L&M Cos., which is based in Raleigh, NC, and has branch operations in Nogales, AZ, and several other locations around the country, will be adding mature green tomatoes to its lineup of offerings out of West Mexico for the winter season this year, according to John McDaniel, sales and operations director for the Nogales office.

The mature greens will be coming from Sinaloa and were expected to start about mid-December, continuing throughout the winter and wrapping up around late March or mid-April, he said.

The start date was originally expected to be a couple of weeks earlier but was delayed due to weather, McDaniel said Nov. 13. Except for the later start, the crop was doing well and quality should be excellent barring additional weather problems prior to harvest. “Everything looks good,” he said. “It looks beautiful.”

L&M’s core commodities out of Mexico include Bell peppers, cucumbers and Roma tomatoes. The company will also have some summer squash and hard shell squashes as well as some chili peppers and watermelons, a small eggplant program and a few vine-ripe round tomatoes.

On cucumbers, “we have definitely increased our numbers,” McDaniel said. “On Bbell peppers, I think it is just about the same.”

A recently taken photo of this season’s cucumbers growing on the vine in Mexico. (Photo courtesy of L&M Cos.)The watermelons are a seasonal program, moving from one growing district to another with the seasons, he explained. Currently, the company was bringing in watermelons from the state of Sonora in northern Mexico. That program was expected to carry through into January. Then, during February, “we are going to have some watermelons out of Sinaloa.” Following that, “we will be back to Sonora in the spring” for the spring watermelon deal.”

Hard shell squash will follow a similar cycle, but with a longer production period out of Sinaloa. “We have them right now” out of Sonora, McDaniel said. “By the end of December or so,” that program will be over. Then from January through April, L&M will have hard shell squash out of Sinaloa.

The hard shell squash will start up again in Sonora, out of the Hermosillo district, for the spring program in March, overlapping with the tail end of the Sinaloa season.

The program consists of Acorn, Butternut and Spaghetti varieties.

In summer squash, which consists, for L&M, of zucchini, yellow straight neck and Mexican Grey squash, it is a winter program only. “We are not going to have any in Sonora, just in Sinaloa,” McDaniel said. That will start in January and go through around the 15th of April.

L&M’s Mexican Bell pepper program is also out of Sinaloa only. “We are going to start those on the first week of December and have them in stages, so we are going to go all the way through the end of April or the beginning of May,” he said. The program consists entirely of green Bells, split about 50-50 between open field and shade house production. Volume is expected to be similar to last year or “maybe a little bit more.”

All of the product is coming up under the company’s “Nature’s Delight” label, he said.

All of the products L&M sources out of Mexico are also available out of various producing areas in the United States, primarily in the Southeast, at various times of the year. “Our East program complements our Nogales program and gives us more control, because we can pull product from two different areas and ship to the customer based on availability and quality,” said Greg Cardamone, general manager of vegetables for L&M. That enables McDaniel, in Nogales, “to place some orders on our East Coast farms and ships to his customers if there is a gap” in supplies out of Mexico. “Or if the quality is not there, we can divert our customers to another location.”

Most of the customers served by the Nogales branch of L&M are located west of the Mississippi River, but some of the customers in the central United States “like to get product from either coast, depending on availability and quality,” he said.

New in the company’s Nogales operation this year is a change in the warehousing arrangements. “We were doing in-and-out last year,” McDaniel said. “This year we have our own warehouse.” As a result, “we have more control of the product.” It is actually the same 25,000-square-foot facility as previously, located on Old Tucson Road in Nogales. But “now we are managing the warehouse,” he said. That is enabling the company to receive and unload product from Mexico more rapidly, to load customer trucks faster, to maintain better control over the product and to improve customer service, he said.