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Teton Home and Living / Spring 2009 / Planting Inside the Box

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Planting Inside the Box

Or, how to raise a tomato at 6,000 feet above sea level

(page 1 of 2)

Question: What’s red, yellow, and purple and grows bountifully in the Tetons?

Answer: Tomatoes.

Balderdash, you say?

I thought so at first, too. Even holding the warm weight of locally grown, sun-kissed tomatoes in my coupled hands, I suspected the riddle was a joke. Growing tomato vines in the valley is a fairly common thing, but growing a ripe tomato? Not just uncommon; extraordinary.

Standing in Victor on August 20, I am dwarfed by parent vines staked to bear the heavy goodness of ripe fruits and blossoming promises. On impulse—though not authorized to do so—I promise container gardeners Terry Seaman and Kristy Hill the cover photo of Teton Home and Living for their secrets.

“I picked my first tomato on July 20th,” Terry says, “an early variety, ‘Oregon Spring’.

Plunk! An overly ripe ‘Celebrity’ falls to the floor of the couple’s ten-by-twenty-foot deck.

Terry shrugs: “Last summer I knocked my largest ‘Celebrity’ off the vine while picking some others. That tomato weighed two pounds and was fourteen inches around. It was red, but not fully ripe. It would have grown bigger.”

Most local growers would mourn such a tomato cut off in its prime, but Terry’s successes breed equanimity. Red-flagging the 2008 growing season’s late start and its remarkable storms (including hail three-quarters of an inch in diameter), he is resigned to the summer being less productive than 2007, when his tomato harvest totaled ten varieties and four hundred pounds. “We’ll still have some tomatoes ripening in mid-November,” he says, “but so far this year, we’ve only gotten 250 pounds.”

Only 250 pounds. I think of all the years that I’ve fried green tomatoes at seasons’ end, never having seen one even blush; the summers I’ve planted full-sized cornstalks and harvested cocktail ears; the seasons I’ve watched a maze of gopher trails cut, their subterranean residents sucking my carrot tops underground with cartoon-like speed.
I hint to Terry and Kristy that their full-blown tomatoes could be the centerfold in next spring’s issue. But Terry brushes away my promises.

Dogwood Street is the staging area for the annual Fourth of July Parade in Victor. Outside Terry and Kristy’s home, parade-goers park and participants line out. “There’s a mob scene of people checking out our garden every year,” Terry says. “They ask a lot of questions, and throughout summer, some of them bring over visiting friends and family.
“This year by the Fourth, the tomato plants were about seven feet tall, but the real draw were the [loaded] eight-foot pea vines.

“You know, Teton Valley used to be famous for its peas,” he adds. (Indeed, peas were a cash crop overshadowing potatoes here for years.)
In addition to tomatoes and peas, surrounding Terry are containers filled with corn, beans, tomatillos, squash, onions, cucumbers, peppers, herbs, ‘Laramie’ strawberries, and cantaloupes.... (continued)

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