What's ripe in PNW (late July-early Aug update)

[pdxwindjammer]

I am reviving this thread as I get ready to choose the varieties I will plant this year.

For those of you in the NW, I would love an update on your favorites that were grown in ground without a green house.

Surprisingly enough, I ended up having a good year for tomatoes. Others in my community garden of 24 plots had very poor year and everyone kept asking me how I was getting so many ripe tomatoes! Maybe it was the tender care from seedling to planting or maybe that I fertilized with my worm castings and foliar fed with fish emulsion. I really don't know.

The varieties that did well for me last year were Aunt Ruby's German Green, Stupice, Orlov Yellow, Black Krim, Paul Robison, Thessaloniki, Donskoi, Black Cherry, Brown Berry Cherry and Donskoi.

The plant that I loved the most lost it's tag somewhere along the line. It was a beautiful plant that put out 100's of golf ball sized perfectly round fruit. Wish I knew what it was! I did save seeds for myself so I can grow it again but don't know what it is, unfortunately. It is so prolific and the fruit was tasty. I roasted most of these on trays drizzled in a little olive oil with oregano and basil. Simply delicious!

And for those of you who are in the Portland area, I am hosting a seed exchange/Intro to vermicomposting in Beaverton this Sunday, Jan. 15th. at 5:00. PM me if you are interested and I will send you the info.

[MikeT_PDX]

Tamara,
Everything was 3+ weeks late last year, so it's hard to draw many conclusions, esp. with new varieties I trialed. Here's my list of "keepers" and "discards" from 2010:

Keepers:
-Gregori's Altai was very productive and the earliest ripening variety for me. No BER and a modest amount of catfacing.
-Dora produced a medium yield of large fruit. Good flavor; I'll grow it again.
-Paul Robeson was a HUGE plant with great productivity and good flavor.
-Donskoi was another huge plant. Medium yield of large, heart-shaped fruit. Keeper for sure.
-Cuostralee: Big plant; medium load of huge fruit. No BER or catfacing. I was looking for a variety with very large fruit.....this one did much better for me than Omar's Lebanese.
-Brandywine Red (RL): Excellent all the way around. Healthy plant; very productive; great taste; no disease issues. May be my new favorite.
-Thessaloniki: Huge plant; very productive. This one always does well for me.
-Sandal Moldovan: Average load of fruit. No BER; some mild catfacing. I'll grow it again.
-Black Krim: As always it was very good. Average productivity but outstanding flavor. No BER but a little mild catfacing.

Discards:
-Kellogg's Breakfast: Late, as always. Low yield but good flavor. I'm giving up on it....not productive for me and very late in our climate.
-Box Car Willie: Big plant; average productivity. No problems but it didn't stand out.
-Pruden's Purple: Same as Box Car Willie.
-Sierra Leone: Grew it as a novelty. Huge plant with moderate load of big, ribbed fruit. It was very late....not a good match for our climate.
-Omar's Lebanese: Smaller than average plant with average load of fruit. I grew it for the very large fruit...they weren't either large or especially flavorful. May have been due to the lousy weather but I had much better luck with Cuostralee.
-Great White: Productive and the fruit were beautiful, but tasted bland.
-Earl of Edgecombe: Medium sized plant with average productivity. I expected something special.....it was ok but very ordinary.
-Green Zebra: I've grown it several times but never had great luck with it. Some love the flavor; I don't.

[pdxwindjammer]

Hey, thanks a lot Mike! I now have a couple of others to add to my grow list!

I had not heard of the Cuostralee so I am going to put that on my list of "wants."

I think you may have gotten the Sierra Leone from me that I got from Tatiana as a freebie? Mine had a lot of fruit but only a few got ripe. With that name I didn't have high hopes that it would do well in our climate.

Hopefully this will be a better year for us in the PNW.

[dice]

Most everything took a beating in last year's summer weather
up here. A couple of cultivars stood out:

Bloody Butcher - its usual steady eddie self. Started earlier
than most and produced through the summer. Small fruit.

Moravsky Div - Stupice type plant, round fruit like Bloody
Butcher, excellent flavor, kept producing whatever
the weather. Very early.

Csikös Bötermö - another saladette, a little taller plant than
the Stupice-Kimberly-Kotlas-Bloody Butcher types; took a week
or two longer to start producing than one expects from any
of those, but by the first of September it had sweet, mild,
red-yellow striped fruit all through it.

Super Marmande - ordinary flavor (better than Marmande at
our temperatures, though), but this one was almost the only
plant with bigger than saladette fruit to have what I would think
of as a normal harvest, even if a couple of weeks later than
normal due to lack of BTUs. A tough guy in a cold, rainy summer.

Coastal Pride Red - this one was way late for our summers,
and it had thick skin best removed before eating, but it did
produce a lot of round, red, blemish-free tomatoes, which
several better known, usually productive cultivars did not.
Big plant for a determinate.

The few others with satisfactory production were F2, F3, F4
plants from custom crosses and chance crosses, not
necessarily reproducible in the next generation. (I was
probably eating more than 50% fruit that I will never see
the exact genetic duplicate of again.)

Good thing that I had a lot of plants. It made the "only 3 of
these, 4 of those, 1 of this to eat and 1 other to save seeds
from," and so on tolerable.

Despite the miserable year over all, I was lucky in one way:
out of the several crosses that I grew out, I only had two that
made no progress toward a stable OP. One F2 was "all spitters",
and one F4 had plants that were at best "good enough to eat
but not good enough to save seeds from".