Passed the 1,000 tomato mark today!

[QAGuy]

Of course, the vast majority are cherries, but what the heck.
Here's the breakdown.

Cherokee Purple W 28
Cherokee Purple 29
Kellogg's Breakfast W 27
Kellogg's Breakfast 30
Lemon Boy 2
Yellow Pear 34
Momotaro 41
Super Sweet 100 825
Black Prince 62
Aunt Ginny's Purple 20
Beefmaster 15
1113

Cherokee Purple and Kellogg's Breakfast have two entries because there are
two of each. The W is on the west side of the garden.

Lemon Boy and Yellow pear are a month behind the others.

[Fusion_power]

Always nice to have ripe tomatoes. You have a LOT!

[QAGuy]

Yep, made a half gallon of sauce yesterday.

[Fusion_power]

I saved seed from 17 varieties yesterday, then picked a 5 gallon bucket full of tomatoes. My wife made a couple of gallons of juice last night and is planning to make spaghetti sauce with it this morning. This was the first significant harvest of the year. Barring incident, we should get about 2000 tomatoes from the large fruited types and who knows how many cherry tomatoes. We have 5 rows of tomatoes and peppers with each row 180 feet long. Why so many? I need a ton of fresh seed this year. Two thirds of my seed is at the 8 year old mark which is when germination (or lack thereof) becomes a major problem. It is especially good to see favorites like Liz Birt, Lucky Cross, Cherokee Chocolate, and Tastiheart with heavy crops.

[QAGuy]

I don't have anywhere near as many tomatoes as you. Only 11 plants and 9 varieties. Been daily bringing in a half bushel for a couple of weeks lately. Friends are crazy about my gifts. I really enjoy giving them to folks who really appreciate them. It's only the wife and I so we have lots to give away.

Good for you for continuing to save our rare varieties.

My Kellogg's Breakfast is doing great this year as is my Super Sweet 100. Cherokee Purple is a big disappointment. Short plants and not much in yield. Many misshapen fruits too.

[throwaway]

My super sweet 100 got munched nearly to the ground probably 6 weeks ago, but that thing is vigorous and I should start getting some ripening soon.

[b54red]

I really don't know how many tomatoes I have picked now. I took care to count each one and the variety for the first few weeks from my first bed of 29 tomatoes and quit counting somewhere over 400. Since then my second bed of 40 tomatoes has been making for over a month and my third bed of 18 has been making for nearly that long and my fourth bed of 30 plants has just started putting out a few ripe fruits. It was just too much to keep up with every day and with some rainy patches thrown in and fighting EB, gray mold, and an ongoing battle with spider mites my plans of orderly record keeping this year went out the window as usual. If all my plants died tomorrow then I will have had a great year and we have put up a nice amount of sauce and my favorite salsa.

Like Fusion I have been trying to save seed because many of mine are getting quite old and quite a few were crossed and had to be replaced. I still am waiting to get some ripe fruit from over a half dozen varieties that still have not made yet. Various glitches always seem to come up when trying to get a few specific varieties to produce from diseases to insects the problems seem to hit the varieties I am trying to get good seed from the hardest. I have been successful in saving seed from most of the varieties that I would like to keep growing so I can cut back significantly next year on the number of plants I grow.

I use the lean and lower method with single stem plants allowing the occasional short stem to form for additional fruit on some varieties that handle the extra growth without too many problems. I planted all my plants different distances apart in each bed and found that by far the plants that were given a bit more room at a full three feet apart produced better than the ones closer together. Even though the individual plants did better the total fruit from each bed was similar in amount but the largest fruit came from the more spaced out plants. I also had more problems with spider mite spread in the beds that were planted with less spacing between plants but EB seemed to be more random and the spacing didn't help with that.

I had another problem that cropped up this year. I graft all my plants to the RST-106 root stock and have for several years now and it has been a godsend to my garden which is heavily infected with RKN and fusarium wilt along with occasional hits by Bacterial wilt. I have not had a single case of Bacterial wilt since using this root stock and have only had a few mild cases of fusarium show towards the very end of a long season on a few plants and only one that ever showed any RKN when the plants were pulled. However this year with the seed lot I bought I have had a fair number of cases of fusarium and much worse and much earlier than I have ever seen it with this root stock. I have even had a few plants get it so bad and so early that they didn't make any fruit before they had to be pulled. To say I was disappointed would be putting it mildly. I have contacted the company and explained what has happened and hope that they can get the seed back to the near perfect root stock that it was before this batch of seed. Even if they can't I will still use this root stock if it doesn't get any worse next year because even with the loses and early death of quite a few plants most of the ones that did get fusarium still were good producers before they got sick unlike un-grafted plants. Even with this problem the root stock is still my favorite of all the ones that I have tried because of the fact that I get earlier production, more production and no Bacterial wilt which can be as devastating when it hits as Late Blight.

I do want to mention one plant making a super effort in production for a single stem plant and that was one of my single stem Cuostralee plants which gave me over 60 ripe tomatoes from that one plant. I have never had a single stem plant make that many except an Indian Stripe PL plant a few years ago. A couple of others that did fantastic were Granny Cantrell and JD's Special C Tex. As to size I would say that overall Red Barn has produced the most large fruits this year.

Bill

[Fusion_power]

Bill, it is highly likely that the disease organisms in your soil have adapted to the rootstock. If so, disease and pest pressure will just get worse over time.

[b54red]

Don I hope you are wrong.

It seems that I would have seen some gradual increase in disease over the last few years but that has not been the case. The first incidence of increased disease showed in my last two beds of grafted tomatoes last year that were grafted with this seed lot. Over all the years that I have been grafting with the triple resistant root stocks I have only seen a few slight cases where some fusarium symptoms showed up once the plants were really old and had been in the garden producing for months. The reason I noticed the increase in the last two beds planted last year was that the older beds continued to make far longer and much better even with plants sometimes months older. That was something that I haven't seen. Late season fruits usually come predominately from the plants set out last with some production from the old vines. Of course some of the plants from those last two beds did great and some did fair but I did have a noticeable lose of vigor from fusarium with at least one quarter of the plants in those two beds while the other beds were losing their production slowly from natural aging and wear and tear of being in a southern garden for so long.

I can certainly live with the percentage of fusarium that is showing up with this seed lot and may have to use it next year unless they have a new release. If they do I will try to do a comparison by planting each bed half and half with plants grafted onto the two different seed lots and see what happens. I will be cutting back on my numbers due to heath reasons and just to enjoy gardening a bit more. Having this many plants is just too much for me at my age and with my health problems. Even with the much higher than usual loses this year I still have way too many tomatoes to look after this late in the season and it looks like there will be plenty of tomatoes still out in the garden to get TYLCV if it shows up late this summer as I expect since our winter was so mild. I do have one faint hope with TYLCV and that is with the new motorized sprayer I may be able to slow the spread of the whiteflies with the fogging. Regular spraying hasn't worked so well against the little buggers at least with anything I would want to use in my garden.

Bill