2020: Tomato HOA Rehab journal

[Vespertino]

I haven't posted in a few years (since 2015!!!). My free time dwindled down to nothing, but still grew tomatoes every year (just no time to post about it!). While I won't bore you all with 2016-2019 I'll provide the cliff notes: I bought my tomato plants from gardening centers those years, and frankly I can't ever do that again. I didn't have a "bad" year with store bought plants, but starting my own from seed is worlds better in vigor, flavor and yield.

My other photo threads in this topic are:
Slicker Texas Terrace Tomatoes (when I lived in an apartment and tried growing tomatoes on my little terrace in containers)

Broken Knee Tomatoes (I had just bought a house and promptly broke my knee, leaving me to improvise and rely on famlly to help me plant out that year). This is also when I discovered how poor my soil was!

2015 HOA Rehab journal (Efforts to rehab my crappy HOA soil into something better after my knee recovery!)


In years past I often griped about my horrible HOA soil (a flimsy top layer of black soil over tons of clay). So it's time to get back on the bandwagon. Every year I've diligently amended the soil with all sorts of goodies (most importantly: expanded shale to break up that gosh darnoodley clay) and each year was better than the last.

This year I was lucky and had a very good spring in terms on steady weather that didn't bounce too much, and after 6 years of working the soil So far I've had my best year yet!

2020 Grow list- tomatoes:
Sungold (returning)
Santiam Orange (new)
Chocolate Sprinkles (returning)
Raspberry Mochi (new)
Piennollo Del Vesuvio (returning)
Green Doctors (returning)
Green Zebra Cherry (returning)
Firefly (new)
Green Tiger (returning)
Zebarita (new)
KBX (returning)
Plan #9 from outer space (new)
Ukrainka (new)
Tsindao (returning)
Caspian Pink (returning)


I also have some peppers in the mix this year:

Numex Orange
Scotch Orange
Alexander
Paradicsom Alaku
Cajun Belle


And some Eggplants:
Shoku
Edirne


And persian cukes!!! but I planted those late. We'll see how they do.



I tried some japanese greens from seed but we had a few deluges of rain that washed them out and I wasn't able to save them. Now it's too hot to try again. Better luck next year.



Epsoma tomato tone is my dry plant food of choice, if I use any liquids it's fox farm grow big (usually when they are started indoors under the grow lights) and fox farm tiger bloom. I also like to use a touch of cal-mag now and then. All of my plants get a nice handful of Epsoma along with bone meal and epsom salt when they go into the ground.



Pic from my plant-out date:




Of the newcomers, Ukrainka & Plan #9 from Outer Space really performed miles above the rest. I am going to be replacing Caspian pink with Ukrainka, and Tsindao with Plan #9. Caspian and Tsindao are very flavorful tomatoes, but low producers in my yard. Ukrainia tasted better than the caspians and beat the snot out of the plant on production alone. Plan #9 was so prolific for a beesteak, and a very good tasting one too, that Tsindao can no longer complete.



Zebarita produced OK but didn't taste very good.
Green Tiger had major splitting problems with the rain, where I loosing all of them.
Santiam Orange was a nice plant, but I tried to to see how well it would stand up to sungold. It didn't perform poorly but Sungold still had it beat in terms of production & flavor.

Firefly was sweet and a good producer but the flavor was missing, it didn't have much character.

[Father'sDaughter]

Welcome back! Looks like it'll be a really good year. I love that you grow such a variety of tomatoes.

[Vespertino]

Thanks! I've got more pictures coming, those are from the initial plant-out.



I'm also growing some peppers, eggplant, cukes & horseradish!


Also tried saving my scallion trimmings and re-grew them.

[Vespertino]

So my ongoing battle is the poor soil from in HOA. The land my HOA was built on used to be cow pasture, but when the homes are built all the top soil is stripped away, the homes built, and lawn sod placed down around the perimeter. The only dark soil is generally from hardwood mulch that breaks down, but it doesn't go very deep at all and under that is nothing but red clay- lots of it!!!! My soil is like a potter's dream and a tomato grower's nightmare.


Every year I till in the following to try and improve the clay soil:
Expanded shale
Turkey compost
Eggshells and sometimes crushed oyster shells
Worm Castings


This year I added in some texas green sand and peat moss.

[Vespertino]

Around Christmas time I start my seeds under grow lights, this year I tried to use up some older seeds leftover from other years (some as old as 2013). I buy most of my tomato seeds from heritage tomato seed and still had an excellent germination rate.

[Vespertino]

After the plant-out Vesuvio was one of the first to set fruit, followed by Santiam orange and Sungold. I was surprised since it's usually sungold that beats them all to the punch.





I spent some time being a busy little bee.




Chocolate Sprinkles was also one of the first to produce.



Plan 9 from outer space showed a lot of fruit setting, this was my first year growing them so I was excited.




This was also my first time growing Ukrainka, it was extremely productive and gave me much larger fruit than I expected, so I had to sleeve some of them up.








This was my first year growing Zebarita. Another promising one, with lots of fruit setting early. This season was looking up!

[Vespertino]

More plan #9 from outer space!!! I'm growing this one again next year, there aren't many beefsteak varieties that are THIS productive in Texas.



Even though so many tomatoes were off to a good start, sungold ripened first! Sungold is the rock of my tomato garden.






My tomato patch is very small, I don't have a lot of land for growing veggies, so I pack my tomato plants in very tight every year. 35 total in this pic, I think... Or close enough.







Green tigers were looking good!!!!! Such a pretty tomato.





More sungolds filling in nicely



Also added in some Japanese Eggplants!!!!

[Vespertino]

The first tomatoes began to roll in: sungold, vesuvio, green tiger, and santiam orange.





As time went on the Firefly tomatoes started to come in along with raspberry mochi, green doctors, green zebra cherry, chocolate sprinkles and Ukrainka.



Ukrainka was an unexpected winner, such an amazing sweet flavor, not too many seeds and good productivity! Tomatoes were more numerous and far larger than most of the beefsteaks I was growing. I am going to be replacing Caspian pinks with Ukrainka next year.




One of my first Ukrainkas to ripen. It's earned a permanent spot in my tomato patch. I really recommend this one to my fellow Texas gardeners.





More and more cherries coming in and ripening! I tend to be cherry-heavy since they're so reliable for Texas, I've been burned trying to grow more beefsteaks and got getting much in return. Cherries just keep on going and don't tucker out like the larger varieties do.




Green zebra cherry was very productive this year, really wonderful flavor out of all the greens I like this one best.




The tomatoes are starting to fill in nicely.

[Vespertino]

Then mom made pesto:






When the zebaritas finally ripened they all had lot of cracking. I wasn't too happy about that, it seems like they're prone to it. So I had to cut away a lot of scars, but the green color is lovely!



You can see just how much of the zebarita I had to cut away in these slices. The flavor was good (6/10), but not nearly as good as green zebra cherry and green doctors. Because of all the splitting, I don't think this tomato makes the cut to grow again next year.




Next up is Raspberry Mochi, another newcomer to my tomato patch. I got a lot of variety in size: some were small cherry sized, but others were golf-ball sized. The flavor was really sweet, a little strange since it was also a black tomato, I'd give it a 8/10 and it was fairly productive so I'll grow these again next year.






Raspberry mochi slices next to zebarita slices. Nice contrast.





A little salt & pepper and some mozarella for a nice lunch







Plan #9 from outer space was starting to ripen!!! Almost time for BLTs!!!

[Vespertino]

One my first Plan #9's ripened (they were the first of the beefsteaks to ripen) it was time for some BLTs!!!









I was very pleased with the flavor of Plan #9 from outer space. It wasn't quite as good as KBX, but I'd place it at a 8.5 out of 10. It was wonderful for BLTs, low acid but bright tasting and very sweet! The red tomatoes you see are a mix of Raspberry Mochi and Tsindao. Paring the earthy-salty-umami black tomatoes with the bright Plan #9 was a nice combination.



Sadly my Tsindaos were stunted this year and didn't produce very many (nor were they very big), however, I've had production problems with Tsindao before. It was never a production powerhouse, but the flavor always made up for it. Tsindao in it's prime is a 10/10 black. I had always thought the flavor made it worth the reduced yield, but I'm thinking I might experiment with Black Cherokee next year instead.

[Vespertino]

Being a web developer I always have canned air on hand, computer equipment is a dust magnet. I paid some people to put mulch down for me and they got quite a bit on the tomato leaves. Since tomato leaves & stems are hairy they really held on to that mulch.



Like an idiot I tried to use canned air to blow some of it off my KBX plants. Then a ploof (cross between a plume and a poof) of frozen air billowed out and left one of my largest KBX fruit frostbitten. It left a blackened spot near the stem, but I figured I would let it grow and hope the discoloration wouldn't be too bad. The fruit got really big, but when I picked it from the plant once it started to turn yellow (time to ripen it on the counter) it had a really gnarly scar:




And it eventually ripened:

Sadly that hole in south of the stem turned out to be a worm hole. Even though I sleeved all of my larger tomatoes with those woven plastic mesh bags, somehow a little ★★★★★★★ worm found it's way in!!!


On the bright side the scar was merely skin-deep and was easy to pare away:





I also had a MONSTER Ukrainka, heavier than the KBX:















And just like that it was time for BLTs again! Woooooott!









Phew, that was a lot of picture posts. Now I'm finally all caught up!

[Vespertino]

On a side note, I've had far fewer pests in the past 3 years but I think it's due to the fire ant lawn treatment I've been getting annually. It's known to kill locust/grasshopper eggs in the soil along with the fire ant eggs. But I also noticed I'd had less issues with spider mites, green army cutworms and stinkbugs. I don't know if this is also due to the fire ant treatment, but I'll take it.

I was a bit backed into a corner about the fire ant treatment, it was getting to the point where my feet were getting attacked whenever I stepped out into my lawn, and the fire ants loved to colonize around my tomato patch. I tried a lot of different solutions that was suggested to me: cornmeal, borax, different types of baits, etc... Nothing worked until we went nuclear.

[Whwoz]

Some beautiful fruit there Vespertino, enough to make me drool and it is still 2 months off seed sowing time here

[ddsack]

Really enjoyed all the photos! You are doing a great job with the clay soil I had/have pottery clay too in my main garden, so can sympathize. Plan #9 from outer space looks like one I'll have to try -- if only for the goofy name!

[Koala Doug]

Great photos!