The TOMATO thread

[meizzwang]

Just did a pretty decent harvest yesterday. This first basket is very heavy, easily over 20lbs. Filled to the brim!



Blush up close. It tastes great: I definitely got a tropical, almost orange/pineapple undertone to one of the fruit, but has a pretty thick skin that gets stuck to the roof of your mouth. Good weather is needed to bring out optimal flavor on this one. When it gets really warm, little hang time is needed after the fruit turns yellow to have high sugar content, but they can stay on the plant for weeks no problem. This variety is stable,doesn't ever crack, even when watered too frequently and has a good shelf life:



5 star grape x jasper (the red grape tomatoes), wish I had more seeds of this cross. Variable in shape and size, but flavor is spot on like 5 star grape, just heavenly. In the background is candy sweet icicle, brad's atomic grape and lucky tiger, all of which are winners for this year. Also pictured is blue boar berries (cherry sized with dark anthocyanins on shoulder), which I don't like, but I can see how others may appreciate it. This requires the longest hang time of any tomatoe I've ever grown, and even a month after it has turned color, the flavor is on the acid side with little background depth of flavor. This is with 2 weeks without watering!



Dark galaxy in foreground (with brad's atomic grape offtype underneath it), blush/sweet cream in the background. Dark Galaxy is really productive, pulled so many fruit and there's quite a few left to go:



Sweet Cream (the yellow with crazy red stripes). In my climate, given a 2+ week long hang time after the fruit turns yellow, these can get really, really sweet and flavorful. This one needs work though, the skins are tough as heck and stick to the roof of your mouth. Of course, if that issue is corrected, others will complain about cracking, so it's a double edged sword.

[bogman]

Gorgeous 'maters Mike! Lucky Tiger is a lost cause here; they explode with the rain. During a drought, they're outstanding. Maybe good in a hoop house, or for tomato warfare.

If you like sun-dried, a good quality dehydrator will do the same with less hassle (cleaner, no pest-stealing or bugs). I got one of those ten-shelf, stainless steel models after our round, stackable plastic type almost burnt down the house!  Luckily, I had it on a metal base and smelled the burning plastic in time. Those were some nasty looking tomatoes! On the metal dehydrator, I can replace all components, fan, thermostat, etc. Plus, it can't catch fire.

I've been processing like a mad tomato fiend. Half gallon mason jars are getting filled with puree/juice after cooking chunks and running them through a Squeezo. (To be a hopeless tomato nerd, one needs to know what this is.) The really cool preserved product is the freeze-dried. Freeze-dried tomatoes are bizarre. They taste like fresh, but are lighter than styrofoam. Texture is crunchy but melts in your mouth immediately. Might be good in chili, but not salad-it's be a soggy mess.

However, the freeze dried tomatoes can be crushed, seeds and skins sifted out with a sieve, yielding tomato powder. It's astonishing how gallons of fruit shrink into a quart of powder. Added to boiling water, one can make paste, juice, sauce, in a hurry. It's important to remember tomatoes have an enzyme which causes the juice and solids to separate. That's why cooking is an important step, it denatures the enzyme.

Gotta say, Pink Berkeley Tie Dye is lovely and tasty in this tropical climate.


Surprisingly, it hasn't been splitting with all the rain. The plants are starting to look like death warmed over, but they're still cranking. These have a good acid level and are a lot like "old fashioned" tomatoes in flavor, similar to Tappy's Finest, Big Boy, etc. The main difference is they're super juicy. The nights, lately, here have been in the 70s, days 87-94.

Cosmonaut Volkov apparently lost its flavor in orbit, blandest of the bunch. Not a fair year for comparison, but it's susceptible to flavor wash-out. Pineapple has been pretty good; the large fruits have good flavor, but a bit sweeter, milder than others, with a bit more acid than other yellow/red-streaked types.

For the first time since June, we're having a string of sunny days in the forecast. The pepper plants look promising, which is good. There are about 80 of those. The range is from the sweetest cheese pimiento to the nastiest, Carolina Reaper-hottest pepper in the world. But that's a different topic!

[bogman]

The insane amount of rain and humidity has not abated. Flash flood warnings are just about weekly events; we have one today. So far, September has had 3 1/2 days with sun and 24 days of rain! So what happened with the tomatoes here?

The non-grafted types started dying off about two months ago; all have been dead for about a month. The grafted ones continued to grow and most are still putting out a few fruits. Peak harvest from these grafted ones was about 20-40 lbs. every two days. Forty plants should produce more, but tomatoes are not aquatics. The grafted plants were about double the size of non-grafted, right before the non-grafted types died. No fungicides have been used for about 7 weeks, since the plants have played-out and I'm tired of processing. At any one time, there was about 60-80 lbs. after-ripening indoors.

Bottom line: grafted types are much hardier in difficult situations, and this year is epic. Since we're in an agricultural region, constant rain and complete crop loss have a lot of farmers, growers worried. Near constant rain from late May through Sept. has not been recorded here. Hopefully, it's a fluke and not the new normal from warming oceans.

Pepper plants are collapsing within their supports, something I've never witnessed. It's too dark. Some super hot varieties are doing surprisingly well. This may be from their Caribbean ancestry. But, how many Carolina Reapers, or Carib. Goat peppers can one eat!

[meizzwang]

Solanum pimpinellifolium, the real deal (see pics below)! These had location data and were offspring from wild seeds collected many decades ago (before Countries in South America made it near impossible for the United States to acquire new material to preserve long term).

What's so special about this wild tomato relative? Among the random accessions I acquired, it's Disease resistance, but there's a lot more valuable traits in the species. If you go through enough wild genotypes, you can probably find unique flavors, but since the original specimens came from only 1-2 wild collected fruit, the odds are against that happening. It's pretty sad, many of the collections were done so long ago, the idea of collecting seeds from a large number of individuals from each population didn't seem to be the main goal at the time (considering many accessions came from so few wild plants). I think they were more interested in finding that one plant in the population that has "potential," whether that be a unique shape, color, size, production, growth habit, disease resistance, etc. However, they did collect seeds from countless populations, but one or a few individuals captures only a portion of the diversity.
Over time, you can see scientists started acquiring more diversity from the populations until the early 1990's, when the South American Governments put a stop to these collection missions. Well, they didn't stop people from collecting, but they pretty much said if the US collects any material and makes money out of it, they must share the profits with the South American Government. It could take decades of work to turn a wild tomato relative into something profitable, and this pretty much wiped out private companies from wanting to get novel, wild genetics. They figured they'd use the genetic material the US government has already acquired, and this is the story of many modern day tomato cultivars came to be!

To give tomato scientists credit, back in the 1950's, they were a million miles ahead of everyone at the time. They had the vision to see that wild populations were being destroyed, and they saw the need to improve the diversity of tomato genetics in cultivation. Much of what is preserved by the US government are relic genes that no longer exist in the wild! These guys are the reason we have disease resistant tomato plants and tomatoes that taste better than cardboard!

Well, now that I've gone deep into a tangent, back to Solanum pimpinellifolium. Below are 4 different accessions, but the plants got so dang big, I wasn't able to figure out which fruit goes to which plant. All of these are open pollinated, and they require insect pollination to produce fruit, so most likely, the resulting seeds from this batch are all mixed up! That's exactly what I want anyways, mix up the genes, grow out huge populations, and hope you find something interesting!

[bogman]

Brudduh Mike, youza know I be wit you 'bout deez tings !

The great seed collector, Alberto Vazquez, was a very close friend of mine until his passing, some years back. He's mentioned in Amy Goldman's book, the Heirloom Tomato. Alberto was one the very first people who got hold of S. pimpinellifolium and the strain he distributed through friends and the Seed Saver's Exchange became known as "Alberto Shatters". Alberto worked for USDA, Food & Drug, and used his connections to acquire several unknown vegetables and herbs. He knew Jim Duke and seemed to know everyone in the vegetable seed world. Chances are, one or more strains you are growing may have got here via Mr. Vazquez. He had those things growing most years and they were all over his garden. Since his dept. was inspecting imports, it wouldn't surprise me if new accessions passed through his hands before heading to storage or research, minus a small "sample".

Alberto was my source for Bilera tomato seed, one he considered amongst the best tasting, and now, one of the rarest.

Are you harvesting by placing a clean sheet under the plants and shaking them? Wonder what cheesmaniae x pimpinellifolium would taste like? Probably be so vigorous, it'd be a banned weed! You realize those pimp's. are gonna pop up all over the neighborhood  . The birds and beasties doubtless have been … "sowing" everywhere. Bet your neighbors will think they found something "new". That's one way to increase your experimental acreage!

Hey, it finally stopped raining so much; we got 10 inches of snow Monday. But, now Saturday, it has been raining for a few days. Hurry, please breed a rot-resistant tomato!

[alexintx]

That’s awesome Mike! How do they taste? I wonder what sorts of genes are lurking in there. The only wild crop relative I’ve got extensive experience with is wild chile: Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum. It grows wild around here and I’ve been musing on trying to breed it with cultaved chiles. Why? Two reasons: it has great flavor, but more importantly, it’s cold hardy! That’s right, even last winter when we hit the high teens, the wild chiles only died back to their trunks, not to the ground. That kind of cold hardiness doesn’t really exist in cultivated chiles.

It would be great to see more collections of wild crop relatives — there’s gotta be so much potential out there.

[meizzwang]

Got tha "tamayduhz" started up again this year. Plants barely put on a few leaves during the entire month of may since we had an unseasonably cold spring, but during this past heatwave, they doubled in size in 7 days! Still behind a bit overall:


Lucky Tiger:


Solanum pimpinellifolium volunteers:


I've planted tomatoes in virgin soil, and I've also planted them in the same spot for 5 years straight. Disease-wise, I've found weather, cleanliness of seeds/starts, water management, and variety in my climate have a bigger impact on disease formantion than starting off in contaminated soil. Literally, I've had dozens of disease on my plants in the past, but right now, there's zero on any of the plants despite the soil being loaded with pathogens! I didn't get disease even after a freak cold, atomospheric rain that drenched the plants in May!

The secret?
1) don't buy starts, use your own seeds only, and make sure they're disease free by treating them before planting. I've seen so many starts at the local nurseries with diseases, those are a recipe for disaster.
2) grow disease resistant varieties only. Most heirlooms will guaranteed get infected at some point in our climate.
3) Deep, infrequent watering. slow and steady growth instead of constant steroid speed growth is the difference between disease and no disease in our climate.

[edible23]

When I worked as a chef at a private school, I had a garden. The best tomatoes I’ve ever had we’re grown there by me. They were Cherokee Purple, so sweet! I’m not a big tomato eater, but I would slice those and just eat them with a little salt. I also had success with Stripey’s. They were red with yellow stripes.

[meizzwang]

Put on some decent growth in the past few days:

[bogman]

Looks like you'll have another bumper crop, meizz!

On the east side of the US, clouds/rain and wind are big disease factors; pathogen spores blow around from other growers.

Pathogens adapt, so avoiding heirlooms isn't always better. Some of these old varieties had to produce in days when there were limited disease control options. A very important disease-prevention step is to avoid splashing water from the soil onto the foliage when you water. I remove the bottom leaves and shoots very close to the ground.

On page one of this thread, I posted a picture of "Bilera". Since that time, I've been in contact with the Seed Savers Exchange, trying to run down information on this rarest of tomatoes. The original name is: "Mary Anne Billera's Super Plum". When I got the seed, back in the 80s, A. Vazquez didn't spell it for me, and he apparently truncated the name to "Billera". This seed came from Mary Anne Billera's great great grandmother, in Italy. So, it's an extremely old variety. To date, it matches or exceeds the flavor of any tomato I've grown, and I've grown scores of varieties.

This year, I grafted all the Billeras onto resistant root stocks; 30 plants are in the ground. Last year proved that the top-grafted plants were far superior and produced more fruit, longer into the fall than own-root plants. I've been doing the grafts when the seedling stems are about 2mm in diameter. They lag at first, but then they are beasts!

The plan is to grow nothing but Billeras to get pure seed and get it back into circulation, the Seed Savers Exchange. The Italians breed vegetables for flavor; I think the whole population are "foodies"! 

[Copper2]

Here's a F3 domestic X S. pennellii plant I got growing. There is a Tsindao leaf for comparison of the leaf colors on the hybrid. Grew from seed from Joseph Lofthouse:

31F0F926-E3B0-454E-85C6-270CE877545C by Thomas Fleafest, on Flickr

[meizzwang]

That's a really interesting looking plant, thanks for sharing!

[Copper2]

Jun 25, 2019 13:23:25 GMT -5 meizzwang said:

That's a really interesting looking plant, thanks for sharing!

No problem! I hope to give more updates soon

[Copper2]

The F3 domestic x pennellii is not late blight resistant. At least the two I have aren’t. No idea on fruit taste yet. It has exerted stigmas

[Copper2]

1966DB8C-C3A3-473A-B232-78A7070A564B by Thomas Fleafest, on Flickr
20037A7B-F6C3-4A68-A651-3EEEFDEFA823 by Thomas Fleafest, on Flickr
E92605C8-5751-4E2D-BA8B-94D86D5D338B by Thomas Fleafest, on Flickr
Solanum pennellii accessions