WWJD? No, WWBND.
Last year, mid-pandemic, I put a lot of effort into my tomato plants. Staked them up, consistently pruned out the suckers, kept them to a single main stem tied to the stake, pruned out leaves nearest the ground, pruned out any leaves with signs of disease, carefully watered them to avoid soil splash (and presumably, the resulting soil-borne fungal infections). And I used an electric toothbrush to ensure pollination.
With all that effort, I had a great tomato year. Enough for fresh tomatoes, dried tomatoes, frozen tomatoes, tomato sauce, and so on. Ending with pickled green tomatoes. It was, at times, a burdensome harvest of tomatoes, to the point where I fine-tuned my methods to reduce cooking labor, and worked out the energy consumption used in preserving tomatoes.
It’s so rewarding when hard work pays off.
This year, I did the opposite: Minimum effort, a.k.a., sprawl technique. Plant them, leave them alone, and see what happens. No stakes, no pruning. I put my early-season tomatoes in tomato cages. The later ones are just sitting on the ground. Other than watering them when it’s dry, and picking them when they are ripe, my efforts ended when I planted them.
With no effort to speak of … I’m having a great tomato year.
My nine little early-season plants began producing ripe fruit in June (Post G22-025). They are now steadily pumping out more salad-size tomatoes than I can comfortably eat. My paste tomatoes and heirloom high-taste tomatoes are setting fruit. My later plantings (second round of paste, and some heat-tolerant varieties) are thriving. It’s too soon to say, for sure, but this sure seems to be shaping up to be a good tomato year.
Perhaps I was a little premature in patting myself on the back for last year’s good tomato harvest.
Was all that fuss and bother over tomatoes was just another example of the second-biggest waste of time in the United States? That is, doing something really well, that doesn’t need to be done at all.
If you read gardening books, websites, or blogs, they are all about all the things you need to do. Which soil amendments, planting methods, staking and pruning approaches, pest-suppression methods, and so on. Square-foot intensive gardening. Vertical gardening for maximizing use of space.
Seems like nobody will ever say, don’t mess with it, it’ll probably be OK. Nobody ever achieved garden-guru status by handing out that nugget of advice. There’s no profit in it. It’s fundamentally un-American to advise somebody just to let nature take its course.
And yet, sometimes, in the garden, maybe that’s not such a bad idea.
I am reminded of something my brother Joe says. He’s a neurologist. Part of his practice was pretty intense stuff. He would direct a surgeon regarding which piece of a person’s brain to remove, to cure otherwise intractable cases of epilepsy.
But for much of his practice, his mantra was not WWJD (“What would Jesus do?”), but instead, WWBND (“What would Buddha not do?”). I’m not well-educated enough to grasp quite how that fits in with the philosophy of Buddhism. But I get the gist of it. Amid all the pressure to Do Something, there’s value in asking what would happen if you don’t. If your job involves removing parts of somebody’s brain, I’d say that’s a laudable viewpoint. Maybe it’s not such a bad philosophy for gardening, either.
Notes on the un-pampered tomato.
Let’s not be stupid about this. This isn’t a zero-effort approach. It’s a minimum-effort approach. I make sure the soil has adequate nutrients. I clear away the weeds and put down some form of mulch. I water when it’s dry. If there’s an obvious problem for which there’s an easy fix (e.g., deer chewing them down, blossom end rot), sure, I’ll step in and deal with it.
But otherwise, the tomatoes are on their own. No routine maintenance, just benign neglect.
I think I’m learning a few things from that hands-off approach. Mostly, tomato plants make a whole lot more sense if you just leave them alone.
1: Tomatoes grow secondary roots.
I never knew this, because I never let them sprawl before. But every place the vine touches ground, it puts down secondary roots. Just like a winter squash or pumpkin. (This is apparently common knowledge, you just have to think to look for it before you’ll find it.)
If you allow them to sprawl, tomato vines don’t just sit on the ground. They root themselves into the ground. At least, the varieties of paste and other tomatoes that I’m growing are doing that.
And, as with other varieties that do this, the secondary roots are presumed to make the plant more robust. It now has multiple sources of nutrients and water along its length, not just one source at the base of the plant.
2: Committing unnatural acts with tomatoes, part 1.
And now, all that weird gardening advice about burying tomatoes deeply when you plant them, because they have a weak root structure — that now snaps into focus. Sure, if you’re going to stake a tomato up, into an unnatural position off the ground, and deny it the secondary roots that it wants to grow, then the one main root may not be adequate.
I now suspect that the standard “plant them deep” advice is there, in part, to make up for the fact that tomatoes really want to sprawl on the ground. By staking up your tomatoes, you force them into an unnatural act that benefits from that deep initial burial and resulting enhanced mass of roots at the base.
3: Committing unnatural acts with tomatoes, part 2.
Here’s another oddity: Tomatoes look — graceful — when they are allowed to sprawl. The vine naturally forms a series of “W” shapes, as the tip first grows toward the sunlight, then the vine bends because it is unable to support that weight. It touches earth, roots, and starts the process over again. A bed full of them has that angular-arch motif repeated throughout.
By contrast, a tomato that has been staked and trained to a single leader has all the aesthetic appeal of a badly-shaved poodle. Nobody looks at one and says, “my, what a pleasing result”. It’s more along the lines of well, you gotta do what you gotta do. Arguably the poodle/tomato is no happier with it than you are.
People may glance at a patch of un-staked tomatoes and think they are merely a untidy jumble. But if you live with them a while, they grow on you, aesthetically. Their form follows their function. They grow only as tall as they want to grow. Then they return to earth, grow some more roots, and keep going. They make staked tomatoes look as unnatural as they actual are.
4: Plastic mulch is inappropriate for sprawl tomatoes.
Above are some paste tomatoes growing along my back lot line. I planted them through woven plastic mulch, figuring that would make for the least possible effort on my part.
If you’ve followed along so far, you probably understand that growing sprawl tomatoes on impermeable mulch is a mistake. They can’t put down their secondary roots.
Plus, in hindsight, that woven black plastic cloth just gets too hot. I had figured on having a lush stand of tomatoes that would shade the plastic. And these plants may yet achieve that. But for now, the sun beats down on the plastic between isolated plants. I’m sure that can’t be good for the tomatoes when they touch down on that.
Anyway, I won’t do that again. And now I have a more-than-lifetime supply of woven black plastic agricultural cloth.
5: Is that tomato disease, or simply old age?
There can be no doubt that the leaves on my neglected tomatoes don’t look as good as those on tomatoes that are continuously groomed. The pictures below would never make it into the seed catalogs.
In particular, my three Glacier tomatoes are looking pretty tired at this point. In theory, those plants should continue to bear all season long. But in practice, after producing ripe tomatoes for six weeks or so, they are looking like they’re about done for the year.
Last year, I’d have been removing those discolored leaves. Maybe trying to diagnose and cure whatever the problem is. Spraying this and that, trying to knock those fungal diseases back a bit.
This year, I’m just leaving them alone to see what happens. I may throw a bit of fertilizer and water on those Glaciers, see if that might perk them up. I’d hate to lose them if a one-shot treatment could keep them going.
But, as the phrase goes, palliative care only. I’m not trying to cure whatever seems to be ailing them.
When you get down to it, tomato plants always end up with some discolored leaves. They always seem to get hit by some sort of fungal leaf disease or another. I’ve never made it through a season without some sort of fungal damage to the leaves.
Here’s what I note: Those problems always start with the bottom leaves.
That observation is universally attributed to these fungal diseases being “soil-borne” diseases. The presumed mechanism of action is that the fungal spores are constantly present in the soil, and they land on the leaves when soil splashes up onto the leaves. Hence, you see the disease on the bottom leaves first. And then, by some unexplained mechanism, those leaf diseases spread up the plant.
But that’s also perfectly correlated with the age of the leaves. The leaves at the bottom of the plant are the oldest ones. They are the first to go. The leaves at the top are the youngest. Those are the last to go.
I also note that these tomatoes don’t seem to start having issues with the bottom leaves until the bottom fruit have ripened. Indeterminate tomatoes are vines, they set flowers (and then fruit) all along their length, starting at the bottom. But on any given section of the vine, they only fruit once. The bottom sections of these tomato vines are finished, from a reproductive standpoint.
By tomato standards, those first sections of the vine have already lived a long, happy, and productive life. They’ll never set fruit again. In short, they really no longer have a reason to live.
And it’s not just tomatoes. I note this same phenomenon in my winter squash and pumpkins. At some point, the vines go bald near their base, as the earliest leaves simply die off. This also occurs, though less noticeably, with summer squash. If you have (e.g.) powdery mildew, it will attack the oldest leaves first. And you can keep the plants looking fairly good just by continuously pruning off the oldest leaves.
I hypothesize that all of these vines abandon those oldest leaves, near the root of the vine, in favor of putting their energy into their growing tips. And so I suspect that at least some of what is supposedly a curable fungal disease is actually just old age. It’s just the natural order of things, for a vining plant. The plant itself abandons those earliest leaves because its resources are better focused elsewhere.
Whether or not this is true, it certainly has made me a calmer gardener. I’m no longer hell-bent on making sure every leaf and every plant survives in good health to the end of the growing season. I’m far more apt to get a few seed starts going, with an eye to replanting an area once the plants there have passed into their old age. And I’m not reaching for a spray bottle every time I see some sort of spots, or mildew, or the like.
Sure, I’m still keeping an eye out for curable issues. Pests and the like. Blossom-end rot.
But I suspect that a lot of the battle for tomato leaves is just trying to prevent the inevitable. If the tomato plant itself has given up on those lower leaves, I don’t really think it’s my job to try to stop or slow that.
Let nature take its course. Replant as needed. WWBND.
