Tomato News

I've updated you on my Sungold experimental tomatoes in the past, but I barely talk at all about my potted tomatoes. Today I'll talk about all my 'maters.

A couple of my Miracle of the Market tomatoes look like they may start to turn soon. The big one on the bottom hasn't changed color so much as it has started to change in texture. I have two pails of these tomatoes. They seem to be very prolific. Each spray only sets two or three tomatoes, but they keep sending out more blooms. I have over 10 tomatoes set on each plant with lots of flowers still blooming. It grows very weirdly. When a spray of flowers comes out of the stem, it ends the stem. The sucker down below at the last branch starts up just like it was the original stem. So it doesn't grow tall very quickly like most inderterminants do, but it doesn't stop either like determinants.

So far none of my small black tomatoes (Black Cherry- above, Chocolate Cherry and Black Moor) are ripe. The first two are rather disappointing in fruit set. Not many sprays have set. The plants are big, but they aren't doing much. I'll get some, but not an abundance of tomatoes.

Black Moor is much more prolific. It was described as a small 1" elongated cherry. These are almost 2" long and pear shaped. They are not the bite sized little tomatoes I thought I was trialing. I would have to cut them in two to put them in my salads. Then I found my problem. They are 1" across, not 1" long. That makes more sense. I hope they taste good though since there are a lot of sprays of fruit and lots of tomatoes on this plant. The one drawback has been some blossom end rot. I have had problems watering my potted plants. If I don't do it on time they droop rather sadly. So I can't say the BER is really their fault. I'm just as much to blame. However the other plants are getting the same treatment and I've only had one tomato with BER on my other plants (Miracle of the Market). I picked off about six tomatoes that had started rotting. I think I'll still get more before it is all over. Even with that, I think these will be much more prolific than the other small blacks.

Early Ssubakus Aliana is the last of my potted tomatoes. She was described as being a yellow egg shaped tomato. She is a bit rounder and shorter than I expected. But she is putting on a lot of fruit in huge clusters.

I so can't wait to taste them all. Tomatoes are one of my biggest joys in the summer. Now on to my Sungold F2s.

It is official. The Sungolds really are hybrids. I have two plants (Gabrielle and Debra) that have reddish tomatoes. The other four are all the typical Sungold color. So one of its parents had red tomatoes. The size and shape of the tomatoes don't vary much from plant to plant, so both of its parents were probably cherries. I only have six plants so it really isn't a good statistical sample. If my math is correct I have about an 18% chance that any particular recessive trait doesn't show up in my plants. The best part about a Sungold and even an F2 Sungold is that they are prolific. The photo above really doesn't do the plants justice. You can't really see the haze of flowers and fruit in that photo. The fruit especially blends in. It does give you an idea of their prolific nature though. The fruit is everywhere. I hope it ripens fast or it is going to take down their cages. And yes there are cages somewhere inside all that foliage. They have been overrun.