Wow! Time flies y’all. It’s hard to believe we only have one week of the season left after this coming Friday. I’ll be normal about it today, but no promises for next week’s email. It’s gonna be sappy. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
This week has been fun, let me tell you. Tuesday, I got to come into work just to chat with Chris. While a long conversation with Chris is one of my favorite ways to buy time when I’d rather not do work, this time there wasn’t any work to avoid. It’s cold! And with less to harvest, the weeks have been much shorter. You might be surprised, but taking care of tomatoes takes up a lot of our time. Without those babies, we’ve got a whole extra eight hours to kill each week. So Tuesday was spent yapping with Chris about what he wanted to get done this week.
Wednesday was even better. The Small Farms Experience class always works on Wednesday afternoons and I get to help out. This week we were tasked with acts of violence and destruction on tomato plants. You’ll never guess, but it’s not tomato season anymore. Too cold. We really try and avoid leaving any crop material in or on the soil surface as they can be vectors for disease later on next season. So once the plants stop producing fruit, we have to rip them out- violently.
The rationale being that tomato plants are especially inviting to certain pathogenic little guys called root knot nematodes. If we were to clear out our high tunnel the easiest way- by chopping tomato vines at the base and leaving the rest to decompose- we would be absolutely crawling with evil little guys. So, in order to avoid a little guy infestation, we have to remove all parts of the tomato plant before letting the soil rest over the winter. All this drama started about two seasons ago. A few plants in one small patch had become very chlorotic and diseased looking. Chris pulled up their roots, finding strange gall-like growths all over and sent a sample to the Purdue Plant Diagnostic Lab. The PPDL was like, “Looks like you have an evil little guy problem.” And ever since then we’ve been keeping an eye on our evil little guy levels. Next week, the farm class will be removing tomato plants, checking each of the plants roots for galls, and marking out the location of each affected plant. The goal will be to map out where nematodes are (if there are any this year) in order to observe if and how the population is spreading.
The photos this week are of the previously described ripped up tomato plants. You can very clearly see that they have reached the end of their long and fruitful life and are on their way out the door. Getting ready for winter!