophouse.
Photo Pam Dawling

We choose our favorite workhorses along with some unusual heirlooms for our second bed. Most heirlooms are indeterminate. We grow lots of Jubilee (80d ind orange) and Tropic (80d ind red). The just two or three each of the fun and interesting Green Zebra (76d ind green stripes on gold), Striped German (78d ind red/yellow), Amy’s Sugar Gem (75d ind red), Rebelski (75d ind red) and two each of two more cherries, Amy’s Apricot (75d ind apricot) and Black Cherry (70d ind purple-brown)

Green zebra tomato in our hoophouse. Photo Pam Dawling

Indeterminate varieties can continue to grow and produce more fruit as long as the weather is warm enough, and as long as they don’t get struck down by frost or disease. The number of leaf nodes between one cluster and the next remains the same all the way up the vine. Indeterminate tomatoes need substantial support. Pruning is not essential – whether or not to prune depends on your climate, the varieties you are growing and how long you plan to keep the plants for.

Amys Apricot cherry tomato in our hoophouse.
Photo Pam Dawling

Semi-determinate varieties

Semi-determinate tomato varieties are larger than determinate but smaller than indeterminate plants. Some seed suppliers just call them large determinates. These plants usually require staking.

Making Choices

If you are growing in a cold climate you will probably want to grow indeterminates in your hoophouse and keep them all season, as it takes a long time to grow a tomato plant. If you are growing in hot climates, you will probably only grow your earlies in your hoophouse and then grow a succession of outdoor tomato crops. If you grow where there are lots of tomato diseases, you will do better with succession planting than having all your eggs in one tomato basket. If your season is long enough for multiple plantings, you might choose to start with fast determinates to catch the early market.

Hoophouse tomatoes and squash, garden tour, class.

Tomato plants in our hoophouse, planted among the winter greens Photo Kathryn Simmons
Tomato plants in our hoophouse, planted among the winter greens
Photo Kathryn Simmons

We have planted our two beds of tomatoes in our hoophouse – 92 plants – can’t wait! It will be the very end of May before we get any to eat. We have one bed of fast-maturing kinds, mostly Glacier and Stupice, but also a couple each of Five Star Grape, Sun Gold, Atkinson (trying this for the first time), Garden Peach, Mountain Magic, and Ozark Pink (first year for this too.). Except for Atkinson and Ozark pink these are all tried and tested here. They all mature in 56-71 days from transplanting.

Our second bed is of slower ones – 75-85 days from transplanting. A quarter of them are our reliable standard red slicer Tropic. About another quarter are our favorite orange slicer Jubilee. The other half of the bed are special ones, such as Yellow Oxheart, Amy’s Apricot, Black Cherry, Vinson Watts (new to us this year, disease resistant), Green Zebra, Amy’s Sugar Gem, Rebelski (new to us), Mortgage Lifter, TC Jones and Striped German.

For the tender crops going into the hoophouse at this time of year, we don’t clear the whole bed, but dig holes at 2ft spacing down the middle, removing winter crops as needed.

Holes dug for our hoophouse tomatoes. Photo Wren Vile
Holes dug for our hoophouse tomatoes.
Photo Wren Vile

After planting, we prioritize harvesting the old crops directly to the south of the new plants, then gradually harvest the other “old” crops around , to make more space for the growing new crop. This way, we get maximum food from the space. When the surrounding “old” crops are big, we also get some protection on chilly nights. As you can see in the top picture, we also put wire hoops over the plants and use row cover if a frosty night is forecast.

Summer squash in the hoophouse, planted among Bulls Blood beets. Photo Kathryn Simmons
Summer squash in the hoophouse, planted among Bulls Blood beets.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Next to be planted is a row of squash. Today the plants are still in a flat in the greenhouse. Next weekend is forecast to be cold – below freezing. Do we plant soon and add row cover, or try to wait until after the weekend? By then the plants could be too big for the flat.


reynolds-logoToday I gave a garden tour to 15 horticulture students from J Sargeant Reynolds Community College, one of Betsy Trice’s three classes there.

logoOn Saturday I taught a class at New Country Organics in Waynesboro, on Succession Planting. I have many slideshows, and each time I prepare for a presentation I usually revise or at least tweak the one I’m about to give. And often after the event, I upload the slides to SlideShare.net so people can see them again (or the many people who missed the event can see them for the first time. I haven’t yet uploaded the slightly revised Succession Planting to Slide Share. I see I posted the previous version here as recently as 11/10/15.

Instead of reposting I went through my archives and made a new category “slide shows” and labelled all the ones I could find. So, if you are in a slide show watching mood, you can click on the Slide shows category in the side panel on the left and pick from the choices there. Also, Jillian Lowery filmed the class at New Country Organics, and I hope to be able to post the video.


Rhubarb in early spring, not yet ready to harvest. Photo Kathryn Simmons
Rhubarb in early spring, not yet ready to harvest.
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Outdoors, we are weeding, composting and mulching our rhubarb. This is a borderline climate for rhubarb, but we manage to get a crop from it. Best if we provide summer shade.

 

Reviewing tomatoes, checking garlic, Growing for Market magazine

Hoophouse tomatoes at full height. Photo Nina Gentle
Hoophouse tomatoes at full height.
Photo Nina Gentle

One of the crops we grow in our hoophouse in spring is a range of open-pollinated and heirloom tomatoes. Because it doesn’t rain in there and we use drip irrigation, our plants don’t get water put on the leaves. Naturally, they have some dew in the mornings, but this dries up early. So there is less fungal disease pressure than outdoors. Additionally, we do a better job of monitoring the indoor crops than those in the field. So the hoophouse is a good place to “audition” varieties we haven’t grown before, and to grow those delicious but temperamental ones that we no longer grow outside. This year we grew 20 varieties, with at least two plants of each. A few are F1 Hybrids, most are OP.

We are lucky enough to be able to grow some of what we like best without a lot of attention to whether it would be a commercial success or not. But there comes a point (usually in the heat and busyness of summer!) when we want to know which varieties are productive and disease-resistant, as well as delicious. We haven’t time to cosset the losers. We want to invest our time wisely and get good results. And we want to boot the worst to make way for trying some other varieties next year.

I already wrote about the “Rampancy Rating” tomato height chart which we use to plan for the shortest plants at the east end and tallest on the west (for best lighting along the rows). Now here are some notes on the varieties we grew this spring, in terms of productivity and disease resistance. Flavor is very important and more subjective. All of these were tasty.

 

Tropic tomato. Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchnge
Tropic tomato.
Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

This year’s most productive tomatoes among the ones we grew in our hoophouse include Amy’s Apricot, Amy’s Sugar Gem, Five Star Grape (F1 hybrid), Garden Peach, Glacier, Mountain Magic, Stupice, Sun Gold (F1 hybrid) and TC Jones.

Amy's Sugar Gem tomato. Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Amy’s Sugar Gem tomato.
Photo  Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

Reasonably productive for us were Black Cherry, Green Zebra, Nepal, Riesentraube, Tropic and Yellow Oxheart.

Riesentraube cherry tomatoes. Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Riesentraube cherry tomatoes.
Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

We got poor yields from Cherokee Purple, Jubilee, Moskvich, Striped German and Valencia. Now, in all fairness to tomato plant breeders, I should say these productivity ratings sometimes cause me to wonder if the plants have been “browsed” by my fellow communards. Black Cherry, Cherokee Purple and Striped German are well-known for exceptional flavor. It could be that the yield was much higher than I saw.

Cherokee Purple tomatoes. Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Cherokee Purple tomatoes.
Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

In terms of disease, we got some Early Blight and Septoria Leaf Spot. Our most disease-resistant tomatoes were Amy’s Apricot, Amy’s Sugar Gem, Black Cherry, Five Star Grape, Jubilee, Mountain Magic, Riesentraube and Sun Gold. We usually get good disease-resistance from Tropic but it was only so-so this year. Other so-so varieties we grew were Cherokee Purple, Garden Peach, Striped German and TC Jones. More prone to diseases were Green Zebra, Moskvich, Nepal, Valencia and Yellow Oxheart.

Glacier early tomatoes. photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Glacier early tomatoes.
Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

We didn’t record disease-resistance for Stupice or Glacier. We grow these two because they are the fastest and have pretty good flavor for early varieties. We don’t plan to keep them long-term. As soon as we can have bigger slicing varieties and ones without green shoulders, we’re on to them!

Garden Peach fuzzy tomato. Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
Garden Peach fuzzy tomato.
Photo Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

So, looking at both productivity and disease-resistance, next year we’ll likely grow Amy’s Apricot, Amy’s Sugar Gem, Black Cherry, Five-Star Grape, Garden Peach, Glacier, Jubilee, Mountain Magic, Riesentraube, Stupice, Sun Gold and Tropic. Maybe not Cherokee Purple or Striped German unless some people fess up to surreptitious private harvesting. Maybe not Green Zebra, Moskvich, Nepal, TC Jones, Valencia or Yellow Oxheart.

The Cornell Vegetable MD Online has a wonderful chart of disease-resistance in tomato varieties. 38 diseases, 7 physiological disorders and almost 300 varieties listed. The list is a few years old, so really new varieties won’t be there, but the heirlooms and the standard F1s are there.

Research at Penn State Extension provides this list of “Best Tunnel Tomatoes”:BHN 589***, Scarlet Red, Primo Red, Red Mountain*, Red Deuce, Rally **, Charger, Finishline, Rocky Top, BrandyBoy, Conestoga, Carolina Gold, BHN 876, and Big Dena. Mostly they focused on red determinate slicers.

Amy Goldman’s Book The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table: Recipes, Portraits, and History of the World’s Most Beautiful Fruit will tell you all the pros and cons of many heirloom varieties.

So will Craig LeHoullier’s Epic Tomatoes which I reviewed when it first came out.


Growing for Market magazine
Growing for Market magazine

The august issue of Growing for Market magazine is out, along with my article about garlic. This is in the form of a checklist for each stage of harvesting, curing, snipping, sorting and storage.

The cover article, by Joanna and Eric Reuter, whose interesting Chert Hollow Farm blog I often refer to, is about learning to successfully farm together as a couple. (The June/July issue of Growing for Market carried an article about farming as a family with a young child.) This month, Joanna and Eric have interviewed five couples, and asked probing questions about communication of information and emotional states, division of labor, dealing with the jobs neither partner likes to do, balancing sharing decision-making with allowing each other some autonomy and accepting following the other’s lead on some decisions. They also address time off, in particular, how to get time off together, as well as the general issue of limit setting. Managing stress comes up, including the challenges of supporting each other while in the midst of a farm crisis. And they close with some words of advice. I appreciated having this aspect of farming get serious consideration. It’s as vital as good transplants and good tools!

In this issue is also a picture and info about a sloping deer fence that is effective without making you feel like you are working in a cage, a review of the USDA cover crops chart, where each “tile” of the chart opens up when clicked to provide more information, and  Gretel Adams write about growing dried flowers and grains for winter flower arrangements. Lastly there is the encouraging and heart-warming story of Anne and Brian Bates who went from zero land and zero farm income to a 75 acre farm making $100K two years later. they financed the farm with loans from parents, USDA, NRCS and a crowd-funded 3 year loan from Kiva Zip. Their financial plan includes one-third of their income going to pay off the loans, one third in salary and one third to operating costs. Careful planning and hard work are bringing success.

 

Heritage Harvest Festival, corn, more raccoons, stray cat.

<div style=”margin-bottom:5px”> <strong> <a href=”https://www.slideshare.net/SustainableMarketFarming/succession-planting-for-continuous-vegetable-harvests-2013-pam-dawling-26037044″ title=”Succession planting for continuous vegetable harvests 2013 Pam Dawling” target=”_blank”>Succession planting for continuous vegetable harvests 2013 Pam Dawling</a> </strong> from <strong><a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/SustainableMarketFarming” target=”_blank”>Pam Dawling</a></strong> </div>

You can watch my Succession Planting slide show here, and my Asian greens slideshow at SlideShare.net. I presented both at the Heritage Harvest Festival this weekend.

While at the festival I also did two sessions of book-signing at the Museum Shop, toured the booths, and attended several other workshops.

Cindy Connor ‘s workshop was entitled Grow a Sustainable Diet, which is the name of her book. It will be published by New Society in March 2014.

Also busy at work on a book is Criag LeHoullier, aka NCTomatoman. he spoke on Tomatoes for Southeast Gardens. He has grown hundreds of tomato varieties, mostly in 5 gallon pots along his driveway. Here are some of the open pollinated varieties her recommends for the southeast:

Reds: Red Brandywine (not the pink one!), Livingston’s Favorite (a canner), Aker’s West Virginia (delicious and disease tolerant), Nepal (salad size from Johnny’s).

Pinks: Salzar’s Ferris Wheel, Anna’s Russian (heart-shaped, wonderful and very early), Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter, Cherry Pearl (pretty pink cherry with so-so flavor)

Purple/black: Cherokee Purple, Black Cherry, Purple Calabash

Chocolate: Cherokee Chocolate (really good)

Green: Cherokee Green, Green Giant (great flavor), Aunt Ruby’s (wonderful).

Yellow: Lilian’s Yellow Heirloom (delicious), Hugh’s, Yellow Bell (Roma type)

Orange: Yellow Brandywine, Annie, Orange Strawberry, Jaune Flamme, Kellogs Breakfast

White: Coyote (cherry)

Bicolor: Lucky Cross (tastes like Brandywine)

Stripes: Don’s Double Delight, Striped Roman

I’m sure I didn’t write down all the good ones, but these ones appealed to me.

Next I went to hear Clif Slade talk about his $43,560 project. Clif’s goal is “to demonstrate that farmers working with limited resources and using organic methods can make an average of $1 per square foot growing and marketing vegetables from one acre (43.560 square feet)” as explained in the Virginia Association for Biological Farming document I’ve linked to here. The Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote up the project in early July. Clif used to grow 10 acres of vegetables, but it didn’t pay much. He once planted two GMO corn varieties and 18 non-GMO. The deer ate the non-GMOs, but didn’t touch the GM ones. Since then he has gone Organic, grows some seed crops for Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and has developed his 43560 project, finding crops that produce a head or a pound of crop per square foot. As well as growing the most suitable crops (and ignoring the others), he stresses the importance of building good soil, putting a quarter of the land into cover crops at any one time, and paying attention to marketing.

Later, On Saturday, I went to an inspiring presentation by Cory Fowler, a founder of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. His slideshow includes pictures of the village of Svalbard and the vault, outside and in, and the surrounding ice, snow and wildlife. Norway donated the structure, including the Norwegian requirement that every construction project includes 2% (I think) of art. The daily workforce on-site is zero – they monitor from close-by and remotely, but they really don’t want people coming and going!

Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Credit Mari Tefre, andCroptrust.org
Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Credit Mari Tefre, and Croptrust.org

He spoke about the incredible achievement of setting up this “fail-safe, state-of-the-art seed storage facility, built to stand the test of time – and of natural or manmade disasters.” Each country (and a very few non-governmental seed-saving groups) can submit sealed boxes containing 400-seed samples of each variety of each vegetable and grain crop they can obtain. This is as a backup to their national seed bank. The vault at Svalbard steps aside from political and individual self-interest. They are holding the boxes in safe-keeping, and do not open them, but will return them to the source if asked. There are some false stories circulating about what Svalbard is all about, so I encourage everyone to read the website – it’s an impressive project and a heart-warming success story.

The presentation ended with a beautiful short video Polar Eufori which you can see on YouTube.

Meanwhile, back at home, we are using the dry weather to start to catch up on hoeing and weeding. Here’s our fall broccoli (These photos are from Ezra’s blog ObserVA, which I’ve mentioned before.)

Fall broccoli rescued from weeds. Credit Ezra Freeman
Fall broccoli rescued from weeds.
Credit Ezra Freeman

and here’s our late corn and our sweet potatoes:

Sweet potatoes next to our last corn planting.  Credit Ezra Freeman
Sweet potatoes next to our last corn planting.
Credit Ezra Freeman

We are planning to set up a solar-powered electric fence around this corn, before the raccoons find it too. Maybe also to keep the deer out of the sweet potatoes. The previous corn still has new raccoon damage, but the most recent animal to go in our live trap was a stray cat! Not the first stray I’ve caught this year (I think it’s the third). Our spinach came up well this year, thanks to the cooler weather. We’re still working on getting enough kale established. Soon we’ll plant our new strawberries (a bit late, but the best we can do).