growing tomatoes in the PNW

[tache]

I know there are a lot of us here and we have our own joys and sorrows. Here is my tentative list. I would appreciate advice from anyone anywhere. (within reason)
First group; must have
Earl's Faux
Paul Robeson
Marianne's Peace
Black Cherry
Black Prince
Green Zebra
Stupice
Sun Gold
Sweet 100
Second group; for sure... maybe
Cherokee Green
Mong
Cuostralee
Stump of the World
Kimberly
That's all I can think of now. It's a start.

[dice]

Black Prince goes down fast to some kind of blight here
once it gets it (first of August usually).

Black Cherry is not verticillium wilt tolerant. Last year it
did not kill the whole plant, but it got most of it (a couple
of uninfected branches grew back and supplied a few fruit).
That is possibly true of others on your list, too.

Some of those look rather late (Marianna's Peace, Cuostralee,
Stump of the World, maybe Cherokee Green and Green Zebra,
too), but if you prune to 1-3 stems and top them first of
September, you will probably get some fruit. That is what I
did with Earl's Faux last year.

[Tania]

Kimberly and Stupice perform wonderfully here. Paul Robeson is great also.
Cuostralee (and I suspect the same for Marianna's and Stump of the World) is quite late, and you may be risking getting into the heavy rain season before any fruits ripen on it.

Black Cherry is early and productive here. Sungold is even better but it splits so badly, I switched to SunSugar F1 in the last 2 years, and I think it is better (and it is a smaller plant).

I had variable success with Sweet 100 hybrid - my seeds were from McKenzie and the plants were not the same, only the first year (2003) I remember it being very tasty. Switched to Sweet Million F1, and I liked it better.

Do not remember much about Black Prince disease tolerance, but I remember that Chernomor Regular Leaf (seeds from Andrey 2005) was the only survivor of late blight in the nasty summer of 2005.

My $0.02
Tania

[tache]

Thanks for your input Dice. I'm surprised to hear that about Black Prince. It's been a mainstay for me for several years so I'll stick with it until it fails and then I'll blame you. Black Cherry was pretty good last year ( the only time I've had it) but anything that produced anything last year has my groveling gratitude.

I think that both you and Tania are right about nice big slicing late ones. It just doesn't happen here. So I will probably skip Coustralee,Stump and Marriane's Peace. But I will definitely use you pruning method on the ones I do have.

Tania, sweet 100 is a puzzle. It is so prone to cracking. I
switched to sweet 1000. The last couple of years I went back to sweet 100. The taste is a little better and the skin isn't so tough. (which might explain the difference in splitting} any way they are both so productive that I can afford to lose many.

I haven't had Kimberly before so I'll look forward to that. Stupice has more than earned a place forever.

Dice, I am surprised that you have had trouble with Green Zebra. It has always done well for me and my husband really likes it.

We are at the very southern end of the Willamette valley and are being promised a very dry summer so we just keep our fingers crossed.

[hasshoes]

Stupid question. . . what makes growing in the PNW difficult. . . is it similar to New England?

What does "topping" a plant mean. . . cutting off the top part?

I was thinking about trying pruning this year because previously when my plants were finally getting fruit, they were still putting a lot of energy into growing foliage with only a few weeks left in the season.

[pbud]

Cool weather is what makes it difficult. Same here for me in coastal ca. My backyard summer temps rarely crack 80 with lots of fog. That makes it tough to grow the larger tomatoes that ripen late and need heat to develop top notch flavors. 30 miles inland where I work I also grow tomatoes and it's regularly 20-30 degrees warmer there. Amazing how much difference this makes for a tomato. One medium/large one that seems to do well in both environments is Cherokee Green. I've also had good luck with Paul Robeson & Black Krim. But the difference between, say German Red Strawberry or Marianna's Peace grown in those two climates is tremendous.

[dice]

Dice, I am surprised that you have had trouble with Green Zebra. It has always done well for me and my husband really likes it.

I have not actually grown it. I was just looking at that "75 days"
in a lot of listings and having doubts. (I have had some
"75 DTM" cultivars that did not ripen any fruit until after the
fall rains started, although those were not pruned at all.)

We are at the very southern end of the Willamette valley and are being promised a very dry summer so we just keep our fingers crossed.

That makes a lot of difference for Black Prince, in particular.
It is usually fine here until we get a late summer rain, and then
it goes downhill faster than any other cultivar in the garden.
The verticillium wilt in the soil is not necessarily a problem
throughout a garden, even if some plants are disabled by it,
but we do get it up here, and cold, wet weather is ideal for
verticillium growth. Where it is warm and dry it usually dies
back in early summer and may not be a problem.

Oregon has a few different climates. East of the Cascades, the
later cultivars are probably ok, because they set fruit earlier
in the year in the warmer temperatures. The same goes for that
plateau up in the Siskiyous between the Applegate River and
I-5, just east of the Pacific Crest. And a greenhouse changes
everything, of course. My comments were directed toward what
happens growing outside between the Cascades and the Pacific
Ocean.

What does "topping" a plant mean. . . cutting off the top part?

Yes, cutting off the growing tip of the main stem or a large
branch. It usually causes more nutrients to go to developing
and ripening fruit that have already set while the plant is
developing some new growing tips from side shoots below
that point.

I was thinking about trying pruning this year because
previously when my plants were finally getting fruit, they were
still putting a lot of energy into growing foliage with only a few
weeks left in the season.

With Earl's Faux, it looked kind of sparse to me when pruned
down to 3 stems, and I was worried about sunscald if the weather
should suddenly turn hot and sunny (that happens up here).
I was also concerned about the plant having enough foliage
to still produce plenty of nutrients for the developing fruit.
So about the first of July I stopped completely pruning
out side shoots and switched to "Missouri pruning", where
I would let a side shoot grow a couple of leaves and then pinch
the growing tip off of it, instead of pinching it out when it first
appeared in the crotch of a leaf.

It was more work, but the famous flavor was there for the fruit
harvested in warm weather in August, and it was still better
than most other cultivars even when the weather cooled off
in September and the flavor had diminished some.

Smaller plants like Stupice and Kimberly, semi-determinates
in general, and determinates I do not prune unless they were
planted too close together and are impinging heavily on each
other's space.

Pruning is a lot of extra maintenance, but besides earlier fruit
set, it also has the advantage of better air circulation through
the plants, which reduces foliage disease, because the leaves
dry out faster after a rain. It is also easier to see and remove
leaves that do become diseased on a pruned plant.

Cherokee Green I am not certain about. Several people have
noted that Cherokee Purple seems to set fruit in cool weather
better than they expected. I do not know yet whether Cherokee
Chocolate and Cherokee Green preserve that trait.

French Pruning:
http://www.tomodori.com/3culture/taill_sur_2-tiges.htm
(Text is in French, but the pictures are self-explanatory.)

This page has an illustration of simple vs Missouri pruning:
http://www.taunton.com/finegardening...-tomatoes.aspx

This document takes an "ideal number of fruit per plant"
approach to pruning:
http://www.avrdc.org/pdf/TomPrune.pdf

[hasshoes]

Thanks dice, as always you are a wealth of knowledge!

[DoubleJ]

I'm not sure I am understanding all of this. I plant out May 1st. Given even a 90 DTM variety, that should equate to fruit in August. There is still at least one month, possibly 2 months of good weather before the rains come. Am I missing something?

[Tania]

DoubleJ,

In our PNW climate, 80-90 DTM may mean anything within the 90-120 DTM range.
The plant may be ready to set fruit, but the spring/early summer weather may not be favorable, i.e. night temperatures may still be too low, or it may rain non-stop for 20+ days and may not be enough sunshine early in the season. As a result the fruit setting and maturity may be delayed.

I have observed tremendous difference in DTM data when we had good springs (i.e., in 2004, 2006). Lots of 'late season' varieties matured earlier (~70 days) and produced a lot of tomatoes. I hope 2009 will be a better year for all of us PNWers...

Tania

[dice]

Tania is right, temperature changes the days to maturity a lot.

Someone in a reasonably good climate for growing tomatoes
did an experiment with 3 different indeterminate cultivers,
growing side-by-side in the same soil and sunlight. One had
the first cluster set a foot above the ground, on another the
first cluster set at 2-1/2 feet above the ground, and on the last
one the first cluster set at about 4 feet above the ground.
All of the plants were the same height.

The difference was when the day and night temperatures
reached the minimum at which each cultivar would set
fruit. The first one was particularly cold tolerant and would
set fruit in cool temperatures, when the plant was quite a
bit smaller. The second one needed warmer temperatures for
fruit set, and the last one needed more or less perfect weather
to set fruit. If you have a cultivar where the minimum
temperature for fruit set does not occur in your area until
mid-July or August, and it then takes more than a month from
fruit set to ripe fruit (like for big-fruited tomatoes), you might
as well toss advertised DTM for that cultivar out the window.
A cultivar might be 80 days unpruned in Indiana, Kentucky, or
Tennessee, but the same cultivar may be 120 days at our typical
summer day and night temperatures in the Pacific Northwest.

In 2007 I had a quite large Persimmon seedling that I
transplanted around the first of May. It set its first fruit in
a spell of sunny weather around the first of June. The weather
then turned cool and rainy and stayed that way on and off
until mid-August, when that plant set its second and third
fruits (one of which rotted in the fall rains that started the first
of September that year and kept it up for most of that month).

Maybe the best-looking tomato plant in the garden all summer,
2 fruits.

The weather won't be that bad every summer, but "mid-season"
might as well be "late-season" up here, and "late season"
is more often than not like my 2007 Persimmon plant.

[montanamato]

I grew Persimmon for two consecutive years and gave up too...I think it may have set a fruit the 2nd year , but not the first...
Does not like hot, dry either....

Jeanne

[tache]

Thank you so much,Dice. You have the right name. Every year is a gamble. You've given us so much useful information. Eventho we have different miniclimates we share the same cool (not to say cold)nights. That makes it a lovely place to live but not the easiest place to grow Earl's Faux. But we can and it is always worth the effort.


What I have to do is forget that last year even existed so I don't keep referring back to it.

Cherokee Green and Kimberly have moved up to the "must have" column. This is fn and makes think that spring might actually really come.

[dice]

Someone grew Persimmon up here in a greenhouse maybe
20 miles away one year, out on Vashon Island. They had this
picture of a row of Persimmon plants in September with 10
or more big, ripe, beautiful fruit on each plant that was
published in some local publication.

Growing them outdoors is a whole different scene.

[jwr6404]

Tache
I agree with Dice on the Black Prince. In fact I have never had any luck with Black varieties at all. Having said that I will be growing Black from Tula for the first time this year. You might want to consider Cherokee Chocolate it has always done well for me,tastes good and is very productive. I have some seeds for the Cherokee Chocolate I could share with you. Tania & Dice thanks for your input I will be scratching a couple from my seed starting,Tomorrow,based on your comments. I don't want anymore 2008s.