Growing up in a family which ran a greenhouse operation, we were blessed to have fresh tomatoes and cucumbers from about early June right up until the field tomatoes came into production in late July.
My dad would scoff at the tasteless rubbery tomatoes the stores would have shipped up from California and he would buy a few periodically just to prove his point.
I was reminded of this the other day when I brought some grape tomatoes home that were grown in Mexico. Guess what? They were rubbery and tasteless.
Fortunately, with today’s modern growing techniques such a grow lamps, we have Canadian grown tomatoes and cucumbers and for that matter lettuce, spinach and other fresh greens available over a much longer season.
In fact, I have been eating Canadian grown grape tomatoes for the past couple of months and they are delicious and crispy. Biting into one of these gems produces an explosion of flavour that is only surpassed by a vine ripened gem fresh from the garden.
Without grow lamps to extend the day length and light intensity, it was impossible to get a crop to fruition any earlier than June.
My dad would plant the seeds in late January and keep them in a small greenhouse attached to the family home and by the end of March plant them out into the larger houses.
Dad told me once they tried to grow a winter crop and it was a dismal failure. By the time the Second World War had ended, my dad and grandpa had six greenhouses heated with cord wood and sawdust burners measuring 21 feet wide and 135 feet in length.
Keeping the greenhouses warm at night was the key to success; they automatically stayed hot in the daytime due to the greenhouse effect of trapping the heat inside the glass enclosure. Dad would often sleep in a big chair at the greenhouse with an alarm clock set to wake him up every two hours to stoke the fires.
It was a real blessing when he installed gas fired hot water boilers in 1958 after Inland Natural Gas brought a line into the valley.
Beginning in early June, my dad would deliver fresh tomatoes to several corner grocery stores such as Woodlawn Grocery, Capozzi’s Grocery, Farrows, Apseys and Bankhead groceries.
The deliveries were done in the old family Hudson Terraplane.
We also grew field tomatoes in the summer of which most were sold to the cannery on Ellis Street.
I have to say we ate our share of tomatoes and cucumbers in those days.
It was fun to be able to just go into the greenhouse and pick a fresh tomato for a snack any time we felt like a snack.
This year, I think we should have an early crop in the garden as I got my plants out last week. Generally, I wait until mid-May at least but this year it just feels right to get going a bit earlier.
Hope I don’t get caught with a late frost and lose them but sometimes you just have to live dangerously.
