2015 Tomato Report From My Oklahoma Garden
When responding to Lee's post about oxheart tomatoes, I realized I hadn't done any sort of summary of the 2015 tomato year, so here it is.
WEATHER: We had plentiful rainfall from mid-June 2014 through early July 2015, so the tomatoes had all the water they wanted (and more than they wanted in May and June). The tomatoes performed accordingly. Plants were huge, lush, covered with flowers and fruit and produced very well for the most part.
The downside to all that weather is that diseases and many pests ran rampant in the long, mild, cool and wet spring, and parts of my garden had water standing in them for at least 2 months. Tomatoes don't like constantly wet feet, but most of my plants were in raised beds and tolerated the wet soil really well.
We did have the typical tomato problems you see in excessively wet weather: fungal and bacterial diseases, some stalling of growth when roots were waterlogged, bland and watered-down flavor of tomatoes that were maturing during very wet weather, and a lot of concentric and longitudinal cracking or splitting of the fruit. I want to qualify that by saying that while it seemed like a lot of cracking and splitting at the time, it really wasn't that bad considering we had almost a whole year's worth of rain in May and June alone. Since July brought the return of rain-free weather and even drought by August, the cracking, splitting and bland flavor corrected themselves and vanished as the summer went on.
Caterpillars were a huge problem during the rainy spell, but not so much after that, so we lost some fruit to them, but I grow so many plants and they set so heavily this year that the cat-damaged fruit was a brief, minor issue that only lasted a few weeks. We still had far too many tomatoes so I shrugged it off.
THE LOSERS: These plants produced very, very poorly but it was not their fault. They were the last ones to go into the ground, so they ended up in the raised bed at the low end of the garden where excessive rain pooled and ponded and sat for a couple of months. Even though they were in a raised bed roughly 6" above grade level, the puddles of water in pathways around them were 4", 6" or even (temporarily) 8" deep all around the raised bed, and the roots in the raised bed surely struggled to grow on that island in the middle of the sea. Thus, these varieties did not yield much this year: Red Brandywine, Brandywine Sudduth's, Black Prince, Lillian's Yellow, Abraham Lincoln, Azoychka and Red Rose. Despite that, we still like all these varieties and will grow them again next year, figuring we are unlikely to have almost 25" of rain next May, right?
THE SEVEN DWARFS: I have had mixed results from The Dwarf Project varieties in the past, but I have felt all along that it was the weather that was making them perform poorly because every time I planted them, it seemed like we had one of those years that went from winter to hot and dry almost instantly and they never got off to a good start and produced well. So, this year, we had cool, mild and excessively rainy weather and the Dwarfs were happy, grew well and produced like mad. The ones we grew were: Chocolate Lightning, Dwarf Purple Heart, Dwarf Wild Fred, Rosella Purple, Sarandipity, Summertime Green and Tasmanian Chocolate. The only one I don't really have positive comments on is Summertime Green, and maybe it is just because I don't care for most Green-When-Ripe types (I love Aunt Ruby's German Green!). It just seemed, um, uninspiring....kinda meh. So, I doubt I'll grow it again. All the others were great and produced well. Sarandipity, Dwarf Wild Fred and Tasmanian Chocolate produced over the longest period of time. It was a great year for the dwarfs here.
THE BITE-SIZED VARIETIES: I grew Mexico Midget, Sweet 100, Black Cherry, SunGold, Amy's Apricot, and Ildi. Almost all of them did well. The earliest producers were Mexico Midget and Sweet 100 and the heaviest producer was SunGold (of course). SunGold also had the best flavor overall, though Ildi also was tasty. Amy's Apricot and Ildi seemed to be slow starters but made up for it by producing heavily later on. Amy's Apricot wasn't the best-flavored, but I want to reserve judgement on it and give it a chance again next year when we presumably won't have so much rain during the tomato-growing season. The worst performer this year? Black Cherry. That's my fault. I planted them late (I was out of space and trying to figure out how to plant them without planting them in a foot of water) and put them at the extreme west end of the garden in the shade of the pecan tree. Normally tomatoes do well there, but this year we had so little sunshine in May and June that the plants stalled and grew slowly and then were slow to set fruit and ripen it. Black Cherry normally does great, so it will be back next year of course.
THE OXHEARTS: I've never been able to get many hearts to do well here, so naturally this year they all were superb! We had very unusual weather and they loved it. I don't know if they'll perform as well in a drier, hotter year but all the varieties I grew this year will return next year. I grew Anna Banana Russian, Joe's Pink Oxheart, Yellow Oxheart, Kim's Civil War Oxheart, German Red Strawberry, Brad's Black Heart, Cherokee Purple Heart, Dwarf Purple Heart, And Anna Banana Russian. It is hard to pick a favorite, but Joe's Pink Oxheart and Kim's Civil War Oxheart were awfully good, and so were Cherokee Purple Heart, German Red Strawberry, Dwarf Purple Heart.....etc. etc. etc. (grin) They all were so meaty and dense and flavorful, and many of them had almost no seeds. They were my favorite tomatoes this year.
THE BEST: In terms of flavor and productivity among the remaining varieties in our garden, these varieties were outstanding in 2015: Rutgers, Jaune Flammee, Champion 2, Homestead, Gulf State Market, Nepal, Marion (produced over a very long period of time, long after heat shut down the others), Polish (huge fruit!), Pruden's Purple (early as always), Orange Minsk (very heavy producer), Stump of the World (perfect and as close to Brandywine as any tomato not named Brandywine), Soldacki, Gary O Sena, Marglobe, Mortgage Lifter, and Indian Stripe.
OKAY BUT NOTHING SPECIAL: German Johnson (great in a drier, hotter year but not much flavor and kinda of mushy texture in a cool, rainy year), Granny Cantrell (ditto), Kanner Hoell (didn't produce as much as a lot of others), Work Release Paste (petered out fairly early in the year), Super SIoux (early and watery and didn't produce much later on, so maybe it suffered from too much rainfall early in the year and never recovered), Dester (not as good as I thought it would be, but will try it again in a drier year), and Gold Medal (tasty but not a heavy producer).
I also grew Celebrity and Better Boy from purchased plants set out really early and they produced well, but y'all know that we only use those early purchased plants for early fruit for BLTs in April/May and don't pay much attention to them once the heirlooms/OPs are producing. They do a good job of fruiting early (because I buy big healthy transplants the minute they hit the store, so they're far ahead of the plants I started at the proper time for our area) and keeping us happy until the real harvest begins, and after that they just end up in salsa because we have better varieties to eat fresh.
You might notice there weren't a lot of pastes on my list. That's because I am, increasingly, just using a mix of all the tomatoes in my garden for cooking and for canning. Yes, you do have to cook down the beefsteaks/slicers a bit more to get them the right consistency, but we love the blend of the many superb heirloom flavors better than the flavor of your typical paste tomato. I expect to grow a lot fewer paste varieties in the future than I have in the past.
Overall it was a yummy and delicious tomato year. We ate tomatoes every day until we got to the point that we really couldn't stand to look at one more tomato, and then I just canned and froze all the excess or gave them away. I had spread out the planting of the transplants over a really long period---from the last week of March through somewhere close to the end of May---so the harvest was spread out accordingly.
The return of the heat and drought in July/August put an end to fruit set on all but the bite-sized types, but we'd overdosed on tomatoes by then so didn't miss them in August as much as you'd think. We were, after all, already eating tomato sauce and salsa from this year's harvest, and we still had occasional fresh tomatoes---just not bowls full of them every day. The plants I planted in late June for the fall harvest have grown, but not terribly well during the extreme heat and return to drought in July/August. They grew and bloomed, but the blossoms just kept falling off as long as we stayed hot. Finally, in the last 5-6 days, with cooler temperatures, they have set some fruit, and so have some of the spring-planted tomato varieties, most notably, Marion, Champion 2, Mule Team and Gulf State Market (even though GSM is buried under tons of morning glory vines). I expect we may get to harvest some of these before the first frost arrives, depending upon how early or late in autumn it comes.
That's my tomato report---long and detailed as always. We have about 230 jars of salsa canned, other tomato products like chili base and pasta sauce from last year's harvest, and several gallons of frozen tomatoes for winter cooking. I have absolutely no complaints about this year's overall harvest. It was great.
That's my tomato report, so now please share yours.
Dawn
Comments (7)
10 years agoIt was not a great tomato year. I planted 3 times as many plants as last year and got half as many tomatoes.
Raised bed with good soil had Indian Stripe - produced well and good taste, Goldman's Italian - made about 6 big fruits and I'm pretty sure plant is now dead. There is another in a pot, but no fruit on it. Pruden's Purple - it's a nice tomato, but I'm not as impressed as I thought I would be. Pink Bertoua - sprawling prolific plant that produced through the monsoons and the heat. It is not sweet. Salad sized. Pink Boar - love this tomato. Also small, dark purple with green shoulders and stripes/streaks, excellent taste and surprisingly prolific.
Raised bed with new dirt - no ripe tomatoes out of this YET! There are green ones now, but with decent dirt and weather should have been a winner. Here is Cherokee Purple, Arkansas Traveler, Box Car Willie, Grandma Suzy's Beefsteak, Sibirskiy Velikan Rozovyi. The basil is thriving here.
Large pots: Black Cherry didn't survive, I maybe got 6 off the plant. Pink ice - I broke it planting and it spent the summer in crappy soil and survived and produced. A second plant (mislabeled) did better in better soil. Pantano Romanesco Tomato - I'm supposed to be saving seeds for an exchange, but no fruit yet. Black Krim, replaced an OP Sungold that tasted so bad I pulled it up. It was one of the last planted, there may be green tomatoes on it now. Subartic plenty - considering it was bred for short cool seasons it did surprisingly well. I have gotten a couple of ripe fruit, lost some to tomato fruitworm. Large Red Cherry - this always produces and did well even this year. Texas Wild Cherry - sprawler, produced well, why am I not impressed? IDK, maybe in a drier season? Rand's Brandy - I thought this was going to die after I got about 3, but it has perked up and has green fruit. Whippersnapper Cherry - I gave one of these to a neighbor and she had good luck. Mine died. I have one in a solo cup now with a fruit on it. There is also a Pink Bertoua in one of these pots with green fruit but no ripe ones. Nebraska Wedding - prolific, cracked (all of them), favored by fruit worm. I put a Healani plant in about a month ago, it is growing nicely, but no fruit yet.
Straw bale planting, Planted late. These share a trellis with the pots and its hard to tell what tomato goes to which plant: #1 and #2 lost labels, Aunt Ruby's German green - may have fruit. Box Car Willie, Rutgers, "Not Manitoba" - I think this is Martino's Roma with a switched tag or it might be Opalka. Indian stripe, Cherokee Purple. There is actually a couple of fruit on this CP. [This experiment worked, but more like in ground plants with very deep mulch. I could tell when the roots hit the earth below, that is when the plants started to look good.]5' Round Smart Pot Bed planted last. As I planted these, I was planning what I was going to replace them with when they died. They were some sad plants. It has Rutgers and Oplaka in it. Rutgers is making, I have seen a couple of Opalka fruit.
Prize for disease goes to Goldman's Italian. Randy's brandy is surviving early problems. Pruden's purple is kind of poorly looking. Does anyone else think potato leaf plants are more disease prone?
A Dr Wyches yellow disappeared after planting. May have been cut worms or didn't get watered well during the heat. I have some baby plants in solo cups that I probably shouldn't have started. Maybe in the greenhouse?
I'm getting restless. Having cataract surgery the 28th and have to be out of the garden for a week. These plants could go on till November, or ... I have brassica in solo cups with no where to go, LOL. I read if you break the roots by either pulling on the plant or cutting around it with a shovel that you can get them to think they are dying and hurry up and ripen some fruit. Considering that for the New Dirt bed where I planned to put fall brassica.
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10 years agoAce 55 was a clear winner under neglected areas that, at the moment, has 4' tall Johnson grass and other weeds. And also in the tended garden bed. Great production no matter what or where.
Cherokee Purple is a tough plant. Remained disease-free. Production is easily stymied by stress, tho.
I never watered or fed in that one area. These are the winners. I will do them again.
10 years agoI purchased a six-pack of Early Girls and got them in the ground early. Had to cover them with buckets a few times, but had tomatoes by mid-June. They produced pretty good considering all the rain. I'm still getting a few small tomatoes from a couple of them. Of the heirlooms that I started from seed, Gary O'Sena, Heidi, and Hungarian Italian Paste performed best. Most of my plants also succumbed to disease fairly early on. We had enough for fresh eating and I managed to can 7 pints of crushed tomatoes and 6 pints of pizza sauce.
Okiedawn, you mentioned that you staggered your tomato planting this year. Do you also stagger your seed starting activities? If so, when do you start and finish?
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author10 years agoI did stagger my seed-starting slightly. I started most of them on Super Bowl Sunday,which is a long-standing tradition for me. I started more about 5 or 6 weeks later. I am in extreme southcentral OK with an average last frost date of March 28th, and often put my earliest plants in the ground in March, sometimes before the last frost date. (I use frost blankets to cover them if needed.) We generally harvest our first tomatoes (from plants bought at WalMart in late Jan or earliest Feb) the last week of April, and the first ones from home-grown plants a week to three weeks later depending on the weather. This week it rained so much, and nonstop, in March and April that I couldn't even get all the plants in the ground until May. Some of the plants were pretty big, in bloom, and even already had set tomatoes before I got them in the ground. I just worked around the standing water and rainfall when I could. I felt quite happy when I finally got the last plants in the ground, and then May dropped 25.5" of rain at our house, including close to 8" in one day. Our neighborhood and our portion of the county flooded, as did portions of the nearby town of Marietta. Because of the heavy rainfall, my planting was spread out over a longer time period than it normally is, but it all worked out in the end. My last plants probably went into the ground the first or second week of May, and I had to wear boots and stand in 6" of water in pathways to plant them. The plants themselves went into raised beds above the water level.
- 10 years ago
The 2015 season was a different one for me this year. This is the 6th
year I've grown tomatoes in my little backyard here in Tulsa. The first
4 years, I only grew in containers. For the 2014 season, I built two 4'
X 10' raised beds, and also had a couple of containers. But I switched
from 18 gal. plastic containers to 20 gal. Smart Pots. My strategy from
my first year was to mostly grow one plant of 12-15 different varieties to try
as many different ones as I could. 2015 was different for me in a
couple of ways. First, I started growing from seed. And second, I
decided to grow tomatoes that I already knew I liked, and to grow 2
plants each. I started seeds for Brandy Boy, Big Beef, Black Cherry,
Yellow 1884 Pinkheart, Jaune Flamme, Break O'Day, and what I thought was
Sun Sugar, and Super Sweet 100. Those last 2 ended up not being true to
seed. I was bummed about this, as Sun Sugar is my favorite. Whatever
seed I got that was supposed to be Sun Sugar was a small red cherry
instead. It was decent, but not Sun Sugar. Whatever was supposed to be
Super Sweet 100 seed, was instead a golf ball size red that was mealy
and bland all season.I started my seeds on Feb. 14, and they
did fantastic. I moved them out to my "temporary" greenhouse (8' x 8')
around March 10. By the time I planted on April 8, most of my plants
were 18-24" tall and thriving. I planted a little early for Tulsa. It
helps being a Meteorologist and knowing what the likely weather will be
for the next couple of weeks. ;-) My plants were thriving until the
rains came......and came.....and came some more. We didn't have it as
bad as Dawn did down south, but we still had way too much. I started
getting the first ripening fruit on a few of them the week before
Memorial Day. Jaune Flamme, Break O'Day and Yellow 1884 were the first
to ripen. The other varieties started ripening the next week. All of the
fruit that ripened before June 6th or so were very watery. We had that
dry spell during the first couple of weeks of June, and that helped a
lot.I also tried a little experiment with my cherries this year.
I said I had 2 plants of all of my varieties, so I decided to do one of
each cherry in the raised bed and one in a Smart Pot to see if there
was a difference in taste. I can report that there was not a significant
difference in taste for Black Cherry, not-Sun Sugar, and not-Super
Sweet 100. They all tasted the same whether from the Smart pot or the
bed. The only difference in the cherries was the Black Cherry in the
Smart Pot succumbed to Gray Mold about 3 weeks quicker than the one in
the raised bed.Like I'm sure most of you experienced, the
disease pressure was much higher this year than normal, due to the heavy
rain. I normally get Gray Mold on any of the Blacks I've tried. And I
usually eventually get Early Blight to some degree on all the others. It
was quite a bit faster this year. And to top it all off, around July
4th, my neighbor behind me decided to use Round Up all over his backyard
to kill his bermuda and do some landscaping. My tomato plants did not
like this one bit. They all died within a week. I was pretty mad at
first, but luckily, they were mostly played out by then. So the loses
weren't too bad. I didn't have too many fruit left. It would have been a
different story if it was June 4, instead. I guess that's the risk you
take when you garden in the middle of town.BRANDY BOY - This one was my only new variety. These
did well overall, but I probably will not grow again. I know
this sounds crazy, but I'm just not a huge fan of the Brandywine taste.
Call me crazy, I know. I grew a Brandywine back in 2012 in a container
and they all tasted watery and bland to me. And it got Early Blight
quicker than others that year. On a whim, I decided to try Brandy Boy
this year in the bed. Both plants produced about 20 good-sized beefsteaks. I still just wasn't crazy about the taste. If you like
Brandywine, these may be worth a try. Definitely had better disease
resistance than Brandywine, at least in my case.BIG BEEF - These
did great for me, and I plan to always grow this one. The taste isn't
"knock your socks off", but it's very good for a hybrid. And they produce like crazy. This
was my second year growing it. Every year, each plant has pumped out at
least 35 fruit. Most were in the 8-16 oz. range. And for what it's worth, these 2 plants were the last
to die from the Round Up accident.BREAK O'DAY - This variety is
probably my favorite pink. There's something about the "zing" in the
flavor that my wife and I both really like. I've grown this one all 6
years and will continue. It's a little bit smaller plant (4'), but it
pumps out the tomatoes. I've always had at least 30 from every plant. In
2012, I got over 60 from one plant before it finally gave out.BLACK
CHERRY - Another staple that I've grown every year. I love this cherry tomato. Not much to say about this one. It's a very popular tomato, and it always lives up to its reputation for me. The only negative about these is they are susceptible to Gray Mold, typical for Black Tomatoes.
I had hundreds of fruit from each plant before they died. Both plants were huge, as usual.YELLOW 1884 PINKHEART - This is a creation from The Tomatoman here in Tulsa, and I think it is only available through The Tomatoman's Daughter. It's another tomato that I grow every year. It typically produces 8-16 oz. yellow beefsteaks with pink in the middle when fully ripe. This is my favorite beefsteak. It's flavor is hard to describe, maybe creamy-sweet, almost buttery. I know it sounds weird, but it is oh so good. Every person I've given one to has commented on how good it tastes. The first few this year were watery, but after that, they were fantastic. I got about 25 from each plant. I had 2 huge fruit this year, too, which was new. One was 21.9 oz. and another was 20.7. Lisa (the Tomatoman's Daughter) said she'd never heard of ones that big.
JAUNE FLAMME - This one is an orange, golf ball size tomato that is very juicy, sweet and tangy. I've grown this one every year. When I grew them in containers, they had quite a bit of blossom end rot. I haven't had that problem in the raised beds. These are early and very productive. I lost count on these this year, but I think each plant produced at least 75.
I'm not going to go into the not-Sun Sugar and not-Super Sweet 100. I took a chance and ordered the not-Sun Sugar seed from Amazon. That was a mistake that I will not make again. The not-Super Sweet 100 seed actually came from Burpee. They emailed me about a month ago saying there was a mistake in their production of Super Sweet 100 seeds this year, and offered to send me new seeds early next year. I'll give those another try, but will likely not order from them again.
I've got a Black Cherry, 4th of July OP, Jaune Flamme, Green Zebra, Break O'Day, Yellow 1884 PH, and Johnny Joe's going in the garden for Fall. I planted out on July 10. I've already had a couple ripen, and have several fruit growing on all of them. I had worms really bad on these in late July. I sprayed a couple of rounds of Bt, and haven't seen any since. Hopefully I'll get some good production before our first freeze.
So overall, it was a decent year. It wasn't my best year for sure, but I guess it could have been worse. The rain was too much and lead to more disease than normal. And the Round Up incident lead to a premature end to my season. But I grew from seed for the first time this year, and successfully, I might add. So I'm going to say this season was a success.
I look forward to seeing other reports, too.
Lee Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author10 years agoLee, I'm glad you mentioned the gray mold on black tomato varieties. For many years---probably from 1999-2011, it was not a problem here at all. I might see gray mold on one plant a year, and it was not necessarily on a black variety. Then it started showing up on Black Cherry every year, and much worse in wet years than dry years. This year it was on a lot of the black varieties (admittedly, I had almost all the black types in a single row in a raised bed so it likely just spread plant to plant) before the end of June. The gray mold seemed unstoppable on the black varieties, but the ones that were potato-leaved rebounded after a while and put out new growth that was healthy. Since the rain had stopped by then, they stayed healthy. The regular-leaved ones did not survive. The varieties from The Dwarf Project, whether black varieties or other colors, resisted the gray mold the longest time, but it eventually got them too.
I am going to rotate all my tomato plants, Lord willing and if the creek don't rise and if El Nino doesn't keep us flooded all winter, to the back garden where no tomatoes were grown this year or last year. In order to make that happen, I will have to build raised beds lined with hardware cloth because the back garden is mostly sandy soil and we have a Vole Empire running everything back there. I really need to give the front garden a break from plants in the solanum family because I've grown them there every single year since 1999. I'm not good at rotating plants (because I grow so many tomatoes and peppers that virtually every raised bed has some of them in it every year), but after this disease-filled year, I really need to rotate properly next year.
Dawn
hazelinok