Toma-noes, or, how I grew almost no tomatoes in 2020

I talk about "good enough gardening" because I have a perfectionist streak from which I am in permanent recovery (as in, 'I will forever be in recovery,' not, unfortunately, as in 'I have permanently recovered'). That phrase reminds me to garden for joy, in balance with other things that are important to me in my life, including justice work, being a good friend and family member and citizen, and being good to myself. 

Of course it's also true that my perfectionism is in perpetual tension with my impatience, and "good enough" is my internal compromise. I don't always like to do things the right way if doing so will requiring waiting a long time to get certain supplies or figure it out. And yes, I'm pretty used to my gardening going pretty well. I've been doing it a long time, and unless I'm trying something new, or beset by some weather event or other calamity, I'll have a satisfying garden. 

But then last year, my tomatoes didn't grow. Tomatoes! Like, THE crop that is the most better freshly  picked and warm, slow to yield but abundant, beautiful and diverse and so much cheaper to grow than buy. The crop about which I sing, loudly, every single year on the day on which we are able to eat our first tomato toast, "It's the most wonderful time of the year..." (Okay I sing that a few times in the garden year but that's a big one). They did not grow. Here are a couple on June 24th, about the same size as they were when I transplanted them a MONTH earlier: 

  

 

   

By late June tomato plants should have multiple branches, thick stems, lush leaves, and flowers, like these. 

  

 

The first was taken the same day as those above, of a tomato that had self-seeded in another bed (so a tomato that had no head start indoors, but germinated outdoors when the soil was warm enough, around the same time I transplanted my then-healthy babies). The second is a typical June tomato bed from a few years ago. 

There are things I can point to that may have been to blame for this slow start and meager finish:

• Mud on the leaves - I transplanted in a rush, maybe I got the leaves muddy and wearied them with disease.
• Hay too close - I always mulch with hay for water retention, weed suppression, and to keep said mud off leaves, but I've been beginning to wonder if I put the hay too close, inviting disease, and if the bright reflection off the hay sometimes sun scalds my plants, which could be a bigger issue when they are weak or when....
• Not enough hardening off - I may have rushed the hardening off a bit, moving them quickly from nice protected indoors, through a brief stint under my picnic table, and plop into the dirt.

But I do that kind of sloppy stuff all the time, so none of those really explains the scale to which they just Did Not Grow. Which is why I decided, in addition to any of those factors above, that it had to be the soil in the bed I planted them into. 

I have just enough full sun in my garden to do an every-other year rotation of my tomatoes with other sun-demanding crops, so I have planted them in this bed several times before. And each year I amend the bed, usually with a mix of compost and composted manure purchased by the car load from a local place in addition to what little I produce. But last year with the pandemic I panic-bought a bunch of bagged manure when it looked my regular place might shut down indefinitely, and then when I was actually planting out my maters it was the weekend after George Floyd was murdered just a mile from my house, and the protest epicenter a mile in the other direction, and I appropriately had other priorities and threw them in the ground kind of quickly and without the depth of amendment I usually would. And they got muddy and hay-blind and shocked, but also, I think, starved. I think that bed is tapped out. [Edit/update: in particular I think I've been relying on high nitrogen composted manure as a short cut instead of piling on enough compost and plant material to really feed the soil ecosystem. I'm working on that.]

Finally at the end of June I dug most of the plants out (easy, their roots were tiny, not a good sign) loosened the soil around them (compacted, not a good sign), added a lot more compost and micronutrients and worm castings in the soil and on top, and put them back. And they did start to grow some, a sign I'm on the right track. Here's one of the largest ones in mid-September, still very small and sad for a tomato grown in full sun, but alive at least. 

But they never thrived. We got maybe six or eight big tomatoes all year, a few small harvests of cherries, every single plum tomato had blossom end rot (they were in a nearby bed that tends to dry out, and I think suffered from poor watering as well as poor soil) and we had our first tomato toast September 14th, a full six weeks later than usual. I even bought tomatoes from the farmers market a few times, a first in I can't count how long, and the cost really shored up my confidence that the $$ and effort it takes to amend my soil properly, which I sometimes second guess, is worth it. 

So I made a whole plan to raise that bed, expand another bed, top dress all the beds really well in the fall, and ordered all the supplies for delivery and then promptly sprained my ankle HARD a few days later on labor day weekend, and had to put it all off for spring. I also imagined myself posting about this during the long leisurely days of winter cooped up inside, which I regularly forget are not a thing for me. I'm super busy at work all winter, I barely manage to get my seeds started on time. But I really wanted to get this written down and put behind me before I get to planting next year's maters in about a month. 

So this is my confession, (cue Usher): sometimes good enough gardening is actually not quite good enough. But then luckily there's the farmers' market, and I'm not actually trying to make a go of this for sustenance or business (thank god). Here's to hoping my best laid plans for this coming year turn out enough better.