Spring awakens in me the desire to garden and the quintessential garden fruit is tomatoes. Growing up in South Louisiana, I remember my family setting out tomato starts in March and after a couple of months of warm sub-tropical sunshine eating juicy delicious tomatoes from May until well into the summer. It doesn’t work quite that way in Alaska.
In March, when Uncle Fred down south is setting out tomato plants he purchased for a quarter each, I am starting tomato seeds indoors under fluorescent lights. Meanwhile outdoors, barely warm sub-arctic sunshine sparkles brightly on the two-foot snow pack covering my garden. Why do I start from seeds instead of purchasing plants like Uncle Fred you may ask? Well, a single tomato plant in Alaska can set you back five bucks.
It will be May before I can plant my tomato starts in the greenhouse and keep them from freezing during the brief late spring Alaska night. Around this time, down in Louisiana, Uncle Fred is eating his first ripe tomato.
Fortunately for me, botanists have developed a few cold climate tomato varieties that can be grown outside the greenhouse. By the time I plant my developed-for-cold-climates tomato starts outdoors in the garden in June, Uncle Fred has so many tomatoes he starts giving them away.
The effort to grow tomatoes in Alaska doesn’t end with planting. Besides feeding and watering I must compensate for a short growing season with many cool, damp days. Fall and winter are always just around the corner. To help assure some success against these great odds I weekly remove all suckers (secondary branching) between the leaves and the main stalks. As soon as I have two or three tiers of flowers and little green tomatoes on the plants, I cut off the top of the plant. There isn’t enough summertime left for anymore; I have to direct all the plant’s energy to what is there.
While I’m patiently (maybe not so patiently) waiting for a ripe tomato in the far north, Uncle Fred is sick of tomatoes, which are so abundant locally he can no longer even give them away.
Finally, by the end of July the first tomatoes ripen in my greenhouse. It will be the end of August before the tomatoes outdoors in the garden offer up their bounty. But the ones growing outdoors taste the best of all.
So the next time you take a bite into a plump, juicy, ripe tomato think of me struggling to grow tomatoes in Alaska.
Maybe I should try growing watermelons.
