Tomato lovers seeing green

Every summer of their 51 years of marriage, Chet and Irma Rayca have successfully grown tomatoes in the backyard. They plant in May, start picking in mid-July, and by now are usually so flush with juicy slicers named Rutgers and Big Boy that they're feeding their kids and grandkids and giving lots away.

But this year, their tomato patch in a far corner of Northeast Philadelphia is a bust. The combination of a too cool, too wet May and an extremely hot, dry June and July has delayed by several weeks the crops of the region's home gardeners and commercial growers alike.

Here it is August, and the Raycas have harvested only a few little cherry tomatoes. Their big-tomato plants display only yellow blossoms and green fruits.

"We've never had a year like this. It's the worst," said Chet, a retired freight conductor for Conrail, who hankers for his traditional summer treat - sliced tomato and sweet Vidalia onion tucked inside two slices of bread, a dab of low-fat mayo, and a shake of salt to seal the deal.

"There's just something about a homegrown tomato," added Irma, who spent 40 years in the import-export business and likes to get her plants in the ground by about Mother's Day, when the danger of frost is past.

Growers often plant their tomatoes at the beginning of May, risking frost to get to market earlier. This year, it wasn't frost that did them in.

"The tomato plants sat there for a month in cold, wet soil. They didn't die. They just didn't advance," said Andrew Frankenfield, agricultural educator with the Pennsylvania State University Cooperative Extension in Montgomery County.

Although tomatoes are heat-loving plants of tropical lineage, they have their limits. "They go into defense mode and slow down when temperatures go above 90 degrees," Frankenfield said. "That's the tipping point."

Lycopene, the cancer-fighting pigment that makes tomatoes red, can't develop at temperatures above 85 degrees. When it's above 90 for stretches at a time, as it's been this summer, blossoms can fall off, plants don't pollinate - tomatoes pollinate themselves, without bees - and "they take longer to develop that deep red color," said Wesley Kline, a Rutgers Cooperative Extension agricultural agent who works with tomato growers in Cumberland County.

If reds aren't as red this summer, yellow and orange tomatoes are paler. "You can also have lighter and darker spots on the same fruit. They're fine. That's just a heat response," Kline said.

After this season's slowness, demand for local tomatoes was actually higher once tomatoes were ruled out as the cause of the recent salmonella outbreak, said Frankenfield, who lives in Souderton and runs his own farm market.

"Tomatoes were in demand, people were asking for them, and they just weren't available," he said.

Bob Landis, the 10th generation of his family to farm in Harleysville, likes to put his 1,000 tomato plants in the ground by May 5, but the cool, wet weather forced him to wait till May 20. "At which point," he said, "we had a whole week of rain, heavy rain, and a very cold wind."

That delayed the normal start of the harvest from July 10 to the end of the month. "Come to think of it, I guess we're lucky we had tomatoes at all," said Landis, who owns 54-acre Sunrise Sunflower Farm with his wife, Mary.

For all the delays at the front end, we'll get no extension at the back end of the season. "When frost comes, that's it, no matter when we started picking. We don't get a break," Landis said.

The folks at the half-acre Woodbury Community Garden are more than ready for their Ramapos and Big Boys to come in. "We have a lot of green ones, but we do have some red ones," said Amelie Harris-McGeehan, garden coordinator.

She reported that all but two of her 20 community gardeners are growing tomatoes, which fits the typical profile of the American home gardener. According to the National Gardening Association, more than 25 million U.S. households - 22 percent - had vegetable gardens in 2007. The association expects the number to increase by as much as 10 percent this year.

Tomatoes are the favorite crop, although botanically speaking, a tomato is considered a fruit.

Fruit or vegetable, your tomatoes need help getting through the rest of the summer. So water in the morning, keep the roots moist but not wet, and don't splash the leaves or fruit or you'll have even more problems.

Speaking of problems, Chet and Irma Rayca have more than weather to worry about. While checking on their slow-motion tomatoes recently, they discovered yet another obstacle to those sweet summer sandwiches Chet loves so much.

There, perched on his hind legs, leaning against a wire fence and reaching with his front paws for one of the Raycas' Big Boys, was another big boy - a wide-load groundhog that's been hanging around for years.

"We had one tiny tomato, and he picked it when it was almost completely green," Irma said, shaking her head.

Adding insult to injury, the couple noted, the groundhog - whose weight they estimate at 30 pounds - ate only half of their precious produce.

Perhaps unhappy with his gustatory experience, he tossed the other half on the ground, turned his back on the still-green tomato patch, and disappeared into his hole under the Raycas' shed.