In Search Of The Perfectly Vine Ripened Tomato

by Alfred Thorsberg, Granada
Wouldn’t we all love a healthy, vine ripened tomato grown without massive amounts of toxic pesticides? Not a forced ripened tasteless tomato smelling of the laundry soap that lingers in the air in the grocery store and penetrating the foods we pay good money for. During the eleven years I have been living in Nicaragua I have always wanted to figure out a way to be able to pick the perfectly ripe tomato from the vine and eat it like an apple, just like Darrell’s wife loves to do. I have tried, again and again, to grow tomatoes, always with very poor results. Wrong soil, diseases, pests, etc seems to make it very difficult to grow tomatoes in this country. But these setbacks didn’t stop me from making yet another attempt back in July, this time with seeds from Italian seed producer L’ortalano I found at Ferreteria Lugo. The kind was called Tratt. Thiram.
My idea this time was to grow tomatoes in a different way, hopefully away from pests and diseases.  I used a 10′ section of a 6 inch sewer pipe I had laying around.  I cut openings on one side of the pipe, drain holes on the opposite side, set the pipe horizontally on 10″ pedestals, also made by the same type of pipe.  I filled the bottom with hot water sterilized sand, then filled the rest with good cow poop mixed compost soil abundant with earthworms. In shallow holes, every 10 inches, I placed a few seeds, said a prayer to the Tomato God and waited to see what happened.  It turned out a lot was happening.  It appeared that every single seed I planted sprouted, filling my pipe dream with way too many seedlings so I had to transfer most of little plants elsewhere, leaving just nine of the largest in the pipe.

 

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What excitement we felt as the first flower opened up on a healthy plant!

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A screen was placed above the pipe to protect young plants from excessive sun & rain.
Wanting to grow the tomatoes without chemical pesticides, yet being well aware of pests and diseases likely ready to attack my healthy little plants at any time, I took some preventative action. This happened at the beginning of July so the rainy season was slowing down, meaning we needed to water our plants.  We used only collected rain water which we added a good squirt of hydrogen peroxide to, as well as some neem seed oil.
The neem seed oil we produced from seeds from our own neem trees. Neem is a proven pesticide, pest repellent and more.  At the bottom of this article you will find an extensive pdf file on the many benefits derived from the neem tree. A very interesting read. Hydrogen peroxide is magical for making your garden grow. Googlerize for more information if you want to know more about that.
I ground the neem seeds in my coffee grinder producing a thick oily garlic smelling paste.  Neem seed oil is not water soluble so alcohol is needed for the extraction.  Since my Nica guests, long ago, had already consumed all my Guaro Mombacho my best choice for a high alcohol content beverage was the bottle of Tanqueray Gin that had been sitting in my bodega for years.
After adding alcohol to the ground up seeds and letting the mixture sit for an hour or so I screened out the liquid using fabric from an old torn shirt.  In time the neem seed oil would lift to the surface of the liquid but I kept the mixture with the alcohol to help keeping the oil water soluble.  We sprayed a water solution of neem seed oil, hydrogen peroxide and grapefruit seed extract from NutraBiotic onto the whole plants a couple of times a week.

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Neem seeds from our own trees, fruit meat & skin removed and seeds dried.

 

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The freshly ground seeds gives off a strong pungent garlic like scent.

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A Shot Of Tanqueray & Neem, Anyone?

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The possibility of having a good harvest of nice ripe tomatoes was looking bright.  And why not? After all, the origin of the tomato finds its roots in Central & Latin America. The English word tomato comes from the Spanish word, tomate, derived from the Nahuatl (Aztec language) word, tomatlIt first appeared in print in 1595. A member of the deadly nightshade family, tomatoes were erroneously thought to be poisonous (although the leaves are poisonous) by Europeans who were suspicious of their bright, shiny fruit they ended up calling the Wolf Peach.  Native versions were small, like cherry tomatoes, and most likely yellow rather than red.  The Italians named the new fruit Pomi D’oro, golden apple. Then around 1880 the pizza was born. The story goes that it was created by a restaurateur in Naples to celebrate the visit of Queen Margarite, the first Italian monarch since Napoleon conquered Italy. The restaurateur made the pizza from three ingredients that represented the colors of the new Italian flag: red, white, and green. The red is the tomato sauce, the white was the mozzarella cheese, and the green was the basil topping. Hence, Pizza Margarite was born, and is still the standard for pizza. Hence the future of the tomato was assured!
Is the Tomato a Fruit or Vegetable? I guess that depends on whom you are asking. By definition, a fruit is the edible plant structure of a mature ovary of a flowering plant, usually eaten raw; some are sweet like apples, but the ones that are not sweet such as tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, etc. are commonly called vegetables. Botanists claim that a fruit is any fleshy material that covers a seed or seeds whereas a horticulturists point of view would pose that the tomato is a vegetable plant. Until the late 1800’s the tomato was classified as a fruit to avoid taxation, but this was changed after a Supreme Court ruling that the tomato is a vegetable and should be taxed accordingly. Fruit or vegetable, who cares as long as we can pick them on the vines ripe and juicy!
As the first little tomato babies appeared, my family and I became all excited, talking about all the good food we could cook with our vine ripened tomatoes.  In the meantime, it kept raining a lot and the plants grew and grew.

 

Equipped with a loupe, I inspected my beautiful plants first thing every morning.  I soon found evidence of invasions.
Some black spots under the leaves turned out to be a bunch of little worms eating away on the surface of the leaves.
These and other little pests were not that hard to get rid of just by removing the infected leaves or killing the invading bugs.  The really bad news came when my little tomatoes showed up with sad blackened faces.  It was time for me to learn about Blossom End Rot.  Uneven watering the experts claimed the reason for this disease, causing a lack of calcium in the plant.  Too much or too little watering, I don’t know which we were guilty of but we lost a lot of baby tomatoes to this disease.
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As the plants kept reaching for the sky I came to realize my little 6 inch pipe system was way undersized for this type of tomato plant.  The plants we translated elsewhere grew and grew, soon reaching heights to over 8 feet! I started to suspect Monsanto might have its evil claws into the making of the seeds I bought. Lots of green tomatoes appeared and more flowers opened up daily.  We shook the flowering plants a bit daily to help with the  self pollinating of the flowers which is promised to produce more fruit. And more fruit we produced, by the hundreds, which kept growing larger and larger. 

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A screen enclosure with 18 transplanted plants reaching for the sky.

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At this stage there were already several signs that all was not well with the health of the plants.  Some leaves curled up and dried, some whole branches withered and died. Every afternoon the plants were visited by little specks of white which turned out to be the dreaded whitefly B. tabaci.  Little did I know that these little white specks, seen on the undersides of the leaves, signaled the beginning of the end of our tomato plants.
Did the neem seed oil treatment not work?  Hard to say, considering by now it was frequently raining hard, washing away any preventive coating soon after we had sprayed the plants.
From the beginning of the end to the actual end, meaning the clear death of the plants, did not take long at all. All those large beautiful tomatoes showing beginnings of ripening never got a chance to fully ripen on the vine. The plants suddenly just withered up and died, still full of unripe or part ripened large tomatoes. Many of them had suffered cracked skins due to the excessive rain we had had.  Most of these rutted quickly rather than ripening, either on or off the vine.  Others semi ripened turning mostly yellow rather than red.

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Half ripened tomatoes hangs of the dead vines.
It is my understanding, after doing a bit of research, that the main culprit in the death of my tomato plants is a series of viruses called Begomo viruses brought to infect the plant by the whitefly B. tabaci. To find out about this I had to go the Lund University in Sweden and learn from Nicaraguan Aldo Rojas who there did his doctorate of tomato diseases in Nicaragua.
Though I haven’t given up on growing tomatoes in Nicaragua it seems that the plants will ultimately be infected by one or another form of these bad Begamo viruses, that is of course, unless I can find a way to block access to the tiny paper white fly that infects them.  Maybe a small mesh screen that totally surrounds the plants might work. Since the flowers are self pollinating no help from bees or other beneficial insects would be needed to produce fruit.
I just bought some new but different variety of tomato seeds from Lugo, from the same Italian seed producer I used in this attempt.  This variety, promised to be resistant to Verticillium & Fusarium is called Pomodoro Campell 33 and looks dark red and delicious on the package picture.  The name of this variety is probably in honor of the soup mogul Joseph Campbell who, in 1897 came out with a condensed tomato soup. Again, I wonder how genetically modified these tomatoes are.  Hopefully we will not find cricket legs or teeth growing out of our tomatoes.
In case we have any success with our next attempt to grow the perfectly vine ripened tomato, I will let you know.
We also have planted cucumber, parsley, watermelon, cabbage, sunflowers and radishes from the same seed producer.

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Our final harvest picked off the dead vines.
Here is an excerpt from the thesis of Aldo Rojas:
    • A Complex of Begomoviruses Affecting Tomato Crops in Nicaragua

      Aldo Rojas

      Department of Plant Biology and Forest Genetics Uppsala

      Doctoral thesis
      Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Uppsala 2004

Samples were collected in three locations of the country (Condega, Santa Lucia, and Sebaco) from tomato plants showing typical symptoms of begomovirus infection. The symptoms found in the fields were diverse and included severe to mild mosaic, yellowing, downward curling, leaf distortion, veinal chlorosis and severe stunting. The samples were transferred to Sweden and direct PCR detection of begomoviruses in leaf extracts was carried out as described (Wyatt and Brown, 1996).

The whitefly B. tabaci is a very important component of the problems caused by begomoviruses because of its capacity to transmit all begomoviruses and its ability to feed on a large number of plant species.

Conclusions

  • Tomato, pepper and cushaw in Nicaragua are infected by several begomoviruses, of which ToSLCV, ToLCSinV and PepGMV were found in both tomato and pepper. Mixed infections with begomoviruses seem to be common in horticultural crops in Nicaragua.

  • Taken together these results clearly show that the disease caused by begomoviruses in tomato plants cannot be “controlled” by conventional methods like insecticide applications. An IPM (Integrated Pest Management) program is necessary for the management of the problem. Resistant varieties are needed, as a component of the IPM program, but the high diversity of the begomoviruses could be make this approach very difficult to obtain.
    • Resistant tomato varieties seem to be necessary for slowing down the epidemics, but production of such varieties will be difficult due to the high diversity of begomoviruses infecting the tomato crops.http://pub.epsilon.slu.se/727/1/Agraria492.pdf
Insightful information on the Neem Tree:
The website of the Italian seed producer carried by Ferreteria Lugo here in Granada.

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