Tomatoes

I haven't posted in a while. Between long days working the farm, marketing food and Facebook I haven't made time to post here in weeks.

Like all summers it's been busy at Boulder Belt Eco-Farm. We have had a great summer-the weather, for the most part has been cool and dry and the crops have loved it. we have huge tomatoes this year, despite the evil specter of late blight which has been stalking the tomato patches of the eastern US this summer. We don't seem to have that problem. Our tomato plants look pretty bad as they have once again been struck with whatever crud we have in our soils but it is not late blight as our crud rarely effects the fruit. It just kills the vines which can lead to sun scald problems but not fruit with disgusting lesions and rot. At any rate, the fruits are huge.

I did not know that Glick's pride was a beef steak tomato as it never has gotten all that big for us in the past 12 years we have grown it. But this year we have a lot of 1 pound+ fruits.

I notice the paste tomatoes, Amish paste and Opalka are also both huge this year. Usually the Opalka come in at about 1/2 pound or less. This year they are at least twice that big. Same with the Amish paste.

The early girl are not all that big this year but quite prolific

The Paul Robeson are all over the place on size-some are teensy and catfaced, others are big and beautifully round. the taste is good but not quite as good as I expected. still seeds have been saved for next year

Great White tomatoes like others are huge and for the most part perfectly round. And they taste really good for any tomato, but especially for a white tomato which generally are pretty insipid. unfortunately because they are strange they do not sell well (I guess I will have to get aggressive about them and convince people to try them)

The Nyagous are perfect cue ball sized black tomatoes again this year and they taste fabulous. these have become one of my favorites.

The Black Krim are just wrong. 95% of them have catfaced horribly making them pretty unusable for anything other that displaying as a freak of nature or sauce/juice. I dunno what happened there, but it ain't good.

I don't know what happened to the Green Zebra, but with pretty much all the different types of tomatoes we grow ripening to at least the point of identification, we don't seem to have any. But we do seem to have a lot more red saladette types than I remember starting. It's been years since we have grown Green Zebra but I remember them being pretty early so if we have them we should be harvesting them by now. We got the seed from Baker Creek. I do like the philosophy at BC but this is not the first time we have gotten wrong seed from them. I doubt we will order from them again as we cannot afford to spend money with such a lax seed house.

The Costoluto plants died early but they did produce a crop of beautiful fluted medium red tomatoes before they succumbed

The cherry tomatoes are doing well this year. We have way to many sunsugar about the right amount of Cherrywine (which is nearly stable this year-I believe there was only one sport-a pink saladette). The yellow pear plants are not dead and generally they are the first to die of our home grown tomato ick. The green pear seem to be stabilized their first year of selection-100% of the plants are producing green pear maters. As a mater of fact, I found a couple of green pear plants in with the yellow pear plants. The red grape are going gang busters and the green grape are nice and healthy and just beginning to ripen.

It looks like we got 2 crinckovich plants this year and they are noting special. I do like the fruit so I think it will be worth seeking out a good seed source as I do not have enough to keep seed from (you really need a minimum of 8 plants and I have 2).

The Sunray tomatoes are just now ripening up and they are about perfect in every way. huge round deep yellow fruits with great flavor and very prolific. I am surprised the plants have not broken under the weight of all the fruit.

The Dr Wyche's Yellow is almost over for the year and they were, like so many other tomatoes pretty spectacular. Very few deformed, catfaced fruits. Good flavor and good yields.

The Boulder Belt Striped was very good this year. As far as I can tell, we had zero off types so I will declare this a stabilized breed. the flavor is good to boot.

The Matina has been great. Wonderful small tasty fruits and very very prolific

So That's the August rundown of our maters