For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."
why tomatoes look weird and deformed like this 🐱
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If you love to grow big, beautiful tomatoes (especially heirloom tomatoes) then you've probably had your share of weird-shaped fruit with bulges, bumps, and brown scars that sort of look like zippers. It's a common condition called catfacing (though I don't really see the resemblance—I guess whoever coined the term thought their puckered tomatoes looked like cat's cheeks? 🤷♀️). And while most catfaced tomatoes are still edible, so long as they haven't started rotting where the wounds are, it can still be pretty frustrating if most of your tomatoes are coming off the vine this way. In my experience, catfacing also tends to make tomatoes more susceptible to other damage or even diseases. (This same disfigurement also happens to strawberries, if you've noticed odd-looking strawberries on your plants this summer.) So what's this all about? Why does it happen? Is it specific to the tomato variety, how much (or how little) you water, how late you harvest, or something else entirely? Here's why you're getting catfaced tomatoes (and what you can do about it.) I'm about a month out from my first frost 😭 which means I'm already thinking of what will replace all my tomatoes and squash once they're done for the season. I've already sowed seeds in other newly-cleared beds (the fall/winter vegetable garden is going strong 💪), but in my climate, late September isn't the best time to start more seeds if I actually want to harvest anything before spring. Leaving those beds empty isn't an option though—good healthy soil always needs something growing in it. So what will I be doing? Planting cover crops! I just ordered a few pounds of edible cover crop seeds to plant between late September and early October, and a couple of them are new to me. (Side note: If you're not convinced that you should be cover cropping, here's a post I wrote on how they help restore your soil over winter.) First up: bell beans. (Buy them here.)Bell beans are small-seeded fava beans, and you can sow them en masse to take advantage of their nitrogen-fixing abilities. Bell beans are hardy down to 10°F to 15°F, and I'll be growing them under midweight frost cloth in my zone 5 microclimate. Next, I'm trying these frostmaster peas. (Buy them here.)Frostmaster peas are a type of winter pea, very similar to Austrian winter peas (which I've grown and written about here) but with white flowers. They are hardy down to 10°F but can survive single-digit temps with a little protection. Both of these cover crops are 100% edible (leaves and flowers) and the key is making sure they get a few inches tall before a hard freeze hits. This sets them up to survive the rest of winter, where the short days will slow down their growth considerably, but they'll resume growing by early spring. (You can continue to harvest the leaves for salads all winter.) When it's time to plant all your spring crops, you just cut down the cover crops and use the foliage as mulch. Your soil microbes will already be active and happy, and the roots underground will release all their stored energy to feed a new round of plants! P.S. Catfacing is a common problem in tomatoes. Here's why it happens and what you can do about it. P.P.S. Learn how to store all the vegetables you grow (or buy) with my Fruit & Vegetable Storage Guide. Download the PDF, print out the charts, and save money in wasted food! |
Garden Betty
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."