Effect of Sunshine on Ripening & Flavor

[greggf]

I went to NOAA and printed out their "Ranking of Cities Based On % Annual Possible Sunshine."

You'll be glad to know that the city in the U.S. with the most days of sunshine is Yuma, AZ, followed by Redding, CA and Las Vegas.

Slightly below midway down the list are Boston and New York/Central Park, with 58% ave. % poss. sunshine.

Farther down, at 54% and 53% respectively, are Chicago and Albany.

And here are some cities with less than 50% poss. sunshine days, making them the cloudiest, most overcast cities in the U.S.:

Rochester, NY
Binghamton, NY
Burlington, VT
Buffalo, NY
Portland, OR
Syracuse, NY
Pittsburgh, PA
and, dead cloudiest, Seattle

Now, what are the ramifications of this for tomato growing? How important is sunshine - as opposed to growing season length, temperature, and so on - to proper fruit ripening and good flavor development? How nasty are lots of overcast days in terms of tomatoes?

All of my TV stations come from Syracuse, so you can see my interest in this subject.

By the way, there seems to be a nice broad band of cities in the midwest with not-too-much sun and not-too-little sun: Iowa, Nebraska, Indiana, southern Ohio. I assume it's not a coincidence that that's where good tomatoes come from.

I'm also not surprised that that's where Earl lives, hehhehheh.

=gregg=

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/...ccd/pctpos.txt