This year I grew grape tomatoes with almost no watering and absolutely no fertilizer. Just a single plant as a test and I've picked about 100 tomatoes off of it so far. I planted these tomato seeds last year at the base of where my pole beans were growing in November when temperatures were in the low 60's at night and high 70's during the day. We got very little rain through January and just a couple of front related showers in Feb. but this was enough water to get them to sprout up. 5 plants sprouted and only one survived until the next rain. The spot I had chosen for this little experiment is in the drip zone of a young tangerine tree. I mulched this area heavily with about 8 inches of pine straw the year before. My pole beans were grown in 4 inch tall mounds of compost placed directly on top of the mulch and the tomatoes were seeded directly into one of those mounds. I think the key for my success here was the fact that these tomatoes were the third generation in my garden. I had an heirloom variety of yellow pear shaped tomatoes that a neighbor gave me 2 years ago that I seeded and grew last year. I grew them in a bed with some heirloom cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, plum tomatoes and carrots last year and collected seeds from all of those but I'm not the best at labeling so I'm not sure which ones these tomatoes came from. What I got is a grape size tomato that grows indeterminately. It starts and remains quite sweet like those yellow pear shaped tomatoes did. They ripen to an orange color and the tops stay green even when the bottoms turn to a puddle of goo, not that it matters because they are sweet when they are green too. We had 3 weeks without rain before I saw them start to wilt and on the 4th week without rain I decided to water them well. I've had 2 people tell me that they liked these even though they don't like tomatoes. It makes me think of Fukuoka when I hear this because he always advocated for the quality of produce once it had moved a few generations away from a common cultivar. I often let my volunteer plants go to fruit to see if I won the lottery or lost my shirt. I had a particularly bitter tasting tomato grow up among some yellow lettuce. I buried that particular plant in a hole under the live oak but I saved a few seeds to try in other places in hopes of the soil and surrounding plants having been the origin of the bitterness. I walked through the garden yesterday and I saw some new volunteer tomatoes with purple starter stems, I can't wait to see what those end up being.
