Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Preparing The On-Line Tomato Spreadsheet

My wife watered some of the back yard tomatoes yesterday during another hot day -- it got up to 94.7 degrees at Pierce College nearby.

I've been training the tomatoes the past two mornings as well as putting together the on line tomato harvest spreadsheet for 2013. I think I have it ready to go. If you're interested in seeing the numbers, post your email as a comment to this post and I'll be sure to include you.

While putting things together, here's what I've noticed:

It appears we did not plant SunGold this year. Both my wife and I are really surprised by this, but there's no record of it this blog for this year nor in my documentation. We both think we had a SunGold plant but perhaps we gave it away at some point. Or the unknown plant that we're guessing is Orange Paruche is really SunGold. Or more likely, we don't have it. No volunteers have come up yet. My wife may go out and grab one if we can still find it.

We planted a tomato plant named Grande in the back yard that was not recorded in my blog. This was the second of two French tomatoes handed to us by a TomatoMania volunteer. For the spreadsheet I guessed at the planting date based on what was planted around it.

All the plants in the "corner office" have growing tomatoes.

All but three plants in the "koi pond" have tomatoes. The three that do not are Paul Robeson, Black Seaman and Dr. Wyche's Yellow. Only Paul Robeson is concerning me. The concern is that I have had poor luck with this tomato plant the last several years. I'm beginning to think the line is "polluted" somehow but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. The plant seems fine for now, just no tomatoes.

Four out of six plants in the south garden (in the back yard) have tomatoes. All six of these plants are grafts. As a group they look stronger and are a bit larger in size than the other plants. The ones missing tomatoes are Jersey Giant and Gold Medal. No concerns here, they look great.

In the main back yard area only Snow White and Green Zebra have tomatoes. This area was planted later than the rest, so no issues here.

Among the container plants Sweet 100 has growing tomatoes.

My guess is that we'll do about 5000 harvested tomatoes for 2013. Unofficially we planted 53 tomato plants this year, down significantly from last year. I'm also troubled by the early hot spells we've been having so far.
 

5 comments:

bex said...

i'm interested, Bill. Please use my g account. (Sorry but I don't post my e-mail where spambots can pick it up.)

Tom T said...

awesome, bill! thx for the update. this year, I finally set up drip irrigation. last year was just too difficult to coordinate with all the kids' schedules.

totally agree w/ you on the weird heat. reminds me of a few years ago when the big june (?) heat wave wiped everything out.

Socaltomatoes said...

Tom -- that year was 2008. It was 110 degrees here on June 20.

bex said...

110? Wow! I'll have to remember that the next time we grumble about it being in the upper 80s up there.

Hey Bill, I know someone who is interested in learning more about Tomatomania and possibly being a vendor there next year. Are you a good person for her to contact about this? Thanks!

Socaltomatoes said...

Bex -- (TomatoMania) I can forward the information if you send it to me...