Tomato Analysis For May

Since we're at the end of the month, let's do a comparison to last year's May totals.

I picked 7 more Red Currants to bring the May month total for 2008 to 60. Last May, we picked 98 tomatoes.

Last May, 3 tomato plants out of 34 harvested tomatoes (8.8%) while this May, 4 tomato plants out of 52 harvested tomatoes (7.7%).

The first tomato picked last May was on May 2 while this year the first tomato picked was on May 16. Last year the first tomato picked was SunGold, which also turned out to be the most productive. This year the first tomato picked was Red Currant, which looks like it will be the most productive.

I'd say that most of these differences are negligible with the exception of the last paragraph. This year's crop “feels” like it's about two weeks behind last year's crop. That may not prove to be true in the long run, but we'll see.

Last year, the highest harvest total occurred in mid-July (July 13 and 14, to be exact). In 2006, the heaviest harvest dates were in early July. This year, I'll estimate the heaviest harvest date will be around July 22 or 23 based on what we know so far.

All the plants look healthy, some better than others, but all appear healthy.

Opossum In The Backyard

I went directly from work to Home Depot, bought a dozen four foot wooden stakes, worked out at the gym, drove home, gave two of the stakes to my neighbor across the street and put in five of them into the ground for additional support for some of the back yard tomatoes.

When we got back from dinner, I made some paper mulch but didn't put it out in the garden. Our dogs found another opossum in the back yard and dealing with the dogs, the opossum and animal control took up the rest of the evening.

This morning I watered the tomato plants a bit lighter that I did last time. I didn't notice any new plants with tomatoes but I didn't look too closely.

Last year on this date, we harvested our first tomatoes of the season, two Sun Gold Cherry tomatoes.

On a side note, perhaps one is wondering why I'm going all out now with the paper mulch, stakes, fertilizer and whatnot. In essence, I'm trying to get “out in front” of all these chores and details before I spend a majority of my tomato time “training” and harvesting the tomato plants. It turns out that I don't do as well as others in the heat of the summer so I'd simply rather do these things now then fight it later.

On the ToDo list: Plant Old Ivory Egg (probably Saturday), finish adding paper mulch to the backyard tomatoes, landscape the area around most of the backyard tomatoes (I'll do this as I add the paper mulch to them), add more stakes as needed, then as time goes on replenish the paper mulch as necessary.

2007 Tomato Totals Analysis

First off, people are amazed that I count tomatoes. “You count them??? Don't you have anything better to do?”

It's really not time consuming. You pick 'em, and place them all on the kitchen counter. Then you count them and record the amount and date on 3 x 5 cards. I got challenged to make a database with the results, so I transferred the 3 x 5 card results to electronic form. Not time consuming at all.

Several numbers jump out. Snow White's 1771 tomatoes is amazing. The tomato is about 3 or 4 times larger than SunGold Cherry and doesn't have the cracking problems of SunGold. The Garden Peach total was in reality two plants, but then again, they were crowding each other.

As mentioned previously, the Husky Cherry Red total of 1116 is tremendous given the small stature of the plant. Red Currant (388) was constrained by being in a container – we may double or triple that with this years plant.

Another impressive number is 160 Mr. Stripeys. That's a lot, considering this was a beefsteak tomato. We had several over a pound.

2007 Tomato -- SunGold Cherry

I remember the plant being a bit leggy when we planted it. But it cranked out about 1700+ tomatoes, if memory serves. A fair amount of them had cracking – I'd pick 50 or so and four or five would be beyond hope before my wife could process them.

I remember the plant getting so pounded by the sun, it resembled kindling. Somehow, it got new growth and kicked out about 100 more tomatoes.

My wife didn't like SunGold, so we didn't get it this year.