05/20/2024
Yesterday at the flea market I had a fun thing happen and it made me think about sharing a bit of nerd knowledge. A guy was walking past my stand and I had already seen he wasn’t going to stop, but he looked over and was like “look at how fuzzy those tomatoes are” and came over. He already had his plants for the year but he bought 4 of mine because he knew thick, stocky, fuzzy stems means super healthy. Now I’ve been trying to show off how fuzzy my tomato stems are to Jason and the kids for a few weeks but they all just think I’m weird, so it was pretty validating to have a stranger do it lol. There were a few other people that commented on it through out the day as well. So I figured I’d share what garden nerds look for in tomato starts. Very fuzzy all over, not just thick but the same size stem all the way to the growing tip. A tomato that has everything it needs will have a consistent sized stem and equally spaced and sized leaves. If you notice it gets skinny after a foot or two, larger spacing between leafs or the leaves are getting smaller then your tomato is running out of something, if all of those things start getting bigger then you have done something good and you should figure out what it is. In early summer your looking for fuzzy leaves or a green sheen on the leaves that is actually fat storage that the plant can use when it’s environment gets difficult. And the most important thing is not buying tomatoes in small pots that are already flowering. Now that we can actually watch plants interact in real time with microorganisms in the soil we have an idea of some of the things they are deciding and how early they make those decisions. A tomato plant in a three cell pack that is flowering has already reached out and realized it’s in a dead zone, it doesn’t have enough space to grow to full potential, and if it wants to reproduce before it dies it better hurry the f up. If you get it home and bury it deep and do all the things you can still get a harvest. But the fruit they have tested has lower nutrients and flavor compounds then a plant that wasn’t tortured and when blight spores and illnesses starts floating around the plant almost always gets hit. Last year I didn’t have a single spot of blight on my plants. They were green and lush right up till frost. Okay done needing out lol.
