THE JAPANESE TOMATO RING
Click here for Cindi Sullivan's Salsa Recipes
The “Japanese” Tomato Ring has a long and interesting story. It was first created by a Charleston, SC postman about 40 years ago. It seems a Miami newspaper reporter, Eddie Jones, interviewed Mr. Callahan (the postman) about the Tomato. As Mr. Callahan and Mr. Jones inspected the tomato ring, they talked about tomatoes and Mr. Callahan’s tours in North Africa, Europe and Japan when he was in the Air Force. Somehow or another, Mr. Jones got his facts confused and ended up thinking that the idea for the tomato ring originated in Japan, when in fact, Mr. Callahan just started implementing the idea on his farm in South Carolina.
(Just as an aside, it was Mr. Jones who coined the phrase “Bermuda Triangle” for the area where ships and planes sometimes spookily disappeared east of Florida.)
The story about the Japanese Tomato Ring ran year after year in the Miami Herald, and was picked up by other newspapers across the country. It came to Louisville, when Mr. and Mrs. Bob Rogers were traveling south for a vacation, saw the story in a Macon, Georgia newspaper, brought it home and tried out the idea. Mr. Rogers was so impressed with the tomato production using this method that he called Fred Wiche to do a story about it.
When I first started this job, I had a bunch of requests for “Fred’s Japanese Tomato Ring”, but I didn’t have Fred’s files with the instructions. Then finally, one day, just in passing, Paul Rogers---the 84WHAS Sportscaster Extraordinaire---told me that it was his dad who gave Fred the instructions. Small world isn’t it? Here’s how it goes:
You’ll need about 80 quarts of good topsoil. Mr. Rogers buys two bags of topsoil for each ring. If you have an excess of good garden soil, use that; it will take about two wheelbarrows full.
You’ll also need two bags of mulch. Mr. Rogers uses cypress mulch, but you could use any other shredded bark mulch or good quality finished compost.
The only other ingredient is a 10-pound bag of 10-10-10.
Take 15 feet of five foot high farm fence (or concrete construction) wire and roll it into a circle five feet in diameter, placing the cylinder in a sunny spot protected from the north and northwest winds if possible. Clear a seven-foot wide circle and break the topsoil a few inches deep. Place the wire ring in the circle, leaving a foot of cleared soil a foot outside the ring.
Place the mulch or compost six inches deep in the ring and top it with a layer of soil and half the fertilizer. Add another layer of mulch or compost, another layer of soil and 2/3 of the remaining fertilizer on top of that. Save the rest of the fertilizer to sprinkle around the plants.
Pat the topmost layer down in the middle to create a depression to hold water.
Plant four, and only four tomatoes, spacing them evenly around the ring outside the wire. They will look small, but in time they will grow roots under and up into the pile.
Lightly fertilize the new plants. We mean lightly, because too much will wither them.
If things start to look dry, water the plants outside the ring when they are small and inside the ring as they grow. Support the vines by tying them to the wire with soft cloth.
Once tomato production starts pumping, top off the compost with another five pounds of fertilizer. Mr. Rogers harvests about 600 tomatoes per plant per year with this method.