The first "Martino's Roma" tomatoes. Martino is supposed to be an improved Roma in terms of yield, but having grown it many years I don't really see the difference. Nothing wrong with it, just not special.
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| Martino's Roma |
The first "Caspian Pink." This has proven to be one of our favorites.
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| Caspian Pink |
The first "Costoluto Genovese." I love the pumpkin shapes, and they taste good too.
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| Costoluto Genovese |
The first "Plum Regal." This was purchased because of its reported blight resistance. Well, either it isn't (completely), or I have something other than blight. The plant is healthier than others, but it is still losing lower leaves. I will contrast it to the "Pony Express" paste tomatoes I am also growing. Those are now nothing more than skeletons with some green fruit clinging. Certainly won't grow that variety again. Plum Regal fruit is nice and blocky, weighing in at 5 - 6+ ounces. I have not sampled its taste yet.
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| Plum Regal |
The first...um? There's a story here. I bought a packet of Amish Paste for this season, and planted two pots with them. One died, so I bought 2 AP plants from a garden center. Their fruit has the typical nippled shape. This fruit came from the one surviving seedling of mine. Well, it certainly isn't Amish Paste. Maybe it's a new variety...Mennonite Paste?
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| Mystery tomato |
Is it even a paste tomato? Let's slice one open...
Nope. It looks suspiciously like Caspian Pink above. So is it a mislabeled seed packet? Or did I screw up my planting? No way to know, so I will buy another packet of hopefully real Amish Paste for next year.
The first (generic) Cubanelle peppers:
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| Cubanelle |
The first "Sugar Buns" corn. This crop suffered from poor germination due to the very cold weather that lingered into early June.
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| Sugar Buns |
My cunning plan was to plant 3 varieties of corn at the same time, with different maturities. Sugar Buns is the earliest, at 72 days, with Honey Select at 80 days, and Silver Queen at 90+ days. As is typical with my plans, it just didn't work out that way. The Sugar Buns was late, while Honey Select is right on time (stronger plants, too). In fact, we took one to check its maturity. Here it is on the left below, next to more Sugar Buns. You can see how much bigger it is.
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| L: Honey Select, R: Sugar Buns |
Sugar Buns tastes fine, but Honey Select is superior. This one tasted fantastic. Once again, I'm putting my principles on hold and growing it, even though it comes from a big nasty agribiz conglomerate (it itself is non-GMO, but the company sure does a lot of GMO crops).
OK, this post is getting too long and wordy. I'll just show representative other harvests for this week.
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| Hungarian Hot Wax, Cherry Bomb, Shishito |
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| Mitoyo, Nadia, Bride, Ping Tung Long |
Lastly, The Kitchen Goddess wants to show off her new hand-carved fruit-ripening bowl, looking like a dugout canoe:
We may be harvesting dozens of tomatoes, but most of you lovely people are getting bushels of them. Blight, or whatever it is, is just such a scourge here. I hope you are able to escape it. Thanks for reading this overly-long report, and I really look forward to reading everyone's posts on Harvest Monday, kindly hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres.
Hmm, I haven't even gotten to the dozens of tomatoes stage yet. No blight here but there are a few other foliar diseases that regularly hit my tomatoes. And then there's the rodents... Always something, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteAlways something.
DeleteOoh, love that bowl! I need something like that here, instead of having everything just covering up the kitchen counter. Those Amish Paste tomatoes do look a bit 'different' don't they. Hopefully it is tasty if not...pastey. It looks like you are getting lots of goodies to eat from the garden at the moment!
ReplyDeleteThanks Dave. They mystery tomato is actually quite good.
DeleteThe Plum Regal that I'm growing are starting to get diseases but it doesn't look like blight. I've been letting the ripen indoors near a window for a few days because the foliage on the plants blocks the sun. They make good sauces, IMO. Nice eggplant. Mine bit the dust last week. Every gardener needs at least one mystery plant per season.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think it is? I confess to not being very good at identifying plant diseases.
DeleteI always carefully label my seedlings and then forget to transfer labels when I transplant into containers or the ground. I am growing a few new varieties of tomatoes this year and unless they mature perfectly, I can't always tell one from another.
ReplyDeleteI do the same.
DeleteWe also have that scourge of blight here in the UK and we lost all outside except one blight resistant variety(Crimson Crush) It is heartbreaking after all that work and anticipation to consign the to the bonfire, isn't it?
ReplyDelete