A lot of our plants have just about blighted out due to all the rain we’ve had in the last month. Because of that the fruit has been rotting on the vines due to them splitting, and with no foliage, they’re also getting sunscald. Oh, and it looks like deer have got into the patch, but not as bad as previous years. Same old story as before. Plus, the plants had gotten so high above their stakes, a lot of them have tumped over. It didn’t help that I didn’t weed hardly any the last month either, but it became an impenetrable mess.
Saying all that, this evening i picked about 30lb of tomatoes, and we canned 7qt of them in the water bather. There’s still some more fruit on the plants, I just hope we’ll have enough to make some salsa when our peppers finally ripen up. We have 6 other plants down in the corn/bean patch, and they look decent, so we ought to get some off of those (3 Brandywine, 3 Orange Ky beefsteak).
Our best producers were in descending order: Chocolate Cherry, Dr Wyche Yellow, Jaune Flammé, Russian Queen, Gordost Sibiri and Boxcar Willie. Siberian Pink, Watermelon, Abe Lincoln, Paul Robeson set quite a bit of fruit, but they’ve either rotted on the vine, or are getting burned up by the sun. My two Romeo plants have set some huge Roma type fruits, but not one of them are ripe yet.
Here’s a pic of a basket of the toms I picked today.
Next year I’m going to have to do something different as this scenario plays out every year. Namely, I’m going to really have to reduce the number of sucker branches, and figure out a way to support them better. Plus, we’re just going to have to grow some hybrids, as these heirlooms tend to struggle in this environment. Maybe it won’t matter, but we ought to try. Oh, and I’m not trying any more purple/black varieties (other than Chocolate Cherry) as the plants are way too diseased before the fruit has a chance to properly ripen.