Farming hobbyists preserve the land one tomato at a time

Jeff Cully knelt and surveyed the destruction.

By all appearances, a lone deer had hopped the fence in the night and chewed the tops squarely off 400 or so of his heirloom tomato plants just two weeks before harvest time.

“Boy, can they jump,” Mr. Cully said later, outside his Quogue house with his significant other of 15 years, Samantha Dettmer.

The early July incident qualifies as but a minor disaster for the 4,300-square-foot backyard plot the couple has dubbed “Dettmer Farm.” Almost exactly one year earlier, a blight brought on by heavy rain destroyed all 3,000 tomatoes in the garden in a four-day sweep. Mr. Cully said his friends called him crazy to try again.

But there he was, on the scalding early July afternoon, waiting for the sun to subside a little so he could get back to work. It turns out he wasn’t so crazy after all—the sultry weather had caused this year’s crop of approximately 3,600 tomatoes, arranged in more than two dozen rows in the middle of the 1-acre backyard, to shoot up at an “epic” pace.

“I’ve never seen stuff grow this fast this early,” he said.

This summer marks the third tomato crop for Mr. Cully, a freelance photographer, and Ms. Dettmer, an administrative assistant at Quogue Wildlife Refuge. For them, the organic micro-farm skirts the line between a hobby and a commercial enterprise. They plan to sell mixed baskets at local farm stands to showcase their 13 varieties of heirloom tomatoes—bizarre fruits that range from blackish to golden, pear-shaped to grape-sized. The heirlooms come with names like “Golden Current,” “Big Rainbow” and “Japanese Black Trifele.”

Heirloom tomatoes are thus named because they are similar to those grown hundreds of years ago, in the days before heavy genetic engineering. But a lighter yield is the price of heirloom farming.

“We’re not going to get 10, 15, 20 pounds per tomato plant,” Mr. Cully said. “Not gonna happen.”

But the backyard tomatoes are firmer, fresher and hold more intense flavors than the supermarket fare, according to Ms. Dettmer. “It’s like night and day,” she said.

From Montauk Highway, the couple’s white two-story house has a dignified, rustic look, typical of the homes in Quogue. The main structure dates back to 1871 and is shielded from the busy road by a row of tall hedges. The couple bought the property from Ms. Dettmer’s parents earlier this decade, Mr. Cully said.

But around back, rows of green stalks and rich soil, cordoned off with bamboo posts and wire mesh, dominate the property in place of, say, a tennis court or a manicured lawn.

“We have our little compound here and we enjoy it,” Mr. Cully said, “You know, it’s not your ‘fancy Quogue.’ But for what we like, it’s fancy.”

Part of the appeal of farming, he said, was to cultivate a holdout against the suburbanization of the South Fork. Photographing real estate advertisement photos from a helicopter over the last 15 years, Mr. Cully said he has seen acres upon acres of farmland carved up and built out.

“We do what we can on our property,” he said. “We have no control over anything else.”

Some 250 hop vines crawl up hanging strings among the tomato plants, implanting the plot with a shaggy, wild touch. Mr. Cully said he began growing the hops on a whim five years ago, and sells them to home brewers and small micro-breweries over the internet.

The tomatoes, Mr. Cully said, can sell for about $1.50 per pound. And if the upcoming harvest goes as well as he expects, the plot could yield 10,000 pounds of fruit.

But the money, he added, is secondary to the physical and metaphysical benefits of farming: “phenomenal exercise,” closeness with nature and the thrill of transforming a piece of land.

Dettmer Farm is an organic operation. Mr. Cully and Ms. Dettmer work without pesticides or fungicides, and they feed their plants with fish emulsion rather than chemical fertilizers. If a weed has flowers on it, it’s allowed to obtrude among the tomatoes. That way, it will attract bees, Mr. Cully said.

The project demands about 10 hours of labor per week, Mr. Cully estimated, although an intensive weeding session can occasionally dominate an entire weekend. All in all, he reported, farming the crop takes less time, sweat and money than one would expect—it cost about $600 the first year, including seeds supplies and soil, to get the micro-farm up and running.

“A lot of people think there’s so much expense and time involved with this,” he said. “It’s not really the case.”

As exemplified with the deer breach and last season’s blight, the realities of weather and nature dictate that a hobby farmer must have down-to-earth expectations, according to Mr. Cully.

“If you expect perfection, if you expect no problems, you’re going to be disappointed,” he said.

But Mr. Cully’s back-and-forth challenges with nature afford him the opportunity for invention. After doing some research, he thought the dry weather may have prompted the deer to target the tomato plants for their moisture. On the evening of July 8, he filled a half barrel with water and put it out back.

The next morning, he said, he concocted his own deer repellent out of used kitty litter produced by the couple’s more than 10 cats. The feline excrement, he hoped, would offend the deer’s senses of smell—a gamble that appeared to have paid off.

“I grabbed a couple bags of some choice items, it was disgusting, and lined the fence with them,” he said. “And it was hilarious.”

Since then, and after Mr. Cully reinforced the bamboo fence, the deer have been successfully diverted to a patch of wildflowers the couple planted last spring in the rear of the property for wildlife consumption.

And after the recent rainstorms, the tomatoes are on track for a relatively early harvest—early, at least, for heirloom tomatoes, which flower and ripen weeks later than hybrids, Mr. Cully said.

“Man, is it booming,” he said last Friday, referring to the tomato blooms. “It’s a sea of flowers now on the top.”