Enjoying home-grown tomatoes all summer

August 25, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By Kathy Van Mullekom

Daily Press (Newport News, Va.)

Shelley Barlow is totally into tomatoes.

During summer, she never goes a day without dining on several.

“I eat tomatoes three meals a day, plus snacks when they are in season,” she says. “Lots and lots of tomato sandwiches and BLTs, of course.”

Luckily, her craving for fresh tomatoes is easily satisfied in a two-acre vegetable garden at her 800-acre Cotton Plains Farm in Suffolk, Va. There, she grows more than 200 tomato plants, many of them heirloom varieties.

Since 2005, Shelley has grown crops as a Community Supported Agriculture business. Customers sign a contract, paying $270 to $360 for 12 small or large weekly baskets of fresh vegetables.

“We decided not to grow peanuts anymore and were looking for another enterprise to add to the farming operations,” says Shelley.

She and husband, Joe, run the farm, which grows acres and acres of cotton and corn. A 1982 agriculture graduate of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., Shelley has raised hogs, worked in a veterinarian clinic, sold pig feed and been an agricultural pharmaceutical representative.

She’s farmed full time since 1997, and has the tanned arms and face to go with it.

In the vegetable garden close to the house, Shelley’s single row of tomatoes measures several hundred feet.

Galvanized metal livestock pens are recycled into tomato stakes. Lined in an inverted V formation, they are just the thing to keep the tomato plants and fruits from hitting the ground.

“I was staking and stringing the tomatoes, but these pens are perfect,” says Shelley. “When you farm, you get creative and reuse everything you can.”

Heirloom tomatoes she grows include Rutgers, Green and Red Zebra, Cherokee Purple, Early Girl, Rose, Mortgage Lifter, Brandywine, Nyagous, White Wonder and Lillian’s Yellow Heirloom.

An heirloom tomato is open pollinated by insects, bird, wind or other natural mechanisms, or a variety passed down from generation to generation. Seeds from open-pollinated varieties produce plants and fruit that are identical to the parent.

When Shelley heads into the garden for a tomato for her own summer meals, she’s most likely to pick Brandywine.

“It’s a big, ugly tomato, but it’s the most delicious tomato you can imagine,” she says. “A slice is more than enough for a sandwich.”

Brandywine is also an easy plant to recognize, thanks to its smooth, oval-shaped leaves with a pointed tip instead of the normal jagged tomato plant leaves. Its beefsteak-shaped fruit features pinkish flesh with green “shoulders” near the stem.

Cherokee Purple is another big, ugly tomato that tastes soooo good, sort of tart combined with sweet — a good combination, she says. She also likes Green and Red Zebras for their striped colors and tart tastes.

For cherry tomatoes, she recommends Sun Gold, which ripens to a golden orange.

Planning each summer’s tomato crop starts in January when Shelley is cooped up indoors, looking at seed catalogs. Her favorite is Totally Tomatoes, with its full-color photos that make her long for a BLT. She always plants more tomatoes than she thinks she needs, which assures her of enough produce for customers if something goes wrong.

This year, she put in 21 tomato varieties, including Nyagous, a rare dark brown-purplish, almost black tomato from Russia.

“The jury is still out on them,” says Shelley. “Years ago, I grew Black Prince and they got soft too fast and Nyagous is doing that, too.”

She germinates vegetable seeds in soil blocks she gets from Lisa Ziegler of The Gardener’s Workshop, an online gardening-supply store based in Newport News, Va. (www.tgwshop.com). This year, she had 500 baby plants on every flat surface she could find in her house.

Once weather stabilizes outdoors, she transplants the seedlings, tucking each into a deep hole with good soil and a little fertilizer. This year, she incorporated an organic seaweed-based starter fertilizer. Drip irrigation supplies water from a nearby lake; plastic row coverings deter weeds.

So far, she’s found no cure for blossom-end rot, a calcium deficiency that causes a disfiguring, sunken decay spot at the blossom end of the fruit.

“Seems like it just has to run its course at the beginning of the harvest,” she says. “I’ve used a land plaster [finely ground gypsum], which is a peanut product that’s mainly lime, and the calcium sprays, but seems like there’s always some of that early on.”

When horn worms are a problem, Shelley hand-picks the pests or waits for helpful cardinals to dine on them. If the worms get out of control, she uses Bacillus thuringiensis, which is a natural biological control commonly called Bt.

“Knock on wood, tomato-spotted wilt has not been a problem the past few years,” she says. “I rotate my crops every year, so other diseases are only a minor problem most years.”