danceswchopstck replied to your post
Aug. 22nd, 2016 12:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2bvAmlU:danceswchopstck replied to your post “danceswchopstck replied to your photo:Heirloom tomato tasting for a…”
The only tomato variety that I’ve found tastier than a Brandywine is completely un-irrigated (“dry-farmed”) Early Girls. I don’t know if you’d get the same effect in NY as we do in CA with the dry-farm technique. Our summers are damn dry, so that the tomatoes have to get their water by rooting way down into the water table. The tomatoes come out latish, smallish, tough-skinned, and with intense mineral-y flavor. I like that. :)
I have heard of dry farming! I don’t think anyone does it in the Northeast.
The peeps at the farm do want to try some different techniques. Currently, given the equipment they have, and the fifteen years or so wherein their predecessors did nothing innovative at all (though, they always used organic practices, so they do have some credit due to them for that) and sort of just tried not to think about long-term stuff, there are some issues– the fields all have some pretty brutal plow pan about eight inches down, because that’s as deep as their equipment can go. So… nothing can root through that.
But the veggie manager guy is really into the idea of no-till, and that would be more friendly to a low/no-irrigation setup. They might try it. It sounds pretty cool.
Some of the crops– winter squashes and potatoes– are in an area they can’t irrigate. The result is that the crops just fail; they lost most of the winter squash this year, and the potatoes are all marble-sized. I rather imagine that if you don’t set it up properly, that’s what you get with tomatoes too…
The only tomato variety that I’ve found tastier than a Brandywine is completely un-irrigated (“dry-farmed”) Early Girls. I don’t know if you’d get the same effect in NY as we do in CA with the dry-farm technique. Our summers are damn dry, so that the tomatoes have to get their water by rooting way down into the water table. The tomatoes come out latish, smallish, tough-skinned, and with intense mineral-y flavor. I like that. :)
I have heard of dry farming! I don’t think anyone does it in the Northeast.
The peeps at the farm do want to try some different techniques. Currently, given the equipment they have, and the fifteen years or so wherein their predecessors did nothing innovative at all (though, they always used organic practices, so they do have some credit due to them for that) and sort of just tried not to think about long-term stuff, there are some issues– the fields all have some pretty brutal plow pan about eight inches down, because that’s as deep as their equipment can go. So… nothing can root through that.
But the veggie manager guy is really into the idea of no-till, and that would be more friendly to a low/no-irrigation setup. They might try it. It sounds pretty cool.
Some of the crops– winter squashes and potatoes– are in an area they can’t irrigate. The result is that the crops just fail; they lost most of the winter squash this year, and the potatoes are all marble-sized. I rather imagine that if you don’t set it up properly, that’s what you get with tomatoes too…
