How I Spent my Summer Vacation…

I have written about cultivating our food and running a farm business as a part-time slow waltz through joy and beauty. Not this summer. This summer, in 36° C heat, I obsessed and irrigated and fretted and sweated. Mostly I sweated. I didn’t have time to take time to stop to see the beauty. At night, I wilted into bed. I planted the zucchini in mounds of compost as I always do and the plants wilted even faster than I. The peppers took way too long to flower, though they did eventually. And don’t get me started about the salad greens in this heat. But the biggest setback was with my headliner, the black tomatoes. Though I seeded the summer vegetables in March, June and July did not produce a single ripe tomato.

I recently wrote about water as the limiting factor in cultivating our food. Without enough water, the intense heat has defeated the farms and gardens in my region. Though not publicized except in our farming journals, 60% of Italy is in drought conditions with the crops compromised or nonexistent. (Above: a river bed 10 km from my farm) But when my first tomato plant bit the dust in the heat—having been heavily watered—without a single fruit turning red, it changed everything. I spent the next few evenings sitting in the garden accompanied by a dog and a vodka, trying to sort out what I was missing. I didn’t sort it out. I needed to be taken by the hand and dragged back to the basics. It happened on our way to the village, when we often drive past a very large and very successful vegetable garden. I like to stop and check out what is growing and how. But last month I was shocked to see that the farmer had lost many of his summer vegetables to the heat. Most of his very large field had gone to grass. His tall staked tomato plants were still valiantly standing but were now covered within tarps. I laughed at the ridiculousness of this small and primitive gesture in the face of our brutal heat. But the next visit to town, I was shocked to see the farmer’s tomatoes were turning red. Under the tarp. Without sunlight. Meanwhile, back at my farm, most of my tomato plants had lost leaves but still had brilliant green fruits. When they were pummelled by hail we were forced to cover them with an olive net. Enclosed in an environment with more humidity and less sunlight, the green tomatoes all began to turn red, giving us a deluge of delicious juicy fruit. THIS was my epiphany.

What took me so long to figure this out? The tomato patch outside the village was covered by a net called a shade cloth. It comes in different levels of UV screening and accomplishes three things. It protects plants from the hail which bedevils us during rainstorms in very hot weather. It cuts back on the sunlight. And, when the ground is well-watered, the covering helps the tomatoes’ environment stay consistently moist. All the above stimulates the natural ethylene produced by the tomatoes which cause mature green tomatoes to fully ripen. Yes, sunlight is initially essential. And temperature. And fertile soil. And water. But water is not the most important factor as it turns out. Genetics is the bottom line.

The very simplified science: A growing green tomato is loaded with chlorophyll, the pigment we generally associate with the leaves, making the developing fruit appear green. Chlorophyll enables plants to capture sunlight, converting it to energy. When a tomato reaches maturity—and its seeds are viable—ethylene is released. The gas induces ripening through a genetically determined cascade of chemical changes. The chlorophyll breaks down, allowing the starches in the tomato to turn to sugars, and the orange, yellow and red pigments have their day in the sun. The increasing production of one of the pigments—lycopene, a carotinoid—begins to color the tomato red. All of this is by genetic design via changes over millennia The bright tomato color attracts predators to eat the ripe fruit. They then carry away the seeds to disperse elsewhere (with their feces as the perfect fertilizer). Attracting the animal is the plant’s way to disperse the tomato’s progeny.

All this I forgot with age and my hysteria over the tomatoes not ripening. The farmer whose tomatoes were ripening beautifully under a tarp, with no sunlight and increased humidity, probably learned from his grandparents that, in hot weather, the fully grown tomatoes would ripen if covered. This is also why, at the end of the tomato season, you can fill a bag with hard green tomatoes, add an apple (to stimulate the tomato’s ethylene release), close the bag, wait a week and find the tomatoes soft, red, and juicy.

The MIT Technology Review (August 13, 2026) projects the summer of 2027 to be even hotter as the U.S. burns through more fossil fuels and the current El Niño event continues. The effects will be even more significant next year. Whether or not I give up growing tomatoes in the increasing summer heat and move them to spring or fall, it is time I took some of my own advice and paid attention to the successful older farmers in my immediate area, in my community. They have heard stories (and some have lived through) catastrophic times; hail, snowstorms, droughts, famine, disease. They may not know the enzymes responsible for turning a green tomato red but they know tomatoes.

My gardens received a nineteenth century makeover. I removed most of the tomato plants from stakes, allowing them to vine horizontally—their natural habit. By placing them over low crates, the tomatoes were off the ground but low and horizontal. I did not cut off any suckers. They continued to grow and produce more large tomatoes. The bushier foliage protected the fruit from the sun and the ground was completely covered, holding onto the moisture. I cut off the growing tips of a few of the most fruit-laden plants and am rooting them (in beer bottles of water). I will pot them up when they have enough roots. If September remains very warm—as it is projected to be—I will plant them in a bed with only 5 to 6 hours of sun.

And I bought shade cloth.

I am not suggesting a specific action. I am sharing my story, what worked for me in the mountains, in the center of Umbria, in late August. Consider this a fable, about changing times and the limits of what we can learn from books, the internet, newspapers. It is about sailing into uncharted waters and the necessity of looking around our immediate neighborhood, our community, for answers specific to our region. It is also about pooling our knowledge instead of looking up generic answers on our phones.

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