Information from our September 2009 newsletter regarding the late blight that devastated many tomato fields last year.  A reader requested that we post it here on the blog. A Boss’s Corner column is included every week in our newsletter.

The Boss’s Corner

Hi,

So far this September, the sun has sent its warm rays and bathed Magicland Farms with its photosynthesis inducing electromagnetic energy from sunup to sunset. Clouds have been scant and fleeting and liquid sunshine has been absent replaced with the genuine stuff. This sunny, dry weather has really helped our tomatoes and it hurt the Phytophthora infestans fungus/mold, more commonly referred to as late blight.

Canning Tomatoes

Tomatoes are usually canned using the hot water method, which is well known by most of our customers. It is also known that while tomatoes can be successfully canned with this method beans can’t be. Why? It has to do with the acidity and the problem of botulism and other bacteria. While it is impossible to get a jar of tomatoes hot enough using a hot water bath to kill the botulism organism, the botulism bacteria can’t survive in an acid environment. How to you measure acidity? Using the pH number. A pH of 7, like distilled water, is neutral, vinegar is an acid and has a pH below 3 while baking soda is an alkaline with a pH above 9. In order to can tomatoes safely, the tomatoes must have a pH BELOW 4.5. Every tomato of ours we tested tested below 3.8 which means they are plenty acid enough. (By the way our beans test around pH 5 which means they must be canned with a pressure canner.) We looked up about the USDA’s recommendations concerning blight infected tomatoes and they say it is OK to eat them fresh BUT THEY SHOULDN’T BE CANNED!!! Why? The USDA never said in the bulletin although we think it is because tomatoes picked from dead vines aren’t as tangy (less acid) than those from healthy vines. WE NEVER PICK TOMATOES FROM DEAD VINES!!! If you have a question about the acidity of your tomatoes, our tomatoes or any other vegetable or fruit, stop by our market and we can give you, free of charge, a little paper test strip that will let you know if the acidity of the fruit or vegetable is below or above pH 4.5. We also can show you how to use it-this takes about 20 seconds to show how. In short, there is a tiny sensitive area in its center where you put a drop of juice. This sensitive area turns color and you can then tell what pH the juice is-the color coding is right on the strip so you don’t need another color chart. Nice little thing…

Late Blight

First off, late blight generally infects only tomatoes and potatoes. This is the same disease that caused the horrific Irish potato famine of the 1840s. It is caused by the Phytophthora infestans organism and loves mild (60 to 80F) temperatures and lots of wetness. It is the same thing that killed Martha Stewart’s tomatoes in Connecticut and did the same to millions of other tomatoes across the eastern part of the country this year. I have never seen it before on our farm and a 85 year old woman who grew tomatoes all her life in Newaygo County never saw it before either. What happened? Well, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Kmart and Wal-Mart all sold tomato seedlings with late blight in their garden centers from April to June this year. They obtained their plants form several southern growers who grew them outdoors and apparently didn’t take care of them right so they got full of late blight. This explains how the blight got started but not how it spread to people who grew the tomatoes themselves and didn’t plant infected tomatoes (like us). The other culprit here is the weather-the lack of sun and the cool, rainy and wind. The two working together-the diseased plants all over the place in home gardens and the weather-did many, many tomatoes in this year.

Late Blight and Magicland Farms

My middle daughter, Rebekah, called my attention on August 6th to something funny on a couple of tomato plants in our #1 patch. It was late blight. That same day we removed and buried hundreds of plants, in all three patches, that had any sign of blight on them The next day I put on a fungicide on most tomato plants. Apparently, the blight had already spread and a week later it was visible on many, many more plants in all three patches. However, the fungicide and the warmer, dry weather worked together to stop the blight in its tracks and about 2 weeks later the tomatoes grew on and now look healthy with delicious blight-free tomatoes-however, we lost about 2/3rds of our potential crop since the blight really set the plants back and while they are growing well now it’s very late for tomatoes since the days are growing shorter and our usual frost is just a little over 2 weeks away (October 1). (By the way, while at the farm the average killing frost is in early October, next to inland lakes it is the end of October.)

Just to reassure you: we never knowingly picked a blighted tomato except to toss it and we don’t pick tomatoes from dead plants!

Liking the sunny dry weather for now but have a secret hope for some rain soon.

Nashle!
Tom

The crew just picked 18 quarts of strawberries this morning. Kind of surprising how many ripe strawberries they are finding given the lack of sunshine around here over the past few days. However, we are glad the strawberries are ripening. 

The other evening we had strawberry shortcake for supper and boy was it good! The berries are absolutely delicious, nicely sized and just wonderful. 

Hurry down and pick up a quart or two. You’ve got to enjoy them while they last.

Strawberry season has begun at Magicland Farms!

This morning the crew picked 13 quarts of strawberries.  They are for sale at the stand. 

For those who aren’t familiar with our place, we are located at 4380 S Gordon, Fremont, Michigan. You can go to our website for directions and a map: Magicland Farms.

Our hours are 1oAM to 6PM, Monday through Saturday, closed Sundays. At the start of the season, we only stay open as long as we have produce to sell so I would recommend you not wait until the afternoon as I don’t know how long the strawberries will last. Once we start to have more produce to sell, we remain open for our stated hours.

So head on down to Magicland Farms for the best strawberries you have ever had!

(Early Redhaven Peach Blossoms)

(Red Delicious Apple Blossoms)

Here are some beautiful photos of some of the fruit trees blooming in our orchard. The blossoms are pretty much gone by now. There were a lot of blossoms on the trees so we are hoping for a bumper crop of fruit. Because of the large number of blossoms, we will have to do some thinning.

Remember our first apple of the season is the Quinte apple which we usually have for sale in mid-July. Quinte is a great tasting summer apple.

We grow lots of tomatoes, both heirloom and hybrids. Most of the members of our family absolutely love a fresh tomato, especially one with loads of fresh tomato flavor. We don’t, as a rule, buy any tomatoes from the grocery store as we have yet to find any with acceptable flavor.

For those tomatoes that we grow, we try a lot of different varieties every year before we settle on those that we consider worthwhile growing. The ones that are winners for us must have great flavor, along with good yields and customer acceptance. So we have grown and discarded many varieties before settling on the ones we grow now, and even then we still try new ones every year.

I was surprised to read this article – How to Grow a Better Tomato: The Case Against Heirloom Tomatoes – recently. Most of my surprise came from the fact that Monsanto has decided to fiddle around with heirloom tomatoes; don’t they have enough other things to do? The article is slanted against heirloom tomatoes making them sound like they need to be “fixed” and Monsanto is just the company to do it. Heirlooms can be more difficult and touchy to grow but we have found varieties that give us great taste and acceptable production.

Be wary; Monsanto sticking their nose into something cannot be good.

The crew was very busy at the farm on Friday and Saturday.

On Friday, they finished up the strawberry planting and got the electric fence going so the deer don’t have a feast. Then a couple of varieties of onions got planted – Red Defender and Ailsa Craig. Friday afternoon brought an unexpected delivery of fruit trees we had ordered last year – mainly peaches, plums and HoneyCrisp apples (we knew they were coming, we just didn’t know when). Since those need to be planted quickly, we knew what our schedule would be for Saturday.

All of the trees got planted on Saturday, along with a couple of flats of Montero onions. These onions we are planting are the ones we started in the basement this winter. Unfortunately we found out that the onions we planted last fall did not survive the winter and so we will not have our famous Newaygo Newaygo onions this year. We are hopeful, though, that the varieties we are planting now will be just as good.

Magicland Farms is a family owned and operated roadside market located in Fremont, Michigan. We sell a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.

We hope to keep our customers abreast of what’s happening at Magicland Farms, from the start of our farm activities to the harvest of all of our delicious fruits and vegetables.

Check back often to find out what is happening at Magicland!