pruning tomatoes feels so cruel

Today my big garden chore was pruning our tomato jungle! Tomato plants occupy the biggest bed in our large garden, and are really what I am looking forward to the most about harvest time. We have 30-something plants, and I think I added up 10 different varieties. There are  Brandywine, Jersey Giant, Roma, Early Girl, Juliet, Sun Gold, and Gardener's Delight in the large garden, and Cherokee Purple, Better Boy and San Marzano in my backyard box. I grew most of the plants from seed in trays on top of my piano, and they quickly outgrew the space!

Now they have been living happily in the ground for about six weeks, and to say they are growing like weeds would be an understatement. The weeds don't stand a chance around these tomatoes! They don't even bother trying! Though I have other theories about that...(composted horse manure fertilizer that may have been contaminated with herbicide?) So anyway, today I needed to prune back the crazy tomatoes so the plants stay up off of the ground and just fit better within their rows. With pruning, I tried to follow the rule of picking off all of the plant suckers below the first fruits. Some plants don't have fruit yet, just blossoms, so I just cut off suckers below the first set of blossoms. I figured that was safe, but I'm new to this "killing parts of the plants for the good of the whole," and a little part of me dies with each branch I remove! But I know that they need to be tamed because they're out of control and are going to be impossible to pick if I don't demand some order in the ranks! 

 I'm using stakes for supports this year, because I knew cages wouldn't be big enough. I really didn't know what all of my support options were when I started, but I know now that next year I'm going to stake them with string, something like this. I've been ripping up flannel sheets and tying a figure with pieces of sheets to help the stems not rub too badly against the stakes.

After I pruned and tidied up the rows, I fed the tomatoes with "Tomato-Tone," an organic fertilizer from our local nursery.

"Gardener's delight" variety from Burpee

As I hinted at previously, I suspect that the composted horse manure that we tilled into the beds in March was contaminated with some kind of herbicide. All of my nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants) are suffering from something that causes the leaves to curl and grow deformed. It's bad enough with a few of the plants that I'm not sure that they'll produce anything (2 out of 3 eggplants, 2 out of 12 pepper plants, and probably 3-4 of the 30+ tomatoes). But the rest of the plants seem to be blossoming and setting fruit just fine regardless. Everything is a healthy green color, and several of the tomato plants are as tall as me and loaded with fruit.

The jungle.

Many people have asked me, "What on earth will you do with so many tomatoes? Won't they go bad before you can eat them all?" My hope is that we will have bucket after bucket of tomatoes to preserve into sauces for pasta, soups & pizza, salsas, and maybe even ketchup! You can dry, can, and freeze tomatoes, so we hopefully won't need to buy many, if any, tomatoes during the winter & spring. We eat pretty seasonally at our house, so we won't miss fresh tomatoes in February anyway!

I can't wait to see some color on those adorable little globes! Maybe if we have a bumper crop I'll be able to share the surplus with local friends, and hopefully spread the homegrown bug as well!