2021 Alameda, CA Container Garden

[garyc1234]

Purple Haze is the next tomato up for review. This is a nice looking dark tomato. The catfacing isn't too bad as you can see from the second picture. Unfortunately, the taste was ordinary. As you can tell, there really hasn't been any tomato that I've tried that has wowed me. In fact, after all of these taste tests, I think I'm going to upgrade the taste of the Sweet Million cherry tomato to 4. That's basically the only tomato so far that I've like snacking on. I've started making BLT's, and all of these tomatoes are just fine there.

Taste: 3/5
Productivity: 3/5

I don't think I'm going to re-grow this tomato unless later tomatoes have better taste. There are a lot of darker tomatoes that have a better reputation such as Cherokee Purple or Black Krim.

[garyc1234]

Finally, for this round of tasting, here is Bear Creek. I have to say that this tomato is beautiful and huge. I seriously can just stare at how great this tomato looks and the size of it. The taste is okay and the productivity isn't great. However, these are the types of tomatoes that you show your neighbors, so that you can brag about why you are growing tomatoes.

Taste: 3.5/5
Productivity: 3/5

I think I'll grow this one next year, just to have an enormous, beautiful looking tomato. Not really a great reason, but good enough for me.

[garyc1234]

For a productivity summary of all of my plants, Better Boy, Black and Brown Boar, and Sweet Million have been the best so far. All of these plants have a large number of tomatoes where basically every day, I can pick tomatoes from some of these plants. Moreton has been doing well also even though I haven't reviewed it yet. Moreton looks similar to Better Boy, and since I pick the tomatoes when they're not fully ripe, I'm often not sure which tomatoes are Moreton when it's tasting time. I'll try to separate them out more in the future.

For duds, I think Brandywine and Neves Azorean Red are in this category. I'm not sure if I've picked a single tomato from these plants yet. Ramapo and GGWT haven't been great either.

The rest are in the middle, but not necessarily that productive (e.g., around 5-10 tomatoes per plant).

[garyc1234]

I've been slow to update this thread even though I've been regularly taking pictures and continuing my taste tests.

I usually pick tomatoes twice a week, and usually get a 1-2 pot fulls every time. More than enough for my family. Here's a picture from Sept 10th of all of the tomatoes that had accumulated. Even now, I usually have about 2-3 pots always full of tomatoes. Now that it is getting colder, the number of tomatoes is decreasing so I expect to wrap things up by mid to end of October at the latest.

[garyc1234]

Here are photos from Sept 17th that show the current state of the garden. As you can see, multiple plants are dying off, and the leaves of many have withered. Still, there are a bunch of tomatoes slowly ripening.

[GreenThumbGal_07]

You pulled in a great harvest Gary!