Normally I have a love-hate relationship with August, when I have an abundance of tomatoes but it’s too hot to pick them after 8 am. This year it’s all love-love, glorious tomatoes and lovely summer days in the low 80s!
A few days ago I picked 29 pounds! I’d been letting the full-size tomatoes stay on the vine until they were completely ripe, but it was still a surprising large one-day haul for my 6 cages of two plants each. I made a huge pot of tomato soup using this recipe. I have 10 quarts in the freezer. I also gave a bunch away, but we still have huge bowls of them on the kitchen counter and we’re eating tomatoes every meal and for snacks.
I’ve only had two tomato hornworms this year. I saw minor damage from one about two weeks ago, but I could never find it and the damage stopped, so I assume a bird got it or something. I spotted the second before it did much harm and dispatched it to the trash. I’m sure there will be more before the season is over!
With one exception, I’m very pleased with the varieties I’m growing this year.
Sungold cherry tomatoes, my longtime favorite, taste as good as ever but don’t seem quite as productive as they have in past years. Maybe this year’s unusually cool weather has slowed them down a bit.
My new red cherry tomatoes, sugar snacks, are wonderful. They’re not quite as sweet as the sungolds, but with a more pronounced tomato flavor. They produce lots of long clusters of plump fruits that never seem to split. I’ll definitely plant these again, since they’re far more satisfactory than the sweet 100s I used to grow.
The big beefs have been wonderful, HUGE beefsteak tomatoes with perfect color and flavor. I picked one a few weeks ago that was 1.3 pounds! These make the best BLTs, meaty enough that they don’t make the bread soggy, but still juicy and sweet.
Carmellos are a nice mid-size salad tomato that I always grow when I can find the plants. They’re as good as ever this year, although the size of the fruit seems more variable than usual.
I had one success with my two experiments, pruden’s purple and persimmon. The persimmons are big tasty bright orange tomatoes that I would happily grow again. The pruden’s purple has produced two huge mushy flavorless tomatoes, kind of an anemic pink, with blossom end rot and serious cracking. That variety will NOT be invited back!
TWENTY-NINE POUNDS! Incredible.