PNW tomato season

[velikipop]

Well it's been two weeks and still only a few ripe tomatoes and those that I have picked taste bland and mealy. There was a piece in the Vancouver Sun yesterday on the bad tomato season this year. The gist of the article is that the rain in July is responsible for the poor crop. I did a hard prune on my plants and will no longer water them in the hope that they will start to ripen before late blight oblitirates the entire crop.

I am curious how everyone else is faring and if you have any tips on how to force ripening. Also, is this the worst summer in a while. This is my 18th year here and I can't remember anything as bad. Where is global warming when you need it!!!

Alex

[akgardengirl]

I am looking for the same suggestions Alex. It has been a bummer here also. I do have tomatoes which are a decent size but green and more green.
Sue

[Andrey_BY]

Alex, grow 90% of your tomatoes only in hothouse in such extreme climate! Most of our gardeners know it is the only answer to your question. And only very early varieties are suitable to open ground growing!
The rare watering will definately help you to force the ripening! It works very well here in Zone4!

[maryinoregon]

It's been a crummy growing season here as well. You should have seen the grange exhibits at our county fair. It ended Sunday. Quite pathetic looking. Ideally for grangers, the fair here should be in about mid-September.

I do have some Aunt Gertie's Gold starting to ripen, but they are quite small. Maybe in the 4-5 ounce range. We just haven't had enough consistent warmth to get them to grow. I have lots of Sun Gold F3s. and they are pretty good. My biggest tomatoes are Green Giant PL, Grub's Mystery Green and Atkinson, which I received from a southern Tomatovillian. I thought with our usually dry and hot daytime conditions, it would do well, and it has set lots, but will they all ripen?

I haven't a clue what will happen to the other plants. I have some that aren't even knee high. Pathetic. I should just go out and pull them. I also have some volunteers that I transplanted into containers that are growing fairly well and several Prue plants. Not doing as well as last year, but OK.

I asked some local Master Gardeners about how tomatoes are doing in this area. What are people saying? Apparently it's rough all over. And my bell peppers are probably not going to even set. My hot peppers are doing great though.

After morning rain, the sun is just starting to peek out. It's too darn muggy. Supposed to get to 80F around here today. We'll see.

Looking on the bright side, I have neighbors who have more sun on their side of the fence and they gave us some Golden Bantum corn today. It was good. Yeah!

[maryinoregon]

I created a separate post for this, but decided I should mention it over here too. Green Giant PL, Grub's Mystery Green and Atkinson are doing pretty well for me. I don't know if they will ripen or not, but they have set well, have had little blossom drop, taken the weather extremes without balking and actually have put on some size. Now if they all taste good, then I'll have more to add to the "grow forever" list.

[keithaxis]

I also agree this has to be the worst NW summer in my 42 years here. ( i was born here)

I got my 1st two ripe beefsteaks in the past 3 days. German Johnson was the one. The fruit on my beefsteaks set in phases and the German Johnson plant set 6 fruit back in early july then took a few weeks off and set about 40 more fruit that will probably ripen in October if at all. But of those first 6 that set fruit I have eaten two ripe and the 3rd is on the plant waiting for me.

I don't ever remember so many non sunny days in july/august...If you like green lawns I guess we have that made easy this year...

We still have hope though, but we need a good 10 days stretch and there is no sign of that yet.

someone mentioned peppers. I have 40 pepper plants and they all are doing great as far as fruit but they will also need heat to turn that fruit ripe, at least pepper plants do not get so diseased in this moist weather...

Hey, it quit raining

[dice]

Everything is late, of course, probably the weather,
and mostly pretty mild-tasting.

Fireworks II was a suprise. This is supposed to
be a 55-day "multi-purpose" deteminate red
from Peters Seed Research. I didn't expect much
from it other than to be early and productive.
It didn't even come close to 55 days, of course
(3 weeks later than Stupice, in fact, to get the
first ripe one), but it has decent fruit set
(about 30-50% more than Odessa on the same
size plant), and the few that have ripened were
surprisingly good tasting, considering the weather.
It has a little zing to it. The fruit are fleshy with
few seeds, and the fruit shape is your typical,
slightly flattened, round sort of tomato. Size on the
biggest ones is about 4-6 oz. Not a "tomato machine"
like some determinates, but it is still a good tomato,
and I'll make room for a couple of them next year.
It had more meat, more flavor, and less seeds and gel
than I expected when I cut it open.

Super Marmande set and ripened the first good sized
beefsteak, maybe 10-12 oz. Flavor in a bad year: better
than store bought but nothing to brag about.

Aurora and Odessa: not great production, but these
too still have noticeably zippy flavor, despite the
rain, more than Gregori's Altai or Super Marmande,
for example, in a year like this one.

Galina, the yellow cherry, has excellent flavor.
This is the first year that I have grown it, so
I can't compare with how it tastes in a good
year, but it is the best-tasting tomato in the garden
so far.

A lot of oddballs from Seeds Trust: what I thought
was an unusually early Red Siberian turned out
to produce little, wrinkled looking beefsteaks about
the diameter of a silver dollar and maybe half an
inch thick. An RL yellow cherry from the Galina
seeds is ok, a little sweeter and smaller than Galina,
decently productive and early (not a waste of space,
at least). A small-fruited (bigger than a cherry, but
smaller than Stupice) indeterminate from the Odessa
seeds tastes ok, a little tart. It set fruit at exactly the
same time as the determinate Odessas, had the same
leaf color and shape, tastes a lot like Odessa, etc,
probably an ordinary bee-made cross. Two
small-apricot-sized PLs from Market Miracle seeds
of all things are very early, producing hard, pointy,
golf-ball size fruit that are a little sweeter than Stupice
and keep for a couple of weeks after looking ripe.
A dark-leaved RL from the Galina seeds has a good set
of bigger tomatoes, maybe 8 oz, but none of them have
blushed yet. The inderminate (wrong) RL Market Miracle
has bigger-than-a-baseball, round, perfect-looking fruit,
but none of them have blushed yet, either. This last
one could be a keeper if the flavor is anything like
MM itself, but it could be earlier if it wants to hang
around in Western Washington on a regular basis.

The Box Car Willies and Pink Oxheart finally set,
but if we don't get a couple more weeks of sun,
they are going to end up ripening in a bag if at all.

The Pink Oxheart flowered like a cherry tomato.
In a place with good weather, it would be a seriously
good producer. It seems to feature the early 20th
century commercial approach to leaf blight:
outgrow it. (If it was standing up straight, instead
of draped along the top of a fence at the edge
of a raised bed, it would be 10 feet tall.)

[velikipop]

Looks like we are all experiencing the same problems. I have some huge tomatoes on Ashleigh, German Head, Amish Old Red and 1884 but they have been green for weeks. My peppers have set fruit but only a few are ripening. The slugs are attacking most of them which has not occured before. Really good performers were Tennessee Cheese and Beaver Dam. My Habaneros are plentiful but they will definately need more warmth.

The good news is I have lots of Kale, Beans, Squash, Onions and Cucumbers My garlic did great this year. I was really lucky because many growers had crop failure do to the wet winter and one had White Rot!!

Andrey, thanks for the tip. I do grow most of my tomatoes in a cloche, which is a basic structure covered with greenhouse plastic. Neverthless, even under cover they do not get enough heat and sunlight and some have foliar disease. The nights are really cool now and we get lots of fog which does not help.

Alex

[Tania]

yes, it is not a good summer - things are growing too slow, and tomatoes are about 2-3 weeks behind comparing with last year.

Despite that, I am picking about 1-3 lb tomatoes every day, mostly Sungold F1 (the most reliable cherry, produces well even in bad weather), and some large fruited varieties started to ripen - Joe's, Orlinoe Serdtse, Dynnye, Dominick's Paste, Giant Pink Belgium. My favorites so far have been Wisconsin 55 and Heart's Delite (not heart) - luscious juicy red medium size beefsteaks, real tomato flavor with some sweetness, quite productive plants.

The largest fruit so far has been Orlinoe Serdtse - 660 g (~23 oz), huge triple heart pink fruit on a very compact plant, which was quite impressive.

Please note that all the tomato plants that are producing now were set out into greenhouses in mid April; after mid-June I rolled the plastic walls up so they've stayed entirely open since then. The tomato plants growing outside are still small - same as with Mary's, I am not sure why this happened this year (maybe all nitrogen was washed out from the open beds during this spring/wet summer?? or maybe the growth was suppressed in spring/early summer due to the cold/wet weather and they never quite recovered since then? In the greenhouses the plants had a very good start in spring and grew quickly...). We eat about 3 lb of tomatoes every day now (this is from 220 tomato plants, so it is not much!), it is enough to feed my family.

Usually by this time we haul pounds of cucumbers from the garden every day. This time around I am lucky to find 2-3 cukes, and not every day.

Zucchinis just started to produce - way too late!

Potato crop was very disappointing this year - some varieties hardly produced enough seed potatoes. The reason being that the late blight killed the plants in June/early July.

Peppers and melons are doing well, but they are all in greenhouses and I don't even open the gheenhouses these days as it has been quite cool here in the last couple of weeks. I am hoping to see more sunshine before the season ends, so we can get a few ripe melons and watermelons

On the opposite, lettuce grows really well since it loves the cool weather; my 4th crops of arugula shows 2nd set of true leaves, yumm!

It has been a wierd summer, for sure - for one thing, the later blight hit us very early (June/early July) and ruined quite a few tomato fruits and lots of tomato foliage, and killed all my potato plants. However, despite the cool weather we had recently, the late blight has gone away, which I never saw happening before - usually once it hits, it kills tomato plants quite quickly. This summer it looks like all the affected foliage simply dried out on the plant, and once I stripped it out, the plants bounced back to life.

Let's hope we get extended summer in September! We need more tomatoes!

[Tarmar]

I hate to say it but it's nice to know that I am not alone in having such a lackluster harvest. First of all, I started my garden late this year. So I wasn't expecting much. The plants aren't as big as they were last year and there aren't as many fruits on them. However, I think because of the weather, we aren't as far behind as we might be otherwise!

I have so far picked a few Purple Cherokee, a German Lunchbox, some Siletz and Subarctic. I really don't think they are as flavorful as they were last year. But, I am thankful for what we are getting.

We grew peppers and eggplants in a broken black plastic pony watering tub. I think it is the only reason why we have been eating peppers and eggplant! We are picking them young but they still taste great! They are putting on a lot more fruit than I thought they would considering the lateness of getting them started and the coolness of the season.

Basically everything we eat nowadays incorporates zucchini, peppers, eggplant, tomato, onion, garlic and herbs from the garden. I enjoy the fresh food and it keeps me out of the supermarket. I doubt I will end up with enough to put up and hold us over the winter. Guess we better get started on that cold frame!

Thanks, everyone for sharing your PNW garden stories with me!

Tarmar

[Jonathan_E]

Hi all,

I posted this in another thread but it occurred to me after I did that I should have posted it here. I grew up in Bellingham (Washington, not Bellingham, Massachusetts), although I now live in Boston. Some years we had tons of wonderful ripe tomatoes and some years we had nothing. I don't know what varieties my dad grew.

I was just out in Washington for three weeks, driving around Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula. I have been scouting for a potential retirement place and of course, one of the criteria has been whether tomatoes will grow where I land. As I'm sure you know, the amount of rain and sunshine over the average year around Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula is highly variable, because of the rain shadow effect of the Olympic Mountains. Seattle gets 38 inches of rain a year, Port Townsend gets only 19, Sequim gets 16, Bremerton (which is only an hour's drive from Sequim) gets 52, Concrete gets 68, Olympia gets 54, Shelton gets 66, Bellingham gets 36, Orcas Island (Olga) gets 26, Lopez Island gets 19, Whidbey Island (Coupeville) gets 21. The ocean coast is gorgeous, but I wonder whether tomatoes would ripen there at all: Long Beach gets 81 inches of rain, Clearwater gets 117, etc.

Any advice?

Best regards,

Jonathan

[dice]

The old Sunset Western Garden book's heat zones
showed a relative banana belt that stretched from
east of Astoria along the Columbia basin to
about Lewiston, Idaho. It wasn't very wide, maybe
80 miles each side of the river, but it did include Portland.

In reality, despite the higher yearly average temperatures,
the wind blows like a banshee through there until that
bend just west of Portland and Vancouver (or until it
gets to Mt. Hood if you are a little south of the river),
and out on the coast (Astoria) it is cloudy and rainy
more than most places farther inland.

(I remember a lot of Augusts like this at the mouth
of the Columbia during the late summer salmon run.)

Still, there is a lot of forest down there both sides of
the Cascases, and you might find a place with a big
stand of trees to the east for a windbreak that allows
you to take advantage of the warmth. (Just make sure
the trees won't reach the buildings if they topple in
a high wind.)

Sequim has more clear days than the Columbia
basin west of Bonneville Dam, but if I recall
correctly not more btus per year. Real estate
up in that valley tends to be a bit pricy.

Note: They still have a salmon run up in the Strait,
but the season is really short these days. Nice silvers,
not so many big chinook as you probably remember,
and the occasional big halibut (probably ling cod
and sea bass, too, though no one particularly mentions
it).

[velikipop]

Jonothan,

Bellingham is a charming small city. If I had a choice where to retire and grow tomatoes in the Puget sound area I would seriously consider one of the San Juan islands. Because they are in the rain shadow their climate resembles the meditteranean. A bit of research might reveal which is the sunniest and warmest. Two weekends ago I was up on BC's sunshine coast and the weather was cloudy with showers, however out in the Strait of Georgia little Savry island was basking in sunshine.

You will certainly face some challenges growing tomatoes but with the exception of really weird years such as this one I don't think you will have a problem getting a good crop. Last year was great who knows what next year will be like? I think that we all have to accept that there will be bad years once in a while.

Good Luck.

Alex

[Tania]

Originally Posted by velikipop

You will certainly face some challenges growing tomatoes but with the exception of really weird years such as this one I don't think you will have a problem getting a good crop. Last year was great who knows what next year will be like? I think that we all have to accept that there will be bad years once in a while.

Good Luck.

Alex

Completely agree with Alex (although in the bad years like this sometimes I wish I lived someplace else... just kidding . It is absolutely beatiful here!). Next year should be wonderful for tomato growing.

[Tania]

...taken yesterday. More pictures are available at http://t-garden.homeip.net/2007/2007-08-22/