After last summer’s intense heat wave and August hail storm (most of the plants ended up in the compost), I had high hopes for a bumper tomato crop this year. That, to put it mildly, did not pan out. While enough were harvested to enjoy some fresh and freeze some diced, the visions I had this Spring of shelves lined with litres of canned sauce and whole tomatoes were for naught.
Late May/early June were on the cool side, and then things shifted. As I type, it has been two months since it’s rained. Late July brought strong winds and August was hot and dry. We went through the water in our rain barrels (most of it accumulated early this summer) and have had to water from our taps for the last month and a half.
The harsh weather and our attempts to keep the garden well watered resulted in a high percentage of the tomatoes being plagued with Blossom End Rot. Many plants were also still loaded with unpollinated yellow flowers in mid-August. Flowers that had been pollinated and were just starting to grow were burned to a crisp and fell off the plant during a particularly hot week in August. Overall, the tomato plants produced a fraction of the fruit they would in a typical year.
The varieties that did the best were Indigo Pear Drops (sweet, fruity, and abundant - click on picture to enlarge)…
…Reinhard’s Chocolate Heart (rich, complex flavour that reminds me of Black Sea Man)
…Japanese Black Trifele (none of these made it into a sauce or the freezer – I ate them fresh as soon as they were ripe. Delicious.)...
…and Black Sea Man. Planted in a raised bed, they behaved more like indeterminates than
determinates this year. No pictures from this year, but you can see what they look like here.
EM-Champion (no pictures from this year, but they can be seen here) and Early Annie, which are usually workhorses and extremely abundant, produced about a quarter of what they have in the past.
Early Annie - August 16th:
Emalia, a rare variety. I ended up with a single plant from the few seeds I started. They produced loads of flowers that remained unpollinated due to the heat and dry weather. I saved seeds from the first two small tomatoes that ripened.
Poor Emalias. These are about as ripe as any of them are going to get. The colouring and shape are right, but they are a fraction of the size they are supposed to be. (They're sitting on a saucer in the picture below, not a dinner plate!)
Andean is supposed be early and productive, but they only produced between 4-8 fruit per plant (not including the ones ruined by BER - those ended up in the compost bin). Though it was against the house and protected, I think this variety prefers a cooler, wetter growing season than we had.
It was obvious that Petitbec (the earliest to ripen this summer) and Clear Pink Early (not pictured) have huge potential, but neither did very well this year. Both seem worth another try.
Petitbec - these have been popped whole into baggies and into the freezer for use in sauces and stews.
Monomakh’s Hat is another one that is an obvious workhorse in optimal conditions. It developed fruit early and is the earliest-maturing large tomato I have grown. They have few seeds and are very meaty. The taste was much milder and sweeter than expected, but the flavour of most tomatoes this year has suffered. This is another “grow again!” variety.
Beauty King Dwarf was a disappointment. The plants (rugose foliage) are compact and the fruit are pretty (they’d be prettier if they weren’t cat-faced or marred with blossom end rot), but production was extremely low and the fruit was late to mature. I’ll have to chalk a lot of that up to the poor growing conditions this summer, though what I’m seeing reminds me of the year I tried growing another rugose-foliage variety: Coastal Pride Orange. That followed a similar pattern and provided the same lackluster results.
Beautiful striping...
...but BER on the bottom.
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