The last hurrah for the tomatoes??

[Redbaron]

Originally Posted by RobinB

On a strange note, I found my first hornworm... YESTERDAY! He can eat all he wants now. He'll be dead tonight I'd imagine. Weird.

Yes it was strange year for hornworms here too. I got 3 or 4 all year. Last year had hundreds.

[Sen831]

Here on the Eastern Shore we have a few weeks yet to killing frost, and I'll get a few more small tomatoes yet. One interesting detail: in the last couple of days my Maravilha dos Mercados (Marvel of the Market) has celebrated ripening a "final" flush of tomatoes by suddenly putting out a bunch of new branches with lots of flowers. Futile, of course, but the plant suddenly looks so healthy that it will be a shame to euthanize it. One suspects that this variety, like other European-style tomatoes, would manage well in a heated greenhouse that extended the season.

[deerhunter]

got 1 more sitting on the windowsill. gardens all tilled and the winter rye is planted. wasn't a bad year.

[gixxerific]

Just pulled my last remaining plants. I would have to say Kelopatra was the over all champion.

Oh well now I can spend more time on the winter dwarfs now.

My tomatoes will be finished in a couple of weeks. Thats when the normal killer frost arrives. Summer squash will be about the same, but I'm still harvesting a lot of it right now. Turnips and Napa cabbage are going like gangbusters. I also have a lot of nice fall lettuce which will die back some with the first freeze and start growing again in the spring. Fall planted onions are doing great. Fall planted garlic is doing well and will be ready for harvest in mid spring of next year. For some reason, my carrots are not doing so well. They just sit there without growing any. I'm lookig forward to taking a couple of months off and then planting my tomato seeds indoors and onion seedlings outside in January.

Ted

[Deborah]

Ted, I didn't know lettuce comes back in spring. Or do you mean it scatters seeds and those come up?

Deborah,

I plant three or four varieties of leaf lettuce late in the fall. If we have really cold weather it may kill it. Most years it simply freezes the outer leaves and when the weather starts warming in spring, the lettuce comes back to life and grows until it bolts in the heat. I seeded my Romaine a few weeks ago and it has been to warm for it to germinate. It will germinate in the spring with no attention from me.

Ted

[gixxerific]

dont try this with swiss chard unless you want tons coming up.

Originally Posted by gixxerific

dont try this with swiss chard unless you want tons coming up.

Yea Dono, I have Swiss Chard growing in three or four places that I can't remember planting. I just let it keep growing. It gets huge and it's nice to have if I simply want some greens to cook or decorate with. I think some of those mixed lettuce green seed mixes come with Swiss Chard included. The lettuce dies in the heat and the chard just keeps growing. I pulled one plant last summer that was shading some lettuce out and the root ball probably weighed twenty pounds.

Ted

[b54red]

All of my tomatoes and peppers bit the dust last night due to a good hard freeze. They made it through the first freeze which got down to 27 a few weeks ago but last night it was below freezing by midnight and stayed there til around 8 am this morning. It looks like someone poured boiling water over my plants during the night. Looks like we will have hundreds of green tomatoes to throw away. My wife picked a few of the green tomatoes that were really large and a pile of bell peppers yesterday. We aren't fans of fried green tomatoes and so we only kept a few to try and ripen them indoors. With the blushing ones picked the last few weeks we will still have fresh tomatoes into the new year.

I dread the cleanup and trying to get all of those large vines off of the trellis and taking the trellis down too. It is also sad having to pickup all those frozen green tomatoes that just needed a few more weeks. I had a fairly good fall tomato production but it would have been better if we hadn't lost so many to Late Blight a few months ago. Tomatoes ripened slower this fall than most years due to some really cool nights but peppers did better than usual.

[Elliot]

I dread the cleanup and trying to get all of those large vines off of the trellis and taking the trellis down too. It is also sad having to pickup all those frozen green tomatoes that just needed a few more weeks. I had a fairly good fall tomato production but it would have been better if we hadn't lost so many to Late Blight a few months ago. Tomatoes ripened slower this fall than most years due to some really cool nights but peppers did better than usual.[/QUOTE]


What we do with green tomatoes is pickle them and we have for the entire winter. Its not hard to do this. We take old bottles of apples sauce etc and use them and we have lots of great tasting picked tomatoes virtually all year. If you need the recipe let me know.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

[Garf]

Our last cold front took us down to 45*. Actual temps are usually a couple of degrees lower, but no threat yet. Miami rarely freezes.

[eatmoreyeah]

We've had a very warm fall, which was great for my fall maters. I planted out 20 on the 3rd of September. We've only had one frost which did some damage to the new growth. In just the last 10 days I've picked over 120 lbs. It was a nice treat to give friends and family fresh tomatoes and salsa/tomato sauce when they were in town for the holidays. I've still got a good majority of fruit still on the vine. Kinda strange because I started a flat of seeds for spring last week and another one today. Brandywine OTV, Paul Robeson and German Johson seem to really enjoy the cooler weather. I'm really impressed with BW OTV in regards to flavor, production and resistance to disease. It is one of the better tasting reds Ive had in a lomg time. Paul Robeson is now one of the better tasting purple/blacks for me. Firm, with great texture and holds well while not being mealy or mushy.

I planted my flats of thirty six varieties yesterday while a few from this years garden are still ripening in the window sill. The circle continues. I can't start cleaning my garden until the snow melts and the beds dry out a little. I will be making a lot of changes in my garden structure next year. I want to try using some concrete reinforcing panels for tomato trellis next year instead of the semi Florida weave with heavy nylon string. I'm thinking of using those plastic clips used in green houses to attach the vines to the trellis instead of string ties.

Ted