Today’s tomato bowl.
Dream Cream, Plate Di Haiti, Black Cherry, Gobstopper, Koralik Cherry, Baxter’s Bush, Sweet Carneros Pink, Copper Olive, Pink Bee, Streak Lightning, Snowcapped Sunset.
Some picked a bit early. No big maters yet, most of those haven’t started setting fruit until now due to the heat waves we’ve been having.
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After calling out Limbo as a tomato more people should try, I’d Iike to promote another lesser known/grown variety, this time a pepper. Meet Prairie Spice. This one was developed by an amateur breeder (I believe in Kansas) and I got seeds in a trade years ago and have been growing it ever since. It is a good sized cow horn pepper with medium walls, very sweet, but unlike other cow horns I’ve grown, Prairie Spice lives up to its name with a nice low to medium heat. It is sort of like a Carmen or Corno de Toro pepper, but with the heat of a relatively hot Pablano. This one was cut into thin rings to use on a pizza, but it is great on the grill, for frying or for pickled pepper rings.
It is very productive for a larger pepper, averaging about 15 peppers per plant, maybe 20 if well fertilized and in good sun. Mine gets about 4 hours of morning sun and is then in the shade of a Japanese maple the rest of the day. This is this year’s plant in desperate need of water and having just had a deer eat the top off it, including a bunch of the newly set peppers. Treat your plants better than this poor thing please.
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Interesting, it looks a lot like Anaheim, which also has low to medium heat.
Ajvarski peppers, first time growing them. This is the second or third harvest and these are a bit smaller than previous rounds. From a small pot (5 gal tops ) I’m at a dozen picked peppers with several more on the plant small and green. Very meaty and sweet when roasted. Will try grilling this evening.
Got these from my county master gardener sale, here’s their description. I don’t get any smells, but also smell is my worst sense
Ajvarski
Sweet Non-Bell / Red / 80 days
Here’s a truly outstanding pepper from eastern Macedonia. This pepper is thick-walled, with a broad wedge shape. It reaches 6" to 7” long. A unique feature of this pepper is its fragrance: under the right conditions, it can be smelled from 10 feet away! Let it ripen to deep red for maximum flavor. Exceptional for roasting, and it’s unsurpassed for making the traditional sauce called “ajvar”.
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My first large tomato of the season. Ponderosa pink, the only big tomato variety I grew that set fruit in the heat waves. It’s got a big split up the side from the rain last night though. Shoulda picked it yesterday when I saw it blushing but I didn’t think the rain was going to be as heavy as it was. Hopefully it will finish ripening inside and not spoil.
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Rushed out to pick tomatoes at my community garden plot before the rain, which turned out to be picking tomatoes in the rain. Probably not a good idea since it so easy to spread disease among wet plants.
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I have seeds for this variety but have not grown it. Have heard good things.
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My Weisnicht’s Ukrainian tomato is a potato leaf, pushes a lot of growth and sets large tomatoes. They ripe later than Cherokee Purple.
Weisnicht’s Ukrainian tomato:
Today’s haul (Aug 3rd):
Weisnicht’s Ukrainian tomatoes in the right row. The first plant in that row is a cherry tomato.
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Some results so far from my purple hybrid tomato experiment. Probably gave away 400 to 500 plants to see if anyone can find a purple beefsteak in the cross… So far a couple mini beef steaks so far reported.
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Haha, I had the same feeling for that one. I think that their camera just took a really muted photo as most of the pictures I’ve seen are very bright purple 
Well. The pumpkins on a stick are ruined. I thought they would be fine to harvest in fall. Nope. Went from Beautiful with maybe 30/plant on Sunday when I left, to 95% rotten today when I returned. Really frickin sad. They were pretty much all red, so clearly I need to cut off the stems/pull the plants at that stage next year and then hang them to dry. Such a bummer. We had big plans for them.
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Follow up on sugar rush peach as I’ve had some ripe ones now. They’re very mild. Nothing like the light green immature one I bit into. For reference, I eat maybe 1/10 of an habanero at a time cut up very fine and feel the heat, but I could eat the entire SRP and then needed to add habanero because there’s virtually no heat. I would just call them a little spicy. But, they really are peachy, which is fun. Doubt I will grow them again.
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Did I miss something? Took me a second to get past that first line to figure out what was going on. Guess I need to work on my abbreviations a little more.
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Oh funny. Sorry doctor abbreviations it never occurred to me what that looks like! “Follow Up” I’ll change it
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I’m starting to get a Tonka truck of tomatoes a couple times a week. I have over 40 plants, it’s about time they produced more than a handful a day. I’m going to rig something on the back of the truck so the tomatoes don’t roll out.
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This is hysterical. Excellent repurposing.