Welcome to the Tomato Jungle
August is a busy month on the farm. If you’ve been to the Red Dog Farmstand or seen the booth at market recently you’ve probably already gathered this. Each week exciting new crops enter our harvest rotation as the summer heat encourages our plants to mature. This might seem like self-evident thing to say as a farmer, but my favorite part of gardening ever since I was a little kid has always been getting to watch plants grow. To see something that you place into the ground as just a seed, or as a baby plant start, turn into chard leaves nearly two feet long or zucchini the size of my forearm.
When I started at the farm just two months ago, things were already ramping up. A lot of our plants were already in the ground, so for many crops here I missed those early stages of growth. However, one of tasks I remember most from my first week here is spending hours standing in our tractor shed with Nicole setting up trellis spools for our tomato greenhouse. Let me paint you a picture of what our greenhouse looked like back then. When we went in over the next couple of days to set up those trellis lines and begin pruning our tomato plants, most of them weren’t more than 18” off the ground, some only a few inches tall. Twelve neat rows of Big Beef, Marvori, Captain Lucky, and other varieties of heirlooms I didn’t know the names of. We trellised and pruned each plant, a task I continued to do in the coming weeks. Returning to the greenhouse every week I was amazed at how much the plants would grow. Getting to prune them over time I learned about the quirks of each variety and their unique styles of growth, and eventually I learned their names too!
Last week, I returned to the greenhouse for our first tomato harvest of the season, and boy have those plants grown. Walking into the greenhouse today feels like stepping into a storybook. You leave behind the world of Red Dog Farm for 20 minutes and enter a tomato jungle. The twelve neat rows of baby tomatoes have grown into thick vines that tower over me as I walk through the aisles with bright red, yellow, or purple fruit peeking out of the dense green leaves. I’ve always loved eating fresh tomatoes, and I’m as excited as you all probably are that the Red Dog Farm tomatoes have returned for the season. But this year, I’m especially looking forward to continuing to learn from these plants as they grow, produce fruit, and care for our beautiful and vibrant Red Dog community.
~Paige S