Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Harvested Patio Princess Today!


And today's harvest includes 6 back yard Husky Cherry Red, 5 Snow White(1), 5 Snow White(2), 5 Paul Robeson, 4 Garden Peach(2), 3 Yellow Perfection, 3 front yard Husky Cherry Red, 2 Black Cherry, 2 Turkish Striped Monastery, 2 Red Currant, 2 Jaune Coeur de Pigeon, 2 Babywine, Vintage Wine, Mong, Patio Princess, Red Grape, Mexico (10.5 ounces), White Zebra (6.5 ounces), Tiger Paw, Sweet 100 and a back yard Green Grape for a total of 50 tomatoes.

We finally got a reasonable Patio Princess tomato! We received this plant from Liz and Ricardo a few months back. It got planted in a small green plastic container and took off. However, the confines of this container came back to bite us. The growth was constricted. More importantly, the container would get too hot.

We've actually “harvested” about 20 tomatoes off of this plant but they've had terrible end rot. Unlike Speckled Roman, if a Patio Princess tomato has about 25 percent end rot, it's no good. You can salvage part of a Speckled Roman tomato, but not Patio Princess. And most of the tomatoes had around 50 percent end rot due to the container getting too warm.

This harvested tomato has end rot as well but it isn't bad, maybe 10 percent of the tomato.

The harvested Mexico tomato was a little odd. These oddities occur frequently at the end of the season. One side of the tomato, perhaps 65 percent of the tomato overall, was ripe and if anything, a little too ripe. The rest of the tomato was green. But not just green, a not ripe any time soon green, a “it's still three weeks away, if not more” green. That part will have to be cut away.

My wife watered all of the back yard and parts of the front yard. That's saying something because it got up to 103 degrees yesterday with our bad air from the fires.

There was some humidity and clouds in the air this morning. There's a tropical storm coming up from Baja and I believe we're seeing some moisture from it.

The tomato growing from the volunteer tomato plant also looks like Old Ivory Egg.


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