 With that, I think let's get started and we're going to talk tomatoes in the beginning Tomatoes is the most popular vegetable grown in our gardens and here to tell us about some of the recent Advancements in tomato production. It's Dr. Harleen Hatterman Valenti and Harleen is a high-value craft specialist for NDSU Harleen welcome to the forums. Okay. Thank you Tom Okay, so we're going to get started here with the presentation and and You know tomatoes everyone has their their favorite cultivar and I'm not telling you that you have to switch that by any means I just wanted to kind of bring some of you up to date on some of the I Guess Research that has been happening over the I'd say less than five years on tomato production and So as far as the breeding the perfect tomato, I think everyone Realizes that now the store bought tomatoes tend to be really poor texture Little aroma even little little less taste and like that and And but as a as a homeowner and someone who's growing tomatoes in your backyard you have a much larger variety of Cultivars that you could try many of you probably have your favorites that are Early so that you can be the first one on the block to go and have a ripe tomato But there's been a recent study in which now the breeders realized that That taste attributes are kind of lacking in star a store bought tomatoes and so they did a survey and The top three attributes were texture Which I would have thought flavor would have been you know first, but it wasn't it was texture and It makes sense every time you see someone in the store. They're always squeezing the tomato before they Actually go and try to sniff if there's any aroma. So you can't You know from touching I doubt if you're going to be able to go and understand what kind of flavor But you know so if you're going to a store one of the first two things you can probably do is you know Texture and aroma if you can smell any kind of the essence of the tomato, you know, what's right texture you're going to know what's right a little bit more and Flavor of course flavor involves a lot of things and is very subjected to human Perception and I remember Professor talking about The human can only really perceive three different flavors at a time or Flavors including aromas, you know your senses can only perceive three at one time So it's really difficult when you start mixing all those together Okay, one of the more recent advancements has been the entire anthocyanin enhanced tomatoes and the first Place that this occurred was at Oregon State University where they use conventional breeding to go and come up with this indigo series and And really what what they have done is taken advantage of the synthesis pathways with that from wild tomato Lines then in the UK they actually did gene splicing Technique and they utilized two snapdragon genes to go and increase the concentration now the Oregon State ones have In the skins the increased anthocyanin And it's over Traditional ones it's not near the level of the concentration by the UK group in which they had a hundred times Greater concentration of anthocyanins and so everyone's thinking about half health attributes and antioxidants and and so Tomatoes even though you are getting Some of the anthocyanins because that's your dark your purples and your red pigments You are having some of those in your regular red tomato level You're getting even more now with these dark purple fruits As far as cultivars you can see there are a lot of different cultivars that Everyone's kind of jumping on that bandwagon to produce these most of them are smaller though and one study I thought that was really interesting was Another aspect of having these anthocyanin enriched tomatoes is that With that they they're able to extend the shelf life of these tomatoes because they have some of them Well, it prevents more of your infection with some of the diseases and It slows that whole ripening process and so on this study what they did was they used one of Oregon State University's cultivars and you can see they went with 12 degrees Senate grade light and light or darkness and then they increased that temperature to either 24 degrees Celsius and light or darkness and what they found was that with that cooler temperature and that's just three rows of the The tomato looking from the top looking from the side and looking from the bottom. So those aren't all different tomatoes as you go down those lines, but So you can see that for each of their replications what they found was that that 12 degrees Celsius so cooler temperature plus light was needed in order to go and really increase the anthocyanins in in these tomatoes Another area that I thought was rather interesting was intercropping tomatoes As a homeowner, you know, you just have a set spot where your garden is and With rotations you always have to go and and you don't want to put selenium on selenium and you got to move things around but to conserve space they've been looking at intercropping and how that works and So in this one study, they intercropped zucchini basil green beans and lettuce and they compared the crops if they were just a monoculture or if they were intercropped and They use this land equivalent ratio and the yield that they would get from that to determine which ones actually did the best and I suppose if you think about how huge a zucchini plant can get it wouldn't be you know hard to understand why The zucchini really was was not good as far when it comes to intercropping for a tomato yield and You know tomato they wanted to Still maintain the tomato yield Yet see what other vegetables would work in well with that So when you look at that first line you see tomato zucchini and you see intercropped how small your your tomato yield is compared to the monoculture of course When it comes to your zucchini It did about the same because it's so much more competitive If when it was intercropped to the monoculture Crota laria is It's kind of like a fava bean. It's called rattle bean and it has a small pod that they use you get this study was in Italy and so There you see well again You came up a little bit with your tomato Yield intercropped but in comparison to zucchini, but still it was still you know a good almost not quite half of what it a monoculture and then As far as the intercropped the tomato was Much more competitive as you can see the intercropped how it was so much lower When you go and look at tomato basil, I would keep moving up a little bit, but You still with that intercrop Even though I really didn't understand why those yields varied so much For the monoculture, you don't see that kind of yield variation So there could have been some things that are were occurring there I would have thought it would have been up in in the 20s at least all the way through for the monoculture, but Well, no because you're talking about different plants. So the overall yield of the basil isn't going to be that high In the first place so you didn't have that much of a reduction When you look at the green bean and tomato now we're finally getting up into that 30 metric tons per hectare for the intercrop which isn't that much lower from the monoculture and Even though you had a drop in the intercrop for the green beans, you still It wasn't that bad in comparison. You had a land Equivalent ratio of 1.2 you're looking for something over one to make it worthwhile If it was just one that means you would have been just as well with the monoculture You weren't really gaining anything with that land equivalent ratio So and then finally the tomato and lettuce again We actually even had a higher yield with the tomato Although I don't think it would be that much different if there was some statistics with that and The intercrop of the lettuce you saw that reduction But that land equivalent ratio was 1.3 which again was over 1.2 So their conclusion was that the tomato green bean or tomato lettuce were the only two that really didn't decrease the Tomato yield and had that land equivalent ratio Greater than one so greater than habit putting these two monocultures next to each other So I thought that was rather interesting and and you saw that picture and that picture I had earlier I guess I can go back right there You know what we're really taking advantage of is you know Tomatoes kind of get going slowly and then they're going to start to overshadow everything So if you can take advantage of that cool weather with something like a lettuce that loves the cool weather Even though you're trying to warm up everything and get those tomatoes growing as quickly as possible It really works to an advantage One other intercropping study. I thought was really interesting was they're actually using an onion to go and and what it that onion does is it actually kind of stimulates the potato to go and and protect itself from Verticillium and and so what they did here was they they planted tomatoes in a pot alone that's the TM and Tomatoes with It's called a potato tomato or the potato onion. I'm sorry Also is known as a nesting onion in which it kind of puts little off shoots And so underground so it's more of a it has multiple bulbs That aren't as big as your regular onion, but it still can be used It's more like a scallop I guess in comparison for scallion I should say and And so what they did then is they infected all of the tomatoes with verticillium and As you can see there the onions that weren't the Potato onions that were with the tomatoes actually Virtually eliminated that disease from taking over the tomatoes and and they actually had a lot of more technical stuff Involved but it was really interesting that the onions were providing some kind of a sulfur Containing defense compounds to the tomatoes so that they could even though they were inoculated with verticillium They didn't come down with the disease in Comparison to the ones that didn't have the Potato onions or the nesting onions intercropped with them so a question I always get is you know should I Should I go and what should I do to go and get my highest yield with my onion with my tomatoes boy? I got all kinds of vegetables on my mind right now and You know You see pictures all the time how people use a steak and they'll have one leader or you know They'll use a cage and maybe they'll have a couple leaders Maybe they'll have more than one leader Maybe they won't do anything to them and the question always is is do I need to do some pruning? Or should I just leave them be and just provide a way so that I don't have fruit on the ground and and keep the that from rotting and You really should consider pruning tomatoes When you do that you do improve that the air flow through that Also, some of that leaf removal, especially from the bottom will go You can get bigger fruit and you will get earlier ripening from this and so as far as leader number there's you know One one report will go and say two was the maximum Another report will go and say multiple was the maximum another one says one And I think it all depends on the pressure for diseases Where if you really need a lot of airflow then a single leader is going to of course be your best because you're reducing a lot of Air flow which then goes and increases potentially increases the incidence of diseases and so I think what you do is probably Limited by your your situation and and what you have available but some things you should think about is you know doing a little bit of pruning to at least go and Kind of start moving that growth upward and getting things off of the ground so Removing the flowers until a plant is 12 to 18 inches tall actually goes and says hey put that initial Energy that you have into the root system and in the structure of the plant, which is a good thing By removing the suckers beneath beneath that first cluster you then Eliminate well when you get these suckers there's always going to be energy going to those So if you were looking at something getting something taller, then you would do something like that But it's important to wait until that cluster because not at every node will you have a cluster? It's usually on your third node sometimes it misses that so wait until that cluster comes out so that you're not Eliminating some of your fruit if you wanted to go and make sure that you had All the your tomatoes ripen before that first frost What they commonly do is four weeks before that expected frost date you tip the top of it That'll stop that growth and actually concentrate on ripening the fruit. That's on that plant Which would be an important thing if you have no other means of going and keeping those plants from Coming to the frost But you can see on the right hand side there where they really pulled some of those leaves off of the bottom to allow To eliminate a lot of that splashing Grafting so there's a lot of things grafting can do and I think you can read about all of those how If you have the right rootstock you can overcome a lot of these stresses be it abiotic or biotic stresses There are two types of grafting Homo grafting is when you're grafting the same species on it and And what they've seen with that is sometimes they can increase their total soluble solids In the tomato and the concentration of your vitamin C Another time they went and they didn't see that with the vitamin C But with the titratable acidity and another time they increase the yield But none of the others and so it's all over the board and again I think that all depends on your specific problem that you're trying to Overcome with that rootstock as far as heterografting. I know Dr. Lee does this in his intro class in which he puts a tomato onto a potato rootstock There's been another study in which they use the goji berry and they found that they were able to increase not only the total soluble solids their Titratable acidity vitamin C, but also that ratio of your solids to your acidity, which is good with the potato I Think the plant gets a little mixed up am I am I supposed to be trying to put fruit or am I supposed to be trying to Produce tubers and so what they found was you know Although that they did have some increases the INC meant increases. They did see a decrease in Acidity and then fruit size and then with the potato they saw a large decrease in the tuber number The starch content but an increase in those reducing sugars. So I guess they're sweeter Which would be a taste attribute in a preference that you may have but if you're going to try to fry those They're going to get really dark on you And finally the eggplant has also been used as a rootstock and they actually were able to Decrease bacterial wilt on the tomato by having the eggplant as a rootstock So some cultivars to consider I think everyone again has their their preference, but these are some of Some heirlooms that if you want to try something rather different A lot of times heirlooms you won't find these in the grocery store because they have a much thinner skin, so they they're not good at transporting and And So they and they work best if they're left to bind ripened completely again something that isn't really conducive to these cultivars Or to the grocery store because they'll go and harvest them at that breaker stage when they first just get that little tint of color other than green So some of these have a little bit higher in the anthocyanins, but Not the the green zebra the two Orange ones aren't heirlooms. Those are actually newer cultivars that have a much higher content of beta carotene and Vitamin C and so over those yellow cultivars that you may have seen in the past and so and have Been reported to be really tasty If you really want to get to some rather strange looking stuff Sinjenta has bred these heirloom lookalikes and All of them are Pusarium resistant and they have some pretty funky names arowak Tomo lack and gigalack and you can see they've kind of bred these convolutions into the tomato which you know, you can also see finding some heirlooms and taking advantage of a and heirloom lookalike that has Pusarium resistance in it and and so And I think I'm actually ahead of schedule Okay, great All right, we invite your questions out there and while I get going how about You know that study about Intercropping You know a lot of people say that you should plant basil with your tomatoes They think it improves the taste of the tomatoes. Is it just in the mind or what do you think about that companion planting? Yeah, and and they didn't you know that study didn't do any kind of sensory Evaluation that was basically looking at hey you have This many square Fort of Garden area if you want to optimize and get your highest land equivalent ratio Then these are the things you should think about but I could understand something like that and and you know We you didn't see that great of a decrease And if you wanted to go and you know, it could work It's just that you were not gaining anything over having a row of tomatoes and a row of basil How about there's a question about you mentioned indeterminate vines Can you compare that with? Determined vines and should you prune a determinate vine thing way? Oh excellent question so an Indeterminate vine keeps on flowering while a determinate will go and pretty much sets all its flowers and Then that's done. So if you are looking to go and Crop at a relatively short period of time, but a bunch then go more with a determinate While if you want to spread out that season as long as possible even though in North Dakota that might be impossible You know then the indeterminate you you shouldn't go and You know prune really and a determinate vine about a New North Dakota and curious about the planting season What's the time that we should start sowing your your tomato seeds or and also when can we set out transfer plants? Okay so Now that's an excellent question that can go a lot of different directions And we could probably talk for the next 30 minutes on that but we don't have that much time so generally you will go and and see them about four weeks before You're four to eight weeks depending again how much light you're going to have if you were in a green house setting You could get away easily with four weeks if you're in your home and you're not getting as much sunlight and And not putting as much nutrients to them then maybe you're more towards that eight week period And and then you know you just don't want to set them go from your house or that window and Put them outside and say hey you're on your own. It's always better You have to I like to build in at least a week to acclimate them So I'll set them out during the day and I might bring it and bring them in at night Or if I'm going to keep them outside and make sure they're they're kind of like by a south Facing wall right next to it so that they're not going to get a lot of wind whipping From the north or from the west and they're actually getting more sun coming and heat coming off of that wall to kind of get them used to the difference now the Difficult part about putting them on that south Facing wall of your house is that might be too much sun if they were indoor and under a rather low light So you might have to first kind of just put them out there for a few hours and try to avoid that peak really hot Period of intense sunlight Until they get a little bit more acclimated and put them out a little more a little more each day But I like to use a week to get a more acclimated Hardening hard enough and like tomatoes cannot take frost No, you gotta be careful about that and probably they prefer a warm soil Like late May is a good ballpark late May is a good ballpark I mean you have seen that the wall of water things things to go and and try to Help protect them because they are very sensitive to chill Injury and that's where a lot of high tunnel producers get in trouble because they think oh I can get that much earlier because it's warm, but then it cools down in those high tunnels So if you don't have something protecting them from that Evening temperature, then you can get some injury to them Okay, good. How about you mentioned a lot about the anthocyanin tomatoes? Can you talk what is the health benefit of that? Well now the the one went and said they had as much anthocyanin as the blueberry and so So anthocyanins are these you know polyphenolic that are supposed to be anti-oxidants to you know help with a number of things and Some cancer cancer some you know aging aspects of not with radical-free Okay, I am Yeah, how about their taste somebody's asking how is that those extra anthocyanins? How does that affect their flavor well? We were talking about that earlier Tom and you went and you said as someone had some of those indigo series and they said Oh, they didn't they didn't have the greatest taste so anthocyanins aren't sugar and and so So there could be less sweetness associated with it No, thanks people eat with their eyes, too. Yeah, and it's just not comfortable eating up a blue noodle. Yeah About we got a few disease questions here. Yep Did you want to briefly talk about blossom and rot where you got that black bottom on the tomatoes? How can we prevent blossom and rot? Okay, so blossom and rot really comes around from Your water cycling, I know they say it's calcium But again, it's it gets back to the water and the drying out and then wetting and Having something dry out too much and then being rewaters And so trying to keep a little bit more uniform soil moisture will go a long way About how can we control bacterial leaf spot? Okay, so Back to you. Well, I'm not a plant pathologist So a lot of those leaf spots though come from you know that they're There's inoculum on the soil and when things splatter then the spores get splattered onto the leaf And then they just keep moving their way up. So, you know preventing that from happening There are a lot of cultivars that have Various resistance, you know the resistance maybe I mean there's some of them have six letters behind them for all the diseases that they're Resistant to so like bacteria need free water and wounds So, you know keep the foliage dry when you water avoid overhead irrigation And don't play in the garden when it's wet because you know, you're gonna be making wounds in the vines You can't help it and then with that free water there. It's just making entrance Entrance a little holes for the bacteria slip in and you know, of course good crop good Crop management can help to and speaking of crop rotation or do you have some some vegetables that you would recommend that you Rotate and some that you do not recommend rotate to me I just in my garden I just try to Segment it off so they always keep moving things and you know, and you also have to think of Similar like you get eggplants, you know, none of the solanaceae So I'll stay away from peppers eggplants being in there going with maybe more of your leafy stuff Or broccoli, you know brassicas are always good to go and put in after something like a tomato Right, so just stay away with the tomato stay away from the tomato family when you rotate and like carlings that potato Pepper eggplant, they're all in the same family to get the same diseases Okay, what's your favorite tomato Harley? How about that? Oh? Actually, I'm I'm very partial to Roma's And so I make a lot of salsa and so How does that anthocyanin survive in a canning process, you know, okay? Well, I would think That wouldn't be good And I'm not sure how well that color will maintain But I would any kind of a heating process really reduces it somewhat Back to bacteria least but they're looking for a chemical they can spray to protect their plants Um I Tell them send me an email. I'll get back to them. I'd have to look Hopper or sulfur can do the job for you. Oh, yeah fun. Yeah side. Yeah will not help a bacteria Well, but I thought they sit. Oh, they said bacteria. We've got here. Yeah Organic growers use a copper sulfur Also, I probably important on Rotation with something like that and Good seed source or good plant source. That's right. Make sure you have a clean seed What else we got here? How about using eggshells to add calcium in the tomato home plant home? How many eggs should you use per plant? I think I don't I'm sorry We don't eat enough eggs. It's just even me. Yeah Yeah, you don't think about eggshells is for for those Shells to be taken up by the plant. It has to be the most fine possible powder for it to be Taken up. So it's not really a practical approach at least in the short term for using eggshells And also calcium is typically abundant in soils to begin with so it's not necessary How about when you prune a tomato vine? Dude you prune that says you prune just a flower or the type of pruning You don't want to prune the flowers. Do you want you're talking about pruning like just Below or above the first flower cluster right talking about yeah, so we're not we're not pruning the flowers We're just using that flower cluster as a guide to find out. Yeah a good strong vine besides the main vine Yeah, and you know some of those tomatoes will come with a cluster of five to seven, you know fruit And you if you did eliminate a few of them The remaining ones are going to be get bigger, but you know Not that it is like you're going to get twice the size if you eliminate one tomato The next one isn't going to be twice as big so What do you do about volunteer tomatoes? I Know I really hate to kill something but volunteers always going to come up much later They're never going to go and produce much of a crop So they eliminate, you know, they're they're just a weed in those instances They're they're not going to come out of the ground especially Here in North Dakota until much later So a sharp hold. Yes Recommend sounds good Do you like adding coffee grounds to your tomato patch? I haven't I've started drinking tea Okay Well coffee grounds would add organic matter so it would be a plus It's not going to be a earth shattering excused upon but It will improve structure a little bit and if you got to get rid of the coffee grounds But I would think a compost if you could get a compost And get much better Okay, what do you do if you got a tomato plant in fact with verticillium well Now Have your potato onions Quick plan to put a little onion, you know or nesting onion So if it is I think the best thing is get get rid of it because it's going to spread otherwise It's a fungus inside the stem Sorry, there's no we got it's it's a goner. Yeah, pull it out and get it out of there And because they're trying to find a resistant variety in the future. Yeah, we got lots of good resistance Yeah, there are lots and lots that have verticillium resistance Okay, we're gonna just keep going into a couple minutes here Do eggshells help to keep the slugs away we got a lot of eggshells in North Dakota to deal with Diatomaceous earth is usually what's used with that kind of situation and there are their Iron phosphate products and if you have slug then I think you have way too much foliage And you should be getting rid of some of that stuff down low so that You do not have that How about should we put an acid in the hole to prevent wasm and rot Again like you said There's plenty of calcium it's it's more of the water cycling, you know, that is the main Cause of blossom and rot That's right. It's if an acid really did the job man Do you imagine the market there'd be for in acids among gardeners? So you can do a test if you want, you know, let's say you buy six tomato plants Get your husband to put in acids in three of the plant holes But not tell you and then see Later if I make a difference and then you'll find out that it's not really gonna make a difference But but you can try How about is for that verticillium wilt does any type of onion help prevent that or any potato onions? I think it's more that potato onion that nesting onion because it has multiple bulbs and and the fact that it You know, it's different Then your regular onion so about Anything we can do about earlier late blight well or septoria to get some Again Go, you know, if you always have a lot of problems with early blight I don't think there's a lot. I mean generally if someone's gonna have problems with weight light It's because the plants were infected when they bought them But You know again try to get more of your resistant cultivars and That again is if you get more air through You'll help a lot But there are some cultivars that really sensitive to early blight and so they're like that canary in the minefield type thing Keep the foliage dry and there are fungicides that can be used to prevent Infection and have a shield of protection. There's lots of fun sides like coral down and that was widely available and very safe What I think why we you know people just want to add things in their plant home banana peels Okay, if you just we're kind of the big pictures. We're talking about Start a compost pile. That would be a good idea to go and there's no magic cure for putting stuff in a plant hole Then you're better off with tomatoes making sure that you have now if you could go in Plant part of that stem and have more adventitious rooting occur Would be a lot better than trying to put something in the hole with it Okay, I think now We've covered it. We've covered all the questions. I think there are a lot of comments going on but we got that's a little questions and So we're gonna stay on time tonight so heartlings. Thank you for the talk sure things learned a lot appreciate it You're welcome and we're gonna take a five minute break now and then we're gonna start talking about