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torquillI just finished figuring out my tomato varieties for this year -- it's harder than it sounds, harder still this year because my summer garden has had to move, temporarily, to smaller quarters. So I get eight good and two fair slots to a) get a good haul for the freezer, b) grow a variety of different colors/sizes, and c) refresh some of my aging seed varieties. Out of close to a thousand varieties, I have eight whose seeds are a decade old, and that doesn't include some of my tried-and-true heavy yielders. Very tough choices.
So here's the list I came up with -- non-gardeners can skip this with no repercussions. :)
Vorlon: one good and one fair slot. Regular readers probably remember my all-star: reliable, large yields, disease-resistant and all that. Medium-sized deep purple tomatoes with a sweet, complex flavor that has my friends asking for my extras every year.
Earl's Faux, aka Red Brandywine Faux Potato Leaf or RBFPL: one good and one fair slot. I've grown this one off and on as a switch hitter for Brandywine, Sudduth strain. A gorgeous large pink beefsteak, meaty and flavorful, with sturdy potato-type leaves that resist mites and caterpillar damage. Almost no blossom-end rot, though stress can lead to cracking late in the season. This should be my second workhorse.
All of the others get one of the good slots only:
Mortgage Lifter, Radiator Charlie strain. The first heirloom tomato from my garden I ever tasted, and it's stayed at the top ever since. Flat deep-pink beefsteaks in clusters of two or three, with a balanced flavor that just cries out for making BLTs. It's one of my best here, putting out a few tomatoes even when its neighbors give up and die. I'm hoping a really good raised bed will let it shine as it should.
Lillian's Yellow Heirloom. This is one which readers of Dr. Carolyn Male's "100 Heirloom Tomatoes" should know about. It's a clear yellow beefsteak with distinctive flavor. I have all of seven seeds left, from2003 1999(!), and I may not be able to get a plant out of that. My backup is Dr. Wyche (which I have grown before), a midsize gold also found in that book. Both need a growout, both are yellow, there we go.
Earl of Edgecombe. Another variety in Dr. Carolyn's book, it's a midsize, heavy-yielding orange with some serious flavor. I've never grown it, and my seed is aging out, so it gets a shot. Maybe it will give KBX a run for its money.
Homestead. Developed for hot southern states, it reportedly does well in Arizona *and* Florida, so it may grow well here too. Reviews say it's sweet rather than acidic, a large red tomato that used to be a commercial mainstay. Again, I've never grown it and my seed is getting old, so we'll see how it does.
New Big Dwarf. I can't recall growing this before; I got it from an Aussie I used to swap seeds with. As I have a couple of spots where it would be difficult to do good supports, I decided to do two bush-type tomatoes, and this is one. Just because it's a smaller plant (to 3') doesn't make the fruit small, though -- it can make tomatoes over one pound in clusters of 2-3, meaty beefsteaks with excellent flavor. The constraints this year make it seem like an excellent time for me to refresh my seed stock for this one.
Woman's Name Starting With A. Regulars might remember this one too, if only for the name. I picked it up from an SSE listing with no description, only a color (red). It ended up being a determinate (bush) with medium-sized fruit, bearing heavily once and sometimes twice a season. The tomatoes are a little on the tart side for me, but there are tons of them, they're untroubled by cracking or rot, and the flavor is quite good otherwise. I consider it freezer/canning stock to bolster my supply of cooking tomatoes. Since it's also a small plant, it gets a spot this year.
I still have to pick out four peppers, but that should be easier. I was supposed to sow seeds yesterday or today, so I need to get a move on... spring is coming early this year, I think. At least I have a good start on making the raised beds.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure I've posted here why I have to move the garden this summer. Despite the dry winter this year, the ground hasn't gotten hard enough that I feel confident about bringing large trucks full of wood chips through my neighbor's orchard and across my summer garden plot, which is the only route they have to the very weedy back 40. Therefore, I'll have to wait until midsummer to have them come in... and I can't have plants in their way. It wipes out the middle of my usual summer plot, leaving me three short rows and the sweet potato bed. I'll put the squash, sweet potatoes, and two tomatoes out there, but the rest will have to move to the sidestrip... which is sun-soaked, on the watering system, and infested with bermudagrass. I've just finished covering it in cardboard and wood chips, in fact.
So I'm building two L-shaped raised beds on top of the wood chips and cardboard, to prevent an avenue for bermudagrass and other weeds to escape. 120 square feet, 24" deep, made of recycled fence boards, filled with a mixture of leaves (at least 30 bags, thank goodness I collected a lot this year), horse manure (three pickup loads, here we come) and however much of the spring mowing I can dump into it. It shouldn't be too rich, I think, but it will have much better water-holding and nutritive properties than the native soil. I've been hustling to get it built so that the "soil" has a chance to settle and decompose a little, but since my sweet potatoes do well in straight leaves and manure every year, I'm not stressed out of my mind about it.
An added bonus is that the sidestrip is 150 feet from the usual plot, and I suspect it won't have the earwigs and mites that usually plague me. Between that and the much better soil, I'm hoping I'll have a normal garden for once, rather than my usual pathetic struggle against the elements. I may also take the opportunity to try a sprinkler system rather than drip -- our climate is so dry here that plants don't stay damp for long enough to encourage disease, or so my fellow Master Gardeners tell me. We'll see how it goes.
So here's the list I came up with -- non-gardeners can skip this with no repercussions. :)
Vorlon: one good and one fair slot. Regular readers probably remember my all-star: reliable, large yields, disease-resistant and all that. Medium-sized deep purple tomatoes with a sweet, complex flavor that has my friends asking for my extras every year.
Earl's Faux, aka Red Brandywine Faux Potato Leaf or RBFPL: one good and one fair slot. I've grown this one off and on as a switch hitter for Brandywine, Sudduth strain. A gorgeous large pink beefsteak, meaty and flavorful, with sturdy potato-type leaves that resist mites and caterpillar damage. Almost no blossom-end rot, though stress can lead to cracking late in the season. This should be my second workhorse.
All of the others get one of the good slots only:
Mortgage Lifter, Radiator Charlie strain. The first heirloom tomato from my garden I ever tasted, and it's stayed at the top ever since. Flat deep-pink beefsteaks in clusters of two or three, with a balanced flavor that just cries out for making BLTs. It's one of my best here, putting out a few tomatoes even when its neighbors give up and die. I'm hoping a really good raised bed will let it shine as it should.
Lillian's Yellow Heirloom. This is one which readers of Dr. Carolyn Male's "100 Heirloom Tomatoes" should know about. It's a clear yellow beefsteak with distinctive flavor. I have all of seven seeds left, from
Earl of Edgecombe. Another variety in Dr. Carolyn's book, it's a midsize, heavy-yielding orange with some serious flavor. I've never grown it, and my seed is aging out, so it gets a shot. Maybe it will give KBX a run for its money.
Homestead. Developed for hot southern states, it reportedly does well in Arizona *and* Florida, so it may grow well here too. Reviews say it's sweet rather than acidic, a large red tomato that used to be a commercial mainstay. Again, I've never grown it and my seed is getting old, so we'll see how it does.
New Big Dwarf. I can't recall growing this before; I got it from an Aussie I used to swap seeds with. As I have a couple of spots where it would be difficult to do good supports, I decided to do two bush-type tomatoes, and this is one. Just because it's a smaller plant (to 3') doesn't make the fruit small, though -- it can make tomatoes over one pound in clusters of 2-3, meaty beefsteaks with excellent flavor. The constraints this year make it seem like an excellent time for me to refresh my seed stock for this one.
Woman's Name Starting With A. Regulars might remember this one too, if only for the name. I picked it up from an SSE listing with no description, only a color (red). It ended up being a determinate (bush) with medium-sized fruit, bearing heavily once and sometimes twice a season. The tomatoes are a little on the tart side for me, but there are tons of them, they're untroubled by cracking or rot, and the flavor is quite good otherwise. I consider it freezer/canning stock to bolster my supply of cooking tomatoes. Since it's also a small plant, it gets a spot this year.
I still have to pick out four peppers, but that should be easier. I was supposed to sow seeds yesterday or today, so I need to get a move on... spring is coming early this year, I think. At least I have a good start on making the raised beds.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure I've posted here why I have to move the garden this summer. Despite the dry winter this year, the ground hasn't gotten hard enough that I feel confident about bringing large trucks full of wood chips through my neighbor's orchard and across my summer garden plot, which is the only route they have to the very weedy back 40. Therefore, I'll have to wait until midsummer to have them come in... and I can't have plants in their way. It wipes out the middle of my usual summer plot, leaving me three short rows and the sweet potato bed. I'll put the squash, sweet potatoes, and two tomatoes out there, but the rest will have to move to the sidestrip... which is sun-soaked, on the watering system, and infested with bermudagrass. I've just finished covering it in cardboard and wood chips, in fact.
So I'm building two L-shaped raised beds on top of the wood chips and cardboard, to prevent an avenue for bermudagrass and other weeds to escape. 120 square feet, 24" deep, made of recycled fence boards, filled with a mixture of leaves (at least 30 bags, thank goodness I collected a lot this year), horse manure (three pickup loads, here we come) and however much of the spring mowing I can dump into it. It shouldn't be too rich, I think, but it will have much better water-holding and nutritive properties than the native soil. I've been hustling to get it built so that the "soil" has a chance to settle and decompose a little, but since my sweet potatoes do well in straight leaves and manure every year, I'm not stressed out of my mind about it.
An added bonus is that the sidestrip is 150 feet from the usual plot, and I suspect it won't have the earwigs and mites that usually plague me. Between that and the much better soil, I'm hoping I'll have a normal garden for once, rather than my usual pathetic struggle against the elements. I may also take the opportunity to try a sprinkler system rather than drip -- our climate is so dry here that plants don't stay damp for long enough to encourage disease, or so my fellow Master Gardeners tell me. We'll see how it goes.
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Date: 2013-02-16 17:54 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 00:51 (UTC)Sadly, the well which allows us to keep this huge place green also gives us extremely hard water... after having a $75 soaker clog up in four months, I gave up on that idea. I also had to give up on drip tape, pressure-compensated emitters, micro-sprinklers, and three-quarters of the other irrigation equipment out there. My options are sprinklers (impact or spray), non-pressure-comp bubblers, flood irrigation, and distributor caps (which still have to be thoroughly cleaned and de-scaled every two years). Sigh.