Tomatoes are a very popular choice for vegetable gardens. I know lots of people who have almost no space to garden but will have a few potted cherry tomatoes on their balcony anyhow. There are tons of varieties, some are better raw and others bred for sauce making. Slugs do not seem to eat the plants but they will go after the fruit, at different stages of ripeness depending on the species. Whatever my mother grew this summer was susceptible to slugs while still green. My San Marzanos have a tougher skin and the slugs shunned them until they were nearly ripe. When we figured that out, we started harvesting them when they were still orange and let them finish ripening indoors. We lost more of the riper tomatoes to slugs, and even found an earwig in one, although I am not sure if it was making inroads after a slug tore a hole in the skin. Besides being a better bet against the slugs, they are also the best sauce tomatoes, and produce masses of tomatoes. We are picking a few hundred a week and the plants are still flowering.
I have discovered as well that there are very firmly held opinions about the best way to cultivate tomatoes. I have heard heated arguments about the need to pull off the "suckers" which are branches which sprout between two other branches. They are so named because they produce a big, non-fruiting branch which sucks the plants energy away from producing fruit. My mother quietly whispered to me (so no one could hear and argue the point) that tomatoes don't like being mutilated and will do just fine with the suckers left intact. I caved in to pressure a few times and dutifully mutilated my tomatoes by pulling off tiny leafy sprouts as well as some well developed branches which were not producing flowers. Later in the summer I got too busy pulling flowers off my basil and fighting slugs and forgot to keep up with the suckers.Whether I pruned or not, the tomatoes seemed to flourish.
The other point of disagreement is the best way to support a tomato plant. Breeding them for maximum fruit has resulted in top-heavy plants that get floppy, and tomatoes touching the ground are a feast for many bugs. My neighbour's mother insists that each tomato should have its own stake. Josh is a fan of the tomato cage. We have used it before in our first small garden and loved it, and repeated it again this year.
It works like this. When the plants are still quite small, we put up a framework of posts around the tomatoes, and string a sheet of chicken wire on top of the tomato plants at the level where their lowest branches should be once they are larger, maybe 4 inches off the ground. We put ours a bit too high this year which decreases its effectiveness. The purpose is that the young plant will grow right through the wire, and their lowest branches will rest on and be supported by the chicken wire. Eventually when it produces tomatoes, they will also rest on the wire. When ripe, any tomatoes which fall off the vine will never reach the ground, and you can collect them easily by sweeping them off the wire floor. As the plants grow, you add more levels of wire. Our largest plants are big enough for a fourth wire layer, we just never got around to it, so they have three. The important thing is that there is room on all sides of the cage to be able to move around it and pick tomatoes easily. We found out the hard way that it shouldn't be wider than two plants across. We had to chop our wire in half midway through the season because I couldn't reach the interior of the cage. As it was, the plants became so thick and bushy it was like climbing through a thick jungle to pick the tomatoes at the back. When the plants are tiny they looked like they were well spaced out. Maybe it is the type of tomatoes, or the weather conditions, or the hay and compost and manure mix we used, but WOW did we have successful tomatoes!
We tried to plant our tomato patch in a concentrated unit for caging purposes, but we had three leftover tomato plants which I ended up staking. I am not sure it was because of the stake vs. cage arrangement, the location in the garden or some other factor, but the staked tomatoes were far from the best producers in the garden. Not the most scientific study, but there you have it.
Besides having put the first layer of wire a bit too high resulting is tomatoes "under the wire" which makes picking more challenging, we also used a grade of chicken wire which was just a bit too large (2 inch). I had a number of tomatoes fall right through, and others grow in a hole in the wire and get stuck in there as they matured to full size. We had used this size with Roma tomatoes and it worked fine, but San Marzanos are a bit slimmer it seems. Once the tomatoes have grown up into the wire, there is not much you can do.
So what do we do with all these tomatoes? We have used a bunch for salads, for salsa, soup, and bruschetta. We will dry some. We are blanching, peeling and pureeing hundreds, and freezing them until we have no more room in the freezer, then Josh will make a huge pasta sauce and can as much as we can. We liberated an entire shelf in our basement for this purpose.
On a completely different note, I have been given the name of a product that kills slugs which a few of my friends have sworn by. It is called "slug b gone", I am not kidding. I was warned that ground hogs love it and have broken into my friend Alex's shed to eat this stuff, so I warned Josh that he was to apply the coyote piss we bought online from the Pee Mart (again, I am not joking! see www.thepeemart.com) at the same time so it would work. I also made him spray that vile smelly stuff on the top of the fence so that the squirrels would not eat the head off my few remaining sunflowers. Unfortunately it has been pouring all day today thanks to Hurricane Irene, so he will have to mark our territory again tomorrow. We put out beer too, and had very few slugs in the beer this morning so maybe the slug b gone is working. I will keep you all posted...
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