What tomatoes will you grow in 2018?

I too thought it was fabulous didn’t grow it this year, because I coulnd’t Find it! Don’t grow from seed any longer, except for squashes!

Ate my first Cherokee Purple tonight. Another fantastic tomato! They just keep getting better.

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Thought I’d post some pics from the 'mater patch. All of them are still green, and getting bigger, although I think that’s because of all the rain we’ve had lately. Hope the flavor doesn’t get too diluted.

Overall view of the tomato jungle, it’s almost become an impenetrable mess of plants. There’s 9 pepper plants to the left near the entrance

Inside the green jungle

Girl Girl’s Weird Thing, a Green Zebra mutation, from @Drew51

Jaune Flammé, I believe

Boxcar Willie

Siberian Pink Honey, fruit’s almost tennis ball sized now

This is Warren’s yellow cherry, far and away the most prolific plant in the patch

Indian Stripe, also from Drew

Russian Queen, a striped Roma type variety

Paul Robeson, a purple tom, has been pretty productive

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Plants are looking great! You should have a few toms that’s for sure!

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I would buy a second canner! Will they all ripen at once?

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Thanks, yes, the plants look huge and green, but they haven’t set that much fruit. I’m hoping it’s because of the heat we had. I have noticed more blooming now than last week, before we got all this rain. We’ll see. I just want to get some properly ripened tomatoes this year, we’ve been a bit unlucky the last couple years, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

Have you harvested any yet?

@mrsg47, thanks. We actually have an old canner we use for water bathing stuff like pickles, tomatoes, etc, plus a newer pressure canner which we use for low-acid foods like beans, corn, and the like.

The plants are all indeterminates, so they should ripen continuously until a freeze. I hope some of the yellow and chocolate cherries ripen soon, the bigger ones will be another month at least.

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Has anyone tried or heard of a variety called Pork Chop? I’ve searched this site and didn’t find a mention of it. Looking for another good yellow tomato variety to try.

I picked this black krim today. Im curious what the largest tomatoes are that you guys have been growing. I picked a 16.5 ounce Brandywine as well.

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That’s a huge BK, congrats, looks delicious. Brandywines can get big. All our toms are still green, except for some of our yellow cherries. Just hope we can some ripe ones before the deer discover the patch and/or disease sets in.

All we’ve picked so far is a few jalapenos and a green bell pepper.

Wow! My Black Krims are nowhere near that huge! I pick my tomatoes right when they start to turn color. Otherwise the birds get to them. Maybe that is why they don’t get as big. But they are still tasty and set okay even in the heat in Georgia so they are good for me. :grin:

Now that I’m having some success with my tomatoes this year, I think I’d like to grow some for canning next year. Any suggestions for a good tasting paste tomato that has good disease resistance and can stand up to the heat?

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I got this Brandywine yesterday

And this NAR as well

The BW’s near the bottom that are getting ready soonest have the most weirdness…, must have been hot/humid when the blossoms were sticking?

The ones higher up and yet to ripen don’t seem nearly as oddly configured.

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Just harvested some more. Mix bag.

Tony

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I had a li’l issue with one of my San Marzano’s… I woke up this morning to see that one of my plants had just collapsed within the cage.

Just a perfect storm I think… too heavy a fruit load combined with my taking too many supporting branches out I’m guessing. First time it’s ever happened but I’m pretty sure I just caused it by not having enough limbs hanging over the wires and such. Costly, but a lesson just the same!!

So I removed all the fruit showing ANY color, and a lot of green ones were on the ground too.

Tried to get it back up some and tie some supports on but it’s suffering…

But the good news is I was able to come in and have a Tomato sandwich from the big (now ripe) Neves Azorean Red :slightly_smiling_face:

I think the next slice off the NAR will be slightly bigger than the one I used on my sandwich. Real good tasting tomato.

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A rabbit got into my netted raised bed and not only ate all of my ripe tomatoes, she ate the tops of all of the plantS. Well, there is aiways August.:sob:

Perfection

Looking at the last pic, I thought they were bell peppers for a minute. Huge tomatoes!

@ILParadiseFarm You had asked for a follow up. My plants haven’t gotten large this year, we’ve had multiple nights through July in the 40’s and growth on a lot of things in the veggie garden are stunted. Hopefully you can see the two lines that I tie the plants to with sisal. I use an electric fence wire clip to hold the lines and can set multiple lines on the T-Posts. I’d use a taller T-Post if I were growing more indeterminates, a lot of these are determinate. Once the entire row is tied the wires will bow and the two end stakes sometimes lean in.

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We’re finally getting some of our tomatoes to ripen, but most of them are still green. We have had a lot of rain over the last couple of weeks, two weekends ago we had abt 4", and earlier this week we had about 2.5", with not a lot of sun. That’s prob why they’re not ripening like they should.

Our plants have become so tall and unwieldy, they’re folding under from the top weight. Not breaking branches, but bent over. The rain this week really exacerbated this issue as the plants are so tall and top-heavy. Plus the stakes being in soggy ground don’t lend as much stable support. I can barely walk between them now, as quite a few have grown or fallen into other plants. So, there’s not much I can do to remedy this situation, so I’m basically letting them go. Next year I’m going to have to come up with a better support system, maybe a tall wire trellis.

Anyways, today we picked a few that looked ripe and tried them out. Our Warren’s yellow cherry has been our most prolific producer, and last week we picked our first ripe ones. They’re a bit tart, not too sweet, maybe could leave them on a bit longer for that.

This evening we picked a big gnarly Wyche Yellow and a Jaune Flammé. The Wyche looked like a few fused blossoms as it was quite large, but also had some rot on it. I cut out the bad parts and the tried the rest of it, it was meaty, and had almost a mango or some other tropical flavor to it, not real tart either. So, I’ll be interested in seeing how the rest do. The JF was pretty tart, with hardly any sweet to it. There are a few red toms that are starting to get pink, so those might be ready in a couple weeks. There are some Boxcar Willie, Watermelon, and Siberian Pink starting to turn.

A few of the plants are already getting pretty bad disease, which I just assume is blight. So, I hope I can get some fruit off those before the leaves rot away. No varmit issues yet, knock on wood. Will try to post some new pics when we start to get some more ripe specimens.

Drew had posted some pictures of his Romeo paste tomato a year or so ago, and so we traded some seeds. I sent Drew San Mazano and Drew sent me Romeo. He’d said at the time that he wasn’t super confident that they would be viable since he’d had an event and some of his seed collection had gotten wet.

Well I only had a couple of the seeds germinate, and I gave one plant away and planted the other.

Here’s a few shots of a couple I took off the plant yesterday. I took them a little early but we had rain coming and was worried they may crack (had a couple places that had started small cracks)

Anyway, they are simply HUGE!

Here are some pictures to try and give some perspective. They hold their own next to some pretty good sized Brandywine and NAR

1LB 12.8 ounces for a paste tomato just cracks me up :slightly_smiling_face:

Big thank you to Drew!!!

There are maybe 30-35 more on the plant - some probably too small to ever make a tomato before seasons end so it’s carrying a pretty decent fruit load.

We’ll have to wait awhile to know if we like the flavor…, but it was worth growing out just for the novelty factor. Everyone who strolled through my garden commented on them. One guy sent me a text the next day saying “…can you send me a picture of those tomatoes that look like an egg plant, I have a co-worker who wants to see them”

![IMG_8860|690x517](upload:

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