2020: Tomato HOA Rehab journal

[Vespertino]

I haven't posted in a few years (since 2015!!!). My free time dwindled down to nothing, but still grew tomatoes every year (just no time to post about it!). While I won't bore you all with 2016-2019 I'll provide the cliff notes: I bought my tomato plants from gardening centers those years, and frankly I can't ever do that again. I didn't have a "bad" year with store bought plants, but starting my own from seed is worlds better in vigor, flavor and yield.

My other photo threads in this topic are:
Slicker Texas Terrace Tomatoes (when I lived in an apartment and tried growing tomatoes on my little terrace in containers)

Broken Knee Tomatoes (I had just bought a house and promptly broke my knee, leaving me to improvise and rely on famlly to help me plant out that year). This is also when I discovered how poor my soil was!

2015 HOA Rehab journal (Efforts to rehab my crappy HOA soil into something better after my knee recovery!)


In years past I often griped about my horrible HOA soil (a flimsy top layer of black soil over tons of clay). So it's time to get back on the bandwagon. Every year I've diligently amended the soil with all sorts of goodies (most importantly: expanded shale to break up that gosh darnoodley clay) and each year was better than the last.

This year I was lucky and had a very good spring in terms on steady weather that didn't bounce too much, and after 6 years of working the soil So far I've had my best year yet!

2020 Grow list- tomatoes:
Sungold (returning)
Santiam Orange (new)
Chocolate Sprinkles (returning)
Raspberry Mochi (new)
Piennollo Del Vesuvio (returning)
Green Doctors (returning)
Green Zebra Cherry (returning)
Firefly (new)
Green Tiger (returning)
Zebarita (new)
KBX (returning)
Plan #9 from outer space (new)
Ukrainka (new)
Tsindao (returning)
Caspian Pink (returning)


I also have some peppers in the mix this year:

Numex Orange
Scotch Orange
Alexander
Paradicsom Alaku
Cajun Belle


And some Eggplants:
Shoku
Edirne


And persian cukes!!! but I planted those late. We'll see how they do.



I tried some japanese greens from seed but we had a few deluges of rain that washed them out and I wasn't able to save them. Now it's too hot to try again. Better luck next year.



Epsoma tomato tone is my dry plant food of choice, if I use any liquids it's fox farm grow big (usually when they are started indoors under the grow lights) and fox farm tiger bloom. I also like to use a touch of cal-mag now and then. All of my plants get a nice handful of Epsoma along with bone meal and epsom salt when they go into the ground.



Pic from my plant-out date:




Of the newcomers, Ukrainka & Plan #9 from Outer Space really performed miles above the rest. I am going to be replacing Caspian pink with Ukrainka, and Tsindao with Plan #9. Caspian and Tsindao are very flavorful tomatoes, but low producers in my yard. Ukrainia tasted better than the caspians and beat the snot out of the plant on production alone. Plan #9 was so prolific for a beesteak, and a very good tasting one too, that Tsindao can no longer complete.



Zebarita produced OK but didn't taste very good.
Green Tiger had major splitting problems with the rain, where I loosing all of them.
Santiam Orange was a nice plant, but I tried to to see how well it would stand up to sungold. It didn't perform poorly but Sungold still had it beat in terms of production & flavor.

Firefly was sweet and a good producer but the flavor was missing, it didn't have much character.