Field Day at Tomato Mountain Farm

Last week I attended an afternoon field day at Tomato Mountain Farm. I was happy to see many of my CRAFT friends!

I took lots of notes - here are some of the highlights.

If you are going to have a commercial kitchen, a steam kettle is needed. A good one runs $8000-$9000. Don't buy a bread oven as a roaster; the BTUs aren't high enough.

Get a pH pen. pH of tomatoes should be less than4.6. You can keep this pH by sticking to a 90% tomato 10% non-tomato mixture.

The 6 seeder from Johnny's allows you to plant greens beds that look like this! (I thought that was a hoop only tool.)

The Greens Harvester from Johnny's actually works!

A couple of good green varieties: Magenta, Tropiciana (bolt tolerant!!), and Concept

Spacing of 1 x 1 on lettuce, brassicas is a-OK. Look at how beautiful this is!

Strawberries are beautiful but a big time and money suck. (Look at those hoops in the background! He has 22 hoops that are 26 x 96.)

Hoops are great for crops because it protects them from the night dew. Also keeps lettuce clean. I had such hoop-envy!

Finally - and this made a day with great info even more worthwhile. Chris plants white clover between his beds and uses a wheel hoe down the row and then mows it to keep a clean and easy-to-access corridor. This is an idea that we are going to utilize on our garlic fields/beds.