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Waste Not Tomatoes: Seeking a Best Practice

It's an age old question among home gardeners: how many tomato plants does an individual or family need? Clearly there are multiple factors at work in the search for an answer, including the number of people said tomatoes are intended to feed, chosen preservation and usage methods, and available space. Still, one family of four who intends to can tomatoes might plant eighteen plants, and another family of the same size with similar goals might plant sixty or more. Why the broad range of answers to a seemingly simple question?


The Combatants


On one side of the debate stand the restrained growers, with plants often numbering in multiples of six because that's how stores sell tomato plants. The vines are carefully spaced in their gardens, almost always caged if not staked. Virtually no tomatoes touch the ground, barring some awful accident like a freak windstorm or the neighbor's blundering dog; as a result their rodent problems and unnoticed rot problems are practically non-existent. It's comparatively easy for these gardeners to keep the weeds managed, and to spot and harvest tomatoes as they ripen. The plants are at least somewhat less prone to blight in this situation than when they are allowed to ramble freely, and when it does show up it's much easier to handle. Canning will often be a multiple harvest affair, picking just-ripe tomatoes one day, storing carefully somewhere cool and dry, then picking more a few days later and canning all together to obtain a worthwhile quantity.

On the other side stand the magnanimous growers. They often start their own tomatoes from seed, and seed is very cheap, plus at 30+ seeds per packet you might as well plant a lot. Their plants are spaced a bit wider in the garden and then generally allowed to languish or thrive as they see fit. Some early weeding suffices, as the tomatoes will out-compete anything else from July on, provided there are no disease problems. If you plant two or three whole packets of seeds you can easily end up with fifty to a hundred plants this way, and far more fruit than you'll ever use, so if some of it gets gnawed by rodents or rots unnoticed under the lush jungle of vines, c'est la vie--there will be more. Canning day means carrying two or more five gallon pails to the garden and filling them to the brim, either leaving the bad ones to rot or (better practice) picking them so their hormones don't tell the vine to stop producing and their bacteria don't give neighboring fruits any ideas.


The Cases

From a Waste-Not perspective, both sides of the debate have compelling points to make. On the one hand, tomato growers who restrain the number and growth of their plants tend to make much better and more thorough use of their produce. A vine ripened tomato is a beautiful and valuable thing, and by carefully tending their tomato plants they ensure that not one of these lovely gifts of the earth goes to waste.

On the other hand, tomato growers who allow the formation of a tomato rainforest have some valid arguments as well. The initial staking or caging and perpetual tending required by restrained growing are substantial, and when seeds are cheap and space is plentiful you can get a much larger harvest for a lot less work by just prepping, planting and letting the vines grow willy-nilly. More tomatoes surely go to waste, but the gardener's time is valuable as well. Also, each plant tends to produce more fruit when allowed to grow as it pleases. Caged plants produce less, and staked produce least of all; so if you manage to control your waste problem at all you'll still end up with more produce per plant by this method than by restrained growing.


The Caveats 


As in many debates, the conclusion of this debate is quite muddled and subject to many qualifiers. So instead of trying to give a hard and fast statement, I simply have moderating advice for those on each side of the debate.

The restrained grower I would exhort, if they don't already, to grow tomatoes from seeds. Even if you only use a dozen seeds from a packet of Big Boy or Jet Stars, you'll have spent far less than you would at the garden center buying two six packs. You can plant them in a little potting soil in the plastic tray that oreo cookies come in, or in used dixie cups on a used Styrofoam plate, or your grandma's china tea cups; all they'll need is a window sill in a south window and temperatures above 60 and they'll do fine. Start a couple more plants than you need so you can discard the weakest--or plant them anyway and do a little more canning.

The magnanimous growers I would suggest should have an eye to their management. Even if you have 20,000 tomatoes, each one is still valuable, if not to you than to someone; if you grow more than you can use your generosity may well be appreciated at work or church or school or the public swimming pool. Sale is also a plausible option; even if you only sell $5 worth of tomatoes in a roadside stand you'll have paid for your seeds. Consider a modified caging system, wherein posts and rails are set to keep the plants from flopping to the ground; you'll find less rodent damage, easier blight control, and easier harvest to be the result.

Another consideration that weighs opposite the Tomato Jungle: given that it's unwise to plant tomatoes in the same soil two years in a row, and safer still to wait two years between tomato/nightshade crops, one cannot in wisdom devote more than 1/3 of their garden space to tomatoes and potatoes. If there is any limitation upon total garden size this can pose a real problem if the plan is to let the plants ramble freely. In addition, any fruit that rots on the vine or beneath it will leave seeds, leading the volunteers the following year--which can, in turn, harbor blight and allow the scourge to propagate, potentially destroying the harvest of future years. So a more closely managed system is not only easier to treat for blight, but also to take preventative measures against it.


The Conclusions

If your tomato growing experience is limited or non-existent, I don't want this post to overcomplicate the issue for you. In reality, with some basic precautions, tomato growing is a simple and rewarding task. Homegrown, vine ripened tomatoes are really the only tomatoes worth eating raw, and at some point I intend to make a whole blog post regarding the many uses of tomato puree (you can make your sauce taste as good as Ragu (TM), homemade salsa is actually better if you puree and cook down the tomato component, and homemade ketchup is phenomenal). Though far from a survival food themselves, canned tomatoes can make survival foods much more survivable (think of the difference between "rice and beans" and "vegetarian Spanish rice," or boiled potatoes with versus without ketchup, and you'll start to see the advantages). With some planning and a little work tomatoes can become a valuable part of your long-term gardening experience.

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