It’s New Jersey tomato season, our salad days | Opinion – NJ.com
All over New Jersey, home gardeners like me are watching, watering and waiting as our home-grown tomatoes … Jersey tomatoes … blush red and ripen. Have you harvested yours yet?
Home gardeners in Cumberland, Camden, and other counties in the southern part of New Jersey may already be eating their tomatoes. That’s where Jersey tomato season starts. The crimson line typically spreads slowly north … Mercer, Monmouth, Middlesex … and up to where I live in Essex County and then farther north still. Me? No ripe tomatoes yet, only greenies on the vine.
New Jersey tomato season is the culmination of a months-long effort (ordeal?) that home gardeners go through every year. You may have bought your plants as May began, but for some of us, tomato season started in the worst of winter.
Seed catalogs promising bushels of easy-to-grow, sweet, blemish-free tomatoes arrive just after Christmas when the home gardener is most vulnerable. Staring out at a bleak midwinter landscape, how can you not succumb to names like moneymaker, a tasty, table-tennis-ball-sized fruit; or ox heart, which are big as your fist and deep red; or supersweet 100, a sweet cherry tomato. And, then, there are also local icons like Rutgers and Ramapo. Take my money!
I planted the seeds in my basement in February. If you drove by our home, you’d see the telltale purple glow of the grow lights and know tomato season was on. And, no, they were not easy to grow as the catalogs promised. Is the soil too cold, too hot? Too much water, not enough? Whaddya mean, we’re going away for a week? Who’ll take care of the tomatoes in the basement?!?
Winter turned to spring and the day arrived in early May when the weather was safe to plant the seedlings outdoors after I’d nurtured them in my basement. I suppose it’d be trite to compare it to what a parent goes through sending a child to kindergarten, but I’m going with it anyway. The little ones are out on their own to grow and thrive [tearful emoji].
Of course, there’s more, much more. There’s the watering and the mulching and the worrying about cold nights. Keeping deer and bugs and fungus off my growing plants. And how to keep the vines up off the ground is a whole other opinion piece, maybe for next year.
We’re known for our tomatoes here in New Jersey, though it’s not exactly clear why. Other states have similar climate, similar soil, Rutgers tomato expert Peter Nitzsche told me via email. New Jersey home gardeners tend to leave their tomatoes on the vine to ripen, Peter said, so their flavor is more developed, that perfect balance of sweetness and acidity. The tradeoff is that Jersey tomatoes are more delicate and don’t ship as well, which is fine with me. I’ll often eat sungold — an orange-colored cherry tomato that’s sweet like candy — right off the vine still warm from the sun.
New Jersey’s history as a tomato haven has been well documented, but today I’m most concerned about bringing in this year’s crop. Tomatoes are fussy. They like hot weather, but when temperatures go well above 90 for long stretches, as they have over the past few weeks, it puts enough stress on the plants that the fruit stop ripening.
Heavy watering is now a morning ritual. I put up a burlap shade over the plants to take the edge off the heat. We’ll see. On Facebook, a gardener friend posted a picture of his green tomatoes on the vine. “The waiting is the hardest part,” he wrote.
John Shabe is a senior social media specialist for NJ Advance Media and a home gardener. If you have a secret tomato tip, please contact John on Twitter.
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