Planting early varieties late!

Originally Posted by darwinslair

have there been any long-storage tomatoes bred to be short season? That might be nice, having a tomato that sets its fruit in september but not before. The storage ones are nice to be eating in December, but just dont have the taste of the others, so kind of a waste to have them producing in july and august.

Tom

The Goliath Bush tomato variety worked pretty much that way for me. Planted in the heat of summer, they didn't start blooming and setting fruit until late August/early September. The fruit grew well, but was very, very slow to ripen as the days cooled and the daylight hours became shorter. We did harvest a lot of late fall vine ripened fruit, but probably fifty percent of the fruit was picked green the day before our first frost. I filled a five gallon bucket with green fruit and stuck it in a cool, dark place in my shop. When we needed a fresh tomato, I would dig through the bucket selecting the ripest to eat. We ate them into January. One odd thing about the fall fruit was the fact that they retained an almost white color. They never developed the typical green color before ripening. We also lost very few fruit to rot before ripening. They also remained very hard until they ripened. They tasted great when ripe.

After the first frost killed the vines, I pulled the vines with many tiny tomatoes still attached and threw them on my compost pile. I noticed earlier this month that many of the tiny fruit still attached to the dead plants on the compost pile had ripened. We had a couple of really hard freezes earlier this month that finally put them to rest.

Ted