Best and Worst Tomatoes of 2012

Ah, January. Snow covers the garden, and fresh tomatoes are a distant memory. How I miss them! I've been making do with homemade tomato sauce all week, but nothing beats a fresh, homegrown tomato, bursting with juice and flavor. So it's time to snuggle down with my pile of catalogs, think about ordering seeds, and ponder the successes and failures of last year.

2012 was an interesting year for tomatoes. It was the best harvest season I've ever had for Brandywines, that fussy, late-producing heirloom. I suspect the mild winter, early spring, and warm, wet summer provided almost optimal conditions for Brandywines and their cousins here in coastal Massachusetts.

I say almost because it was also a year filled with fungus. Early blight, late blight, and leaf spot all hit our tomato plants with widely varying impact. While the Brandywines weathered the late blight fairly well, our  Hillbilly tomatoes started rotting on the vines. This didn't stop our raiding woodchuck from eating them like candy, and he was welcome to them. Even applications of copper fungicide could not stem the decay.

We grew ten different varieties of tomato last year. In alphabetical order, here's how they performed for us.

Bellstar

I chose Bellstar for its reputation as a reliable early plum tomato. It was non of these. My Bellstars produced very little and succumbed to early blight within a month of planting. The few fruits I got from these were round, not plum-shaped, and seriously lacking in flavor, although they did have good texture. I won't be trying this variety again, which leaves me looking for a good plum tomato variety to replace it.

Brandywine

Brandywine is a pink heirloom variety with a well-established reputation for excellent sweet and fruity flavor. Not a good choice for sauces, they are fantastic for slicing or salads. The drawback is that Brandywines take a long time to mature, 78 days on average, and I've had many a crop cut short by an early frost. Not this year. For the first time ever, my Brandywines started producing in late July and kept on going despite encroaching late blight and leaf spot. They were some of the best, tastiest, most productive Brandywines I have ever grown, and I'll grow them again next year, giving them a nice early start in the greenhouse.

Defiant

Defiant is a hybrid slicer bred specifically for blight resistance, and it did resist well, but it produced poorly. While heirlooms were blooming and fruiting like mad all around them, our Defiants produced very few rather small fruits. They were tasty, though, and I have to wonder if they simply got completely overgrown by the other tomatoes in our bed. Given their excellent disease resistance, I think I'll give them one more try but interplant them in another bed, perhaps with onions, so that they have more space to develop.

Gold Nugget

I planted this pear-shaped cherry tomato primarily for my children to nibble, and the first few we got were delicious, firm, and not overly sweet. I suspect I would have loved them, but alas! Early blight did them in almost instantly. My husband ripped them out of the beds in July, and that was the end of that. Regretfully, I cannot recommend planting a tomato so sensitive to blight.

Hillbilly

One of my seedling customers provided me with Hillbilly seeds. I'd never heard of the variety before, and they were certainly interesting. A close cousin of Brandywines, these yellow-orange tomatoes are firmer and meatier. They grow robustly, and one actually pulled down its tomato ladder. They also produce earlier than Brandywines and quite prolifically. Unfortunately, they proved to be highly vulnerable to late blight. The fruit developed dark brown pitted bruises which eventually split and turned moldy. I didn't see this kind of response on any of the other tomatoes, and it persisted despite two treatments with copper. So, with further regrets, I have to pass on this variety as well. I won't be planting it again.

Juliet

This early-producing  mini-plum, closely related to Santa tomatoes, was a delightful discovery. The fruit was excellent, a wonderful balance between sweet and meaty with a good firm texture. Our Juliets produced prolifically and were outperformed only by our Sun Golds. Better yet, they resisted cracking quite well. Towards the end of the season, they did begin to exhibit some fungal pitting, but they kept on producing right up until the first hard frost. I will absolutely grow these again.

Stupice

This potato-leaf heirloom from Czechoslovakia looks exactly like Brandywine until it fruits. It's reputed to be cold-tolerant and early producing (52 days), but they actually produced about the same time as the Brandywines. Stupice did not stand up to either early or late blight well, though it did better than many other varieties. To my surprise, I found that it grows quite well in a greenhouse at low temperatures, even down to 50 degF. So while I probably won't grow it in the garden next year, I may well start another one in the greenhouse in the spring to replace the one that has just now stopped producing.

Sun Gold

In my opinion, Sun Gold is the king of cherry tomatoes. The round orange fruit is incredibly sweet, and even my tomato-hating eight-year-old will eat them right off the vine. They are incredibly prolific and vigorous, shrugging off blight, drought, and even frost. It took three frosts to finally kill ours off! They do have downsides, though. They split at the the least provocation, so they're not great for market, and they tend to overgrow everything around them. They require very sturdy trellises and plenty of space. That said, this is our favorite tomato, and we'll be growing it for years to come.

Valencia

I chose Valencia as an orange heirloom slicer. I love to make tomato salads with a variety of tomato colors for interest and variety. Valencia was billed as a reliable mid-season tomato, and it was. The fruit, however, was, well, boring. I honestly can't recall now how a single one of them tasted. They weren't particularly blight resistant, but neither did they instantly wither and die. They didn't produce much, but they did produce two or three fruits per plant pretty reliably each week. So, this wasn't a bad tomato, but neither was it a great one. I think I'll pass on this one in 2013.

Washington Cherry

Billed as the earliest cherry tomato to market, I think Washington Cherry was the biggest disappointment. They did produce early, but with nowhere near the yield of Sun Gold. They resisted splitting quite well, but in exchange, they just had no flavor whatsoever. I may as well have bought them in the store for a good deal less trouble. So no more Washington Cherries this year.

The big winners this year were Brandywine, Juliet, and Sun Gold. Stupice and Defiant are worth trying again, I think. But the rest we'll chalk up as learning experiences. 

This leaves me wanting a good, normal-sized plum tomato, a large beefsteak, and some good color. I also want to find more good determinate varieties that don't require quite so much staking and maintenance. I should also add in a couple of blight resistant hybrids.

I'm considering trying the following new varieties next year:

Amish Paste - Mid-season heirloom plum tomato reputed to have high yields and excellent taste. Available from Bountiful Gardens and Johnny's Selected Seeds.

Attention - A new beefsteak hybrid, highly adaptive and resistant to a range of fungal infections and viruses. Available from the Natural Gardening Company.
Celebrity - "A perfect main crop tomato", highly disease-resistant with a long growing season. Available from Johnny's Selected Seeds and the Natural Gardening Company.
Golden Treasure - Yellow storage tomato. Available from Territorial Seed Company.
Grandma's Pick - "Heirloom flavor with hybrid production, uniformity, and disease resistance." Now, how can I say no to that? Bright red with orange shoulders, this tomato is a heavy producer with high lycopene content. Available from Territorial Seed Company.
Gregory's Altai - Bred in Siberia, this heirloom big slicer is reputed to be a very early producer. Available from Bountiful Gardens.
Indigo Rose - So dark purple, it's nearly black with high anthrocyanin content. Available from Johnny's Selected Seeds and Territorial Seed Company.
Legend - Early slicing tomato with excellent late blight tolerance for an heirloom. Produces big 4-5 inch fruit. Available from Territorial Seed Company.
Longkeeper - This semi-determinate hybrid will keep for up to three months when picked green or not-quite-ripe just before the first frost. Available from Territorial Seed Company.
Mountain Magic - Early hybrid, blight resistant, high yields. Available from Johnny's Selected Seeds.
Pruden's Purple - An early Brandywine cousin with dark pink skin and crimson flesh. Available from Johnny's Selected Seeds.
Taxi - Early, determinate yellow tomato, reputed to be easy to grow. Available from Johnny's Selected Seeds and Territorial Seed Company.

If you've grown any of these varieties in the past, please share your experiences and help me narrow down my selections. Also, many years ago, I grew a small Brandywine cousin called Lillian Yellow. Alas, I didn't save the seed, and I haven't been able to find it since. If you have some seed or know of a good source, please let me know.

Happy New Year!

I can't believe it's been so long since my last post. In fact, the last post was by my husband while I was on vacation with our daughters in New Mexico. Now, why would I take a vacation in August, the peak of growing season? Well, when we bought our home, it had many wonderful features, such as the greenhouse and the yard, but it also had some serious drawbacks.

Worst of these was the kitchen, which had not been changed since the house was built in 1940. It had lower-than-standard counter heights, no space for a dishwasher, and very little cabinet space. The adjoining dining room was so cramped, we couldn't entertain more than a few guests without turning the table diagonally or adding a table in the living room. So we embarked on a radical kitchen renovation: add a structural beam in the basement to level the sagging floor, tear down the wall between the kitchen and dining room, pull out the cabinets, add a food prep area with a high counter, and provide enough cabinet space overall that we could stop using the linen closet as a pantry.

We chose to do this in August while on vacation so that the bulk of the work could be done with the girls out of the house. Our younger daughter has asthma-ish problems, and we didn't want her home, breathing in construction dust. We also wanted the kitchen finished before harvest season hit full swing so that we could be canning and preserving our hard-won garden bounty. Every contractor we interviewed assured us they could finish the renovation in four weeks.

It took over three months. We began the 6^th of August, and the kitchen was not completed until the week of Thanksgiving. There are still outstanding issues. Our new induction range arrived with a manufacturing defect. It is scheduled to be fixed on Tuesday. Also, somewhere along the way, someone made a measurement error, and our refrigerator does not quite fit in its allotted space. So we're now looking for a 30-inch-wide fridge that won't seriously bust our budget.

The renovation ate all of my spare time, hence no blogging. Worse, with no kitchen, I couldn't cook most of the veggies we were growing. What on earth do you do with an enormous garden full of veggies when you can't cook? You give them away. We gave veggies to all our friends and neighbors. When the girls returned to school, we sent bin after bin of cherry tomatoes, bush beans, broad beans, bell peppers, cucumbers, carrots, zucchini, summer squash, husk cherries, and sunflower seeds to their classrooms as snacks. Every Monday, I'd pick everything ripe and bring it to the food pantry at Beverly Bootstraps, a local charity. By the end of the growing season, we'd given them nearly 100 lbs. of our fresh, organic produce.

We did manage to freeze some tomatoes, corn, and roasted green chile. We stored potatoes, beets, and squash. I dried broad beans and blue corn for meal. Some friends kindly took all our basil, converted it into pesto, and gave us half the batch. Many of our attempts at storage failed, including green tomatoes wrapped in newspaper and stored in our basement, which simply rotted, and dehydrated red chiles. After hours in the dehydrator, I ended up with red chile leather that then went moldy two weeks later.

And the worst, most frustrating part of this was that the garden was, with a few exceptions and despite raids by a determined woodchuck, wildly successful. Even the corn stalks infected with Gibberella produced bushels of corn. The husk cherries completely overgrew their bed and carpeted the garden paths with their fruit. The bush beans kept on producing right up until the first frost. Even now, with the garden blanketed in snow, we're still picking fresh kale, cauliflower, and broccoli.

At last, the renovation is over, the holidays are past, and I have time to reflect on our successes and failures. Seed catalogs have begun arriving in the mail, and I'm beginning to think ahead to this year's garden. So over the next few days, I'll be posting on all the varieties I planted, reporting on what worked, what didn't, and what I'm considering trying this year. First on my list: tomatoes.

A non-monetary enterprise? (guest post by Alex)

Jenise and our girls are away for 2 weeks, and I am here running the garden by myself. We have truly entered into the harvest phase. I am struggling to find good homes for the fruits of our labors, but more than that, I am struggling to find a model for how this is going to work in the long term. Except for the seedlings, it just does not make sense to try to sell our veggies for money - the scale is too small, and if we need money there are easier ways to get it. So I have created an email list of friends & helpers and set the challenge: how should we organize ourselves to trade vegetables for labor and social capital? If you would like to be part of the discussion, just email me, or subscribe yourself at cropmob-subscribe@highgroundmicrofarm.org .

Good Fungus, Bad Fungus

Fungi play important roles in a garden, both as hero and villain. I went away for a week-long vacation, and just before I left, I noticed yellow spots on some tomato leaves.

Insect damage, heat stress, or early blight? All of the above?

This looks more like the beginning of early blight.

When I came back on Monday, it was clear that this was early blight, characterized by expanding yellow spots that spread to nearby leaves. I removed all the affected leaves this morning and will spray with copper this evening, when it's less likely to harm beneficial insects like bees. For those of you who are concerned about the march of late blight across the state (last I heard, it had moved as far east as Concord), here's a guide for diagnosing your tomatoes and some clear pictures of early blight.

I also noticed on Monday that a lot of the corn had fallen over. My husband said it was due to the high winds we'd been experiencing. Today, I tried to tie up a lot of the corn with string, and I noticed some sort of infection on the stalks. After some investigation, it looks like it's Gibberella stalk rot.

Gibberella is characterized by pinkish streaks on the stalks, which soften and fall over.

Looks like this stalk is starting to split.

Some stalks have broken off altogether.

I'm going to check with other local farmers to see if my diagnosis is correct. I'm hoping not, because there's basically nothing you can do for Gibberella except try to keep the corn strong with frequent water and fertilizer. I'll have to rotate the corn in a big way next year. And I will likely switch from the heirloom varieties I chose this year to a fungus-resistant hybrid  next year. Thus far, only the Extra Early Golden Bantam pictured above seems to be affected. The Hooker's Sweet Indian corn, a red-kernelled variety, seems to be mostly unaffected. Then again, it's setting ears at only 3 feet tall! Maybe it's outrunning the Gibberella.

So those, along with a light dusting of fungus on my summer squash, are the current fungal villains in the garden. Now for the heroes:

Look carefully. Can you spot the Japanese Umbrella Inky Caps?

Unidentified Mushrooms. Lawnmower's Mushrooms? Dunce Caps? Witch's Hats? Who knows?

Mushrooms can be beneficial in a garden. The Japanese Umbrella Inkys help break down decaying matter, such as these wood chips in the garden paths, and make those nutrients available to the veggies. I often find Alcohol Inkys in the straw, performing the same function, but these mushrooms have such a short lifespan that, by the time I have gotten around to fetching the camera, they have generally deliquesced.

Other mushrooms exist symbiotically with the veggies, making minerals in the soil available in exchange for nutrients. I'm hoping that's what those little tan mystery mushrooms are doing. I haven't been able to positively identify them as yet. I keep loaning out my mushroom reference books and only have Fascinating Fungi of New England available, which is a great beginner's reference but not at all comprehensive. A comprehensive reference would be massive, given that mycologists estimate that there are around 20,000 species of mushrooms in North America alone.

Anyway, those little tan mushrooms are in beds all over the garden, but they seem to particularly like the pumpkins and grow happily in the shade of those broad squash leaves. If there are any mycologists reading this, the cap is bell-shaped, the gills are free, crowded, and a light cinnamon color, and there's a slight bulb at the base but no root. I'm working on a spore print now and will report on the results tomorrow, but I'm guessing they will also be cinnamon-y, like the gills.

Abundance

The garden, along with the weather, is heating up. We've been happily harvesting kale and cukes and lettuce for a couple of weeks now, but in the last week, we've also been getting zucchini, summer squash, and new potatoes, and we've begun carefully harvesting dill. Here are some before and after pics...

Basil on June 27th

Basil on July 9th

First Zucchini Harvested on June 27th

Jumbo Zucchinis and Pickling Cucumbers Harvested on July 11th

What a difference a couple of weeks makes! I delivered that box of zukes and cukes to the Beverly Bootstraps food pantry last Wednesday, along with some lettuce and yellow crookneck squash:

Donation to Beverly Bootstraps

Nice, Plump Yellow Crookneck Squash

I just went through the garden and harvested everything we had ripe except kale (they apparently have trouble getting people to take kale, alas). I brought it to the food pantry, where a nice volunteer asked me where it was from, and I said, "Um, my garden?" All three volunteers in the place turned around and stared at me. Then one woman broke the silence and said, "That's so kind of you." I shrugged and told them it was more than we could use, but inside, I was astonished.

Doesn't anyone else do this? Almost all of the other food there was neatly bagged and labeled, and while I was there, a large truck from Richardson's Dairy pulled up to deliver milk. I guess the vast majority of donations come from corporations and organizations. I know an intrepid middle schooler at Harborlight Montessori School was collecting non-perishables during the school year. But apparently, individuals never make food donations, or perhaps not donations they've grown themselves. And that seems terribly sad and broken, somehow. So if you find yourself with more zucchini than you know what to do with this year, I encourage you to find a local food pantry and donate.

Anyway, they weighed our produce, and it came to 16 pounds. They had me sign for it and indicate whether I'd like to receive a thank you note from them (I declined), then handed me a receipt. Woot! I can't wait to bring another box full.

With this heat, though, that may be a while. I checked this morning, and most of the zucchini are turning yellow and shriveling up on the vine. I will increase the watering schedule to an hour every morning and evening and hope that turns things around. Everything else seems to be growing even faster. The husk cherries now have palpable cherries in the husks, the giant pumpkin is growing like mad, and the corn and mammoth sunflowers are racing for the sky. Birds have found our strawberries and seem to be eating them in the early mornings, but there weren't all that many left anyway. And those first few new potatoes were scrumptious. We're pretty happy with the Bintje variety, and the Yukon Golds are pretty much as expected. Next, we'll try some Rose Finns. And I'm guessing that in another week or two, we'll start having ripe tomatoes. Ahhhh, the anticipation!

Catching up: Sustainability Guild

Oof! I got sick two weeks ago, then I spent all last week catching up. Now I'm back up to speed and catching up on my blogging, and there's a whole lot to cover: bean tunnel, new potatoes, gigantic zucchini, escaping pumpkins. Today, I'm going to focus on the Sustainability Guild.

Two Mondays ago, we started transporting all of our remaining seedlings to the Sustainability Guild. On June 25th, Alex loaded up the Prius and drove out to Dorchester. I took these photos before we loaded.

Plenty left to give.

A few gaps where we'd managed to sell seedlings at the Beverly Farmers' Market.

Laura Kozar, Strategic Projects Manager at the Sustainability Guild, came that afternoon and loaded up her car as well. The following morning, she came back with a ZipVan and Renato Riccioni, Sustainability Guild's Creative Director. We all gang-tackled the greenhouse and packed their van.

Sustainability Guild van is nearly full.

Officially stuffed! Off to Dorchester.

l-r: Alex, Renato Riccioni, and Laura Kozar prepare to close up the van for the long drive back.

Happy High Ground Farmers, Alex and Jenise Aminoff

And why are we looking so happy?

Nothing left on this side but the peppers and beans in their EarthTainers.

Even after all that, we still had a few seedlings left.

So Alex loaded up the car again on Wednesday morning and took all the remaining seedlings to Dorchester.

Even more than having an empty greenhouse, we are delighted that the seedlings will be put to excellent use. Laura described the some of the planned uses for the seedlings: planting in public urban spaces where anyone can just walk up and pick a tomato, vertical plantings on "living walls," and more. Hopefully, we'll hear more from them on how our seedlings are doing in their new urban home.

Save the Honeybee

Hi, folks. There's a petition going around requesting that the EPA ban Clothianidin, a pesticide that is suspected of contributing to the massive honeybee die-off we've been experiencing in the U.S. Clothianidin is already banned in several countries, including Germany where it is produced (there's something very odd about that). So if you like apples, blueberries, and pumpkins, all of which depend on bees for pollination, please consider signing the petition.