Oo pumpkins on a stick are pretty. The turkish orange are similar but suposedly what people jormally make babaganoush out of whichbis my fave eggplant dish my mom makes lol. I gotta get her recipe.
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Oh that’s so interesting they weren’t hot. Did they have a peach flavor?
The pumpkins on a stick will be dried for fall/halloween decorations. I found an Etsy seller, it was $2 for the win. @snarfing that’s interesting. I’ve never tried baba with anything other than standard grocery varieties. Please post about how it turns out if you grow them.
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In addition to the bug preesure, I also watered the crap out of them (peppers are perennials here so I water them in like I would a tree). So that also dulls the heat. I am hoping some spring peppers will have more heat (they weren’t heatless, just not anymore than a jalepeno). Have to get my in-grounds through winter first. Frost is coming tonight.
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Yes, i am starting a few for my moms garden specifically. My wife cant eat any nightshades (besides potatoes) so i only grow tomatoes and peppers for me.
Theyre from urban farmer which so far has had great germination for me. My leeks i started sunday already have sprouted
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Wow. What do you do with all those tomatoes?
I only grow a few varieties of tomatoes each year. This year is Heinz, Cherokee purple, and Amish paste. I will probably add a cherry tomato as well or grow out one of the numerous volunteers.
I alternate growing sweet and hot peppers every other year and its a hot pepper year! This year is jalapeño, cherry, red habanero, and yellow scotch bonnet. I am very excited to try the scotch bonnets.
I will give ground cherries a go this year. I hadnt thought to plant them around the bases of the trees but was planning to put hot peppers there.
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Salsa, soup and tomato sauce mostly. Other than the volunteers and Tess’s Land Race, I only grow 2 cells of each. Most of them are cherries, beefsteaks have a very limited season here. I will also lose usually 4 to 5 plants to RKN (still finding spots where it is really bad) and another 1 or 2 to humidity. So I need alot to make a little. So far, this year has been better than previous, but our first freeze is tonight, so we will see how well my frost cloth does.
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If your rkn is reallt bad have you ever looked into grafting? Ive seen some do it especially for potatoes and tomatoes in small spaces, but theres no reason you coulsnt graft onto any resistant roots
I have, and I have a few RKN resistant/tolerant varieties that I plant in known spots. Once I have a few favorites, I might considering grafting them, but until I narrow it down, I think grafting might be too much effort. I thought all currants were resistant, but my inground Tess’s Landrace have not grown at all. The growbag ones have gone crazy, I might pull up one of the inground ones and check the roots.
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Oooh! If this is how they would taste for me I would really like to try them! I guess I will have to find some seeds! Are you willing to trade? 
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I’ve somehow accumulated over 50 varieties each of toms and peps, along with a few different eggplant, tomatillos, inca berries, and most interestingly some true potato seed. I can’t let anything go to waste so I’ll be growing all of them, wish me luck. And yes, I’m on a small suburban lot, not a farm.
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Please post pictures later summer on the small lot growers thread of how you fit them all in!!
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Cherokee Purple is my favorite for flavor, but I only grow tomatoes in the greenhouse now (very short growing season outside) and it doesn’t thrive indoors. Chocolate Cherry is like a mini Cherokee Purple and does okay indoors. Johnny’s Seed has good greenhouse varieties; my current new favorite is called “Hot Streak.” Great flavor, medium-big in size, meaty, good survival and fair productivity into winter so far! And nice-looking, red with orange stripes.
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I forgot to say “to frost” as well. 9 out of 16 inground/growbag tomatoes. 5 volunteers, my two San Marzano #2, my Tasmanian Chocolate and my Sungold. Sungold was almost a year old, SM2 amd Tas Choc were planted in early Ocotober. The SM2 gave me 10-15 tomatoes each, the Choc was slowly ripen its one (which probably won’t ripen now). That early Nov cold front really slowed them down.
The ones that didn’t die are in more sheltered locations. I know that for next year. Only lost 1 pepper that was already almost dead anyways. Now I got space for all the new ones!
I did cover them all.
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Last year I was determined to figure out how to make tomatoes work at my old place. The landlord put in a garden box before we moved in, but it only got ~6hr of sun on a sunny day and our June gloom runs until August, making it more realistically 4hrs a day. Plus unrelenting rodent pressure.
I tried grafted tomatoes, in pots on the sunny deck, and picking everything the second it hit breakers and got several times the harvest. I grew the following and will probably keep things largely the same except for the two SF varieties will likely go now that we’re in the sunnier burbs. I still want to try stupice and haven’t gotten around to it yet.
- Pink Berkeley tie die (grafted): very good, hope to grow again
- black krim (grafted): my personal favorite, as mentioned above
- Tasmanian chocolate: my first dwarf tomatoes, very productive and tasty but a bit smaller than I was expecting
- sungold (grafted): a bad year for sungolds, not sure why. They were the only grafted tomatoes that did worse -
- blush (fairly tasty, but obscenely unproductive)
- San Francisco fog (grafted)
- early girl (grafted)
- Visitacian valley
- super sweet 100-
This may be an unpopular take here, but I’ve given up on starting mine from seed. The local garden centers and master gardener sales have a great selection of locally adapted varieties, more than I can get from any brick and mortar retail seeds like botanical interests and I can’t stomach ordering from and paying shipping to 5 different sources when I only grow 1 or 2 plants of each variety
I’m also trying to overwinter a Jimmy nardello pepper for the first time. Hope it works out, best sweet peppers ever
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what are you grafting onto?
I didn’t actually perform the grafting, a local wholesale nursery or two has been producing them for the last few years so they’re pretty common around here. As I recall they didn’t disclose the rootstock, though.
In my shady bed they performed way better than the sole non-grafted or year over year of the same variety. “Better” meaning more tomatoes, bigger, healthier looking plant. Except for the sungolds, but I seem to remember them not looking super great to begin with.
Not sure if you’d get the same results if you grew the rootstock yourself since I figure that might set you back some time waiting for the graft to heal vs buying it ready to go.
I don’t plan on getting grafted this year since I’ll have way more sun and heat and they’re quite expensive
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I grow 8-10 varieties of tomatoes each year, but the two that I always grow are Sungold and Juliet. I would guess everyone knows Sungold. Juliet is a small plum tomato, almost a cross of a plum and a cherry, that is very productive. I like to dry them and use them through the year.
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I have to ask some of you how many employees do you have? Surely you’re not doing all of this by yourself. I am down sizing my medium size garden at this point. I’m 74 in mid February and the garden is becoming very time consuming. We are members of our local Rose society as well as the American Rose Society. So the garden is surrounded by rose beds. We stay pretty busy year round what with figs, citrus, fruit trees, and the garlic. The attached photo will give you some idea of our down sizing efforts trimming down from thirty foot boxes to twenty feet in length. Yes those are eastern red cedar boards rough cut at 2x10”. We’re still having fun with our little back yard experiment but just want to start slowing down. We will still can our tomatoes (trimmed down from six varieties to just three of the ones we like the most such as Better Boy, Super Sauce Hybrid, and Sun Gold or Midnight Snack cherries and maybe a few San Marzanos. Peppers pretty much the same…a few sweets and few hotties. I will still start a bunch of seeds and give a bunch away…just for fun. We hope you all totally enjoy whatever you do in the garden.
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I’m starting most of the same stuff I did last year. About half of them got killed when I went out of town for a week and my brother didn’t water them enough, then I culled a bunch due to overestimating my space. This year I have alloted twice as much space as I did before and won’t be starting a few of the varieties I didn’t like last year.
Tomtoes: Wapsipinicon Peach, Arkansas Traveler, Inciardi Paste, Red Ruby, Old German, Opalka , Vintage Wine, Isis Candy, Dark Orange Muscat, Chocolate Stripes, Black From Tula, Ananas Noire Tomato, San Marzano, Great White Beefsteak, Plate de Haiti, Green Zebra, Black Cherry, Ponderosa Pink, Purple Bumblebee, Pink Bumblebee, Speckled Roman, Cream Sausage, Sunrise Bumblebee, Cosmic Mountain Sunset, Cosmic Purple Rain, Better Than Candy, Gobstopper, Indigo Sungold, Snowcapped Sunset, Indigo Isis Candy, Cosmic Jewell Centriflor, Cosmic Orange Grape, Cosmic Cream Centriflor, Lucid Gem Of Colorado, Indigo Mountain Girl.
Tomatillo: Purple, Rio Grande Verde
Peppers: Serrano Tampiqueño, Numex Joe Parker, Habanero, Licac Bell, Purple Cayenne, Chocolate Bell
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It helps that I’m 31 with no other major obligations other than work. I also have only one or 2 trees that are of bearing age at the moment, so if I don’t grow alot of tomatoes and peppers, I don’t get alot of fruit. And we have long days, so plenty of sunlight to kill. Some of those nightshades are also perrenial here, especially tree tomatoes and cocona, but also peppers and pepino if I protect them from frost.
When my trees are older I will grow alot less veggies (tomatoes specifically), but that is still 3-5 years out. Once I get my 5-6 varieties of tomatoes I really enjoy and do well here, I will settle down my selection. But until then, I got the seeds, so I might as well use them.
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