I usually don’t grow tomatoes because of how much work they are and how often they fail to produce well around here, but this year I’m giving Sun Gold a try. I’m expecting much better disease resistance and great flavor from it, and if it delivers, it’ll have earned a permanent spot in my otherwise generally tomato-less garden.
For peppers I’m putting an over-wintered Trinidad Perfume back in the ground, and am testing Goddess banana pepper and Carmen Italian sweet pepper, as well as growing out some Biquinho hybrids someone shared with me.
No eggplants. I am putting some overwintered ground cherries back in the ground though, and will be sowing some yellow tomatillo plants soon.
Nice, I really liked the C. baccatum variety I tried the other year, Aji Amarillo, which is fairly similar to Sugar Rush Peach. They take a while longer to get going, and they’re more upright and tall growing, but once they get going, they are very productive. The peppers are quite sweet too. But sacred intercourse those peppers were hot!
They’re also surprisingly root hardy, mine were still alive below the mulch layer quite deep into winter. With some mulch piling and an average winter (not like this year), I might be able to overwinter them here in 8a/b.
Cherokee purple has done alright for me in the past, better than Brandywine. I’m over in Greenville, but Charlotte gets pretty much the same summer weather.
Faster just isn’t in the cards from what I’ve seen. Your set up is pretty similar to what I do for them, but I usually run more of 75-80F and keep things minimally damp. The first few days I’ll have the media nice and damp, but after that I keep the water pretty light so that I’m mostly keeping them not dry rather than keeping them moist–similar to fig rooting media. I also over seed, usually three or four seeds. That wastes a lot of seed most of the time, but sometimes it’s worth it. Usually germination is pretty good or absolutely none, but every now and then germination is low but not zero, so over seeding in those cases is worth it. Seed is not expensive to my mind, so there’s little cost in over seeding. Oh, and sometimes I top the media with sand, just to help a bit with damping off. Good quality media is a must either way.
But still, chinensis seeds to be the most variable in if it’s going to be at all viable. And it for sure takes way longer than annum. I don’t plant them at the same time anyway, since I want chinensis plants to be a bit older when they go out, but if I were planting them at the same time and the annum came up weeks before the chinensis, it would add to the frustration for sure.
One of these years I’m going to try putting tomatoes under shade cloth and clear plastic canopy. I have a feeling that widely-spaced tomatoes under shade cloth that never get exposed to rain might be the trick. I’ve seen similar ideas tested by others with good results.
