The weekend prior, my wife started several different tomato varieties from seed. To date, we haven't seen any sprout, so we're a bit worried about it...
Last weekend we had some compostible dirt trucked in on Saturday morning. We spent about six hours on Saturday and five plus hours on Sunday spreading it around everywhere in the front and back yards. You can see what we started with on Saturday morning and what's remaining as of Sunday evening.
Here's the yearly harvests...
2007 - 10990 tomatoes, 33 tomato plants
2008 - 4503 tomatoes, 52 tomato plants
2009 - 11155 tomatoes, 61 tomato plants
2010 - 8092 tomatoes, 77 tomato plants
2011 - 9178 tomatoes, 77 tomato plants
The total harvest came in 3rd place out of 5 years, right in the middle of the pack.
As mentioned on other posts, we were quite happy with the taste of this year's harvest. Porkchop, Vorlon, Hungarian Heart and Clint Eastwood's Rowdy Red were some of this year's highlights. Porkchop, when harvested at the right time, was the best tomato I've eaten in maybe three years. Hungarian Heart was my wife's favorite this year.
But you can see why 2007 was an awesome year. 2nd place in harvest totals with less than half the plants of the past two years. That's what happens when you dig out a trench in the front yard, wheelbarrow the dug dirt in the back yard and replace with nearly pure compost.
Time and money permitting, we'll add a lot of compost over the next month or so.
Here's the top 10 harvest totals per tomato this year:
Matt's Wild Cherry -- 2727 (highest total all time!)
Snow White -- 944
SunGold(1) -- 623
Husky Cherry Red(2) -- 591
SunSugar -- 378
Husky Cherry Red(1) -- 323
Garden Peach -- 318
Haley's Purple Comet -- 216
Sweet Carneros Pink -- 202
Golden Mama -- 192
We're looking forward to 2012!
Here's the December harvests by year...
2007 - 0
2008 - 6
2009 - 39
2010 - 90
2011 - 140
So this year's December harvest was the highest ever. In fact, it was the highest even if you combine all previous years.
What are the implications? Not much...just that SunGold(1) took off very late in the year. We harvested 129 SunGold(1) tomatoes this month. And they were good!
If anything, this is an indication that it's good to plant sweet peas and sugar snap peas in the fall. The SunGold(1) took off when it "found" the soil previously used by the peas last winter.
Yesterday's harvest: 2 SunGold(1) tomatoes.
Today's harvest: 17 SunGold(1) tomatoes.
The grafted SunSugar that my wife had severely cut back (from at least 5 feet in length down to an inch or 2) is recovering nicely.
And that's it for 2011!
Saturday's harvest: 15 SunGold(1) tomatoes.
Monday's harvest: 9 SunGold(1) tomaotes.
Our "koi pond" fence has fallen down in places but SunGold(1) still produces. But the cold nights will be the downfall of this plant. My wife tasted these tomatoes and still was impressed with the taste. They're not only good, they're excellent!
We've now harvested over 600 SunGold(1) (604) tomatoes! SunGold(1) is now the third highest harvest total for an individual plant for 2011.
Late last Sunday my wife pulled out Stupice, Jaune Flamme and Berkeley Tie Dye. She cut back SunSugar severely, so much so that I consider it pulled out for 2012. Since this is a grafted tomato my wife wanted to see if it would come back if it was cut back like a rose. It seems like a reasonable experiment.
That leaves SunGold(1) as the remaining tomato plant for 2011.
On Saturday I harvested 16 SunGold(1) tomatoes and today I harvested 4 more.
We've now harvested over 575 SunGold(1) tomatoes (580)! SunGold(1) has moderate wind and cold damage but still should produce a few more good tomatoes. We had them for dinner tonight and last Sunday night. They're still quite good!
Today's harvest includes 20 SunGold(1), 3 SunSugar, 2 Stupice and Jaune Flamme for a total of 26 tomatoes.
On Sunday my wife pulled out Green Doctors Kiwi(2) and on Tuesday she pulled out the mighty Matt's Wild Cherry. We ended up harvesting an astonishing 2727 tomatoes off of that plant.
We've now harvested over 500 SunGold(1) tomatoes (514)! I'm impressed with the late output. It's not just producing large tomatoes, they're tasty as well!
My wife has 9 maturing pomegranates on her pomegranate tree. She harvested one of them today.
The harvest total for November came in at 125 tomatoes. This compares favorably with the October harvest total of 133 tomatoes. No dropoff to speak of.
Why was that? It's pretty clear -- SunGold(1). In October we harvested 26 SunGold(1) tomatoes. In November we harvested 90 SunGold(1) tomatoes. Some were quite large for SunGold tomatoes.
Here are the numbers for November for the prior years:
2007 - 0
2008 - 19
2009 - 181
2010 - 214
2011 - 125
Again, this year's total is right in the middle of the pack.
What does this mean? Nothing. 2007 could be considered our best year. It's too late in the season to glean much meaning from the numbers.
