From the farmer: Much at stake for tomatoes

Jul 29, 2023

Tomato stakes at the ready at Greenrock Farm.

Editor’s note: We’ve asked some of our Traverse City farmers market purveyors to share stories with us about their time on the farm and at the market. Enjoy!

Tomatoes are a race against time. Fran determines what variety and how many seeds we need in December. We get the ground worked up as early in the spring as we can. In the meantime, Fran has started the seeds in the greenhouse based on reverse engineering the outcome (determine what date we want the tomatoes for market and determine what date to start them in the greenhouse based on the seed packet recommendation on how long they take to grow to harvest). Then the race is on.

Tomato plants are a top-heavy structure, and depending on the variety, can be really tall and really top-heavy. Sooner or later the base of the plant will fail and the whole plant will lay in the dirt, get diseases and ruin the tomatoes. The seedlings, the weather and the soil conditions all have to be right before you can plant.

We plant as a team. We mark the rows with a string and stakes, and I man a shovel while Fran plants the seedlings. We do what we’re good at. I’d take all day trying to get the seedlings in the hole, and more often than not would get whacked upside the head with the shovel handle if we traded jobs, so we’ve learned to make peace with the process.

We try to plant the rows east and west to take advantage of the winds to help keep disease away. Once the seedlings are in the ground and growing tall enough, I install the tomato stakes — wooden stakes between each plant that are about 5-feet tall. Next we lay down a paper weed barrier. This barrier is organic certified and impregnated with fertilizer. The beauty of it is that by the time winter comes, it has simply vanished and we’re ready for the next season. In the meantime, it suppresses weeds and keeps the ground moist for the tomatoes.

After the barrier is down, we tuck in straw around the base of the tomatoes. This does three things: weed suppression, moisture retention, AND rainwater deflection. I read somewhere that tomato diseases are in the soil and will always be with us. What happens is the rain hits the soil around the plant and splashes diseases back up and onto the plants. With straw, the rain hits the straw and is deflected down. We do everything we can not to use sprays of any kind.

When the plants have grown tall enough, we start stringing about every 8 inches tall until we run out of stake or plant throughout the whole summer.

That being said, DO NOT GET THIS OUT OF SEQUENCE!!!! One year I put the paper down before getting the stakes in and while we were at market, must have had a good old Michigan windstorm and gully washer hit the farm. When we got home it looked like we had alien crop circles in the tomato field. The paper mulch had not torn but had wind-whipped the poor tomato babies to death. If you have ever seen a farmer cry, I was really close that time.

I told you all that so I could tell you about the stakes. In the early days, starting in March I’d sort all the stakes and re-tip the ends so they pound easier. I use a 3-pound sledgehammer. Each stake takes roughly 10 whacks. Three-thousand plants would then take 30,000 whacks. Pretty rough on the old guy. There had to be a better way. My first idea was to make a tool for an air impact driver. Not good. Inefficient and I’d have to figure a way to get an air compressor way out in the field.

Idea No. 2: I read somewhere that bamboo was three times stronger than wood. Probably true, so I ordered 5,000 stakes as big around as my thumb and eagerly awaited their arrival. That’s it! I’m a genius! The big day came, and I grabbed a bamboo stake and my sledge and started to whack it. BBBBOOOOIIIINNNGGG!!!!!! It looked like Wyle E. Coyote getting hit with a frying pan! Bamboo also bends, and you cannot drive it in the ground. Now what do I do?

Genius idea No. 3: Pressure washer! I took the tip off my pressure washer, drilled holes in the dirt with one hand and stuck the bamboo stakes in the ground with the other hand as fast as you could pick them up. That’s it! Back to being a genius again, I’m going to get my picture in some tomato magazine for sure this time. Worked great — for about three weeks. As previously mentioned, tomatoes get top-heavy the bigger the tomatoes get. We came home from the market and found whole rows lying on the ground bent over by a summer storm and bendable bamboo stakes. Not only not a genius, but in the doghouse. There goes all my fame. Many steel fence posts for reinforcement got us through that year.

About that time, I started seeing ads for garden augers to plant flower bulbs. Nice, but short, and I still had to drag a drill and a cord out in the field.

A few years later, they made a longer auger, and a battery powered drill big enough to do the job. Now we plant the seedlings, drill holes in the ground between the plants, insert a stake and stomp the ground around the stake. No need for a nice point on the end of the stake any longer. Done.

Back to being a tomato genius.

Greenrock Farm is a non-certified organic farm owned by Alan and Fran Jones. They started the farm in 1993, and started coming to the Sara Hardy farm market in Traverse City in the mid- to late ‘90s. According to Alan, “The name Greenrock came about because the market master (Betty) kept asking for it. We really didn’t have a name for the farm, so one day Fran and I were standing in a field discussing what to name it, when I picked up a green rock, and a star was born.” They are located in beautiful Conklin and grow an eclectic combination of fruits, vegetables, and flowers.

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