20 In The Front Yard, 56 In The Back Yard

We had progress on a bunch of things relating to tomatoes this weekend.

On Friday I added stakes to all the front yard tomato plants and fixed a few cages. I added stakes to a few of the back yard tomato plants. I added fertilizer to the new plants as well to all of the container plants. I fixed the fence around the “koi pond”. I noticed that Nyagous has a growing tomato on it.

None of this took very long. My wife watered all the tomato plants in the ground and that took much longer than the little things I did.

Not as much happened Saturday as car trouble took care of most of the day.

I'm slowly “training” the tomato plants more and more as they grow. There's not much to do now and I don't have to do it every day but that day will come.

We've been planting so fast that I haven't been able to take stock of what's been planted in what location. This was handled next. I had started it on Saturday but didn't get very far. Sunday morning was a cloudier morning which made it much easier to enter the information onto a Net Book computer in outdoor lighting conditions.

On Sunday my wife and I, along with Liz and Ricardo and our “seed lady” went to the LA Garden Show. Liz and Ricardo bought about 7 or 8 tomato plants while we came away with a couple more.

At home we had four more tomato plants to plant. We planted Poma Amoris Minora Lutea in the “koi pond” (and dispatched a couple of large cutworms in the process), planted Hungarian Heart and Saint Pierre in a pot in the back yard. My wife transplanted White Cherry to the side of the container and planted Brown Berry with it. What that we believe we're done planting for 2010!

I dumped the remaining dirt back in the ground used for our soil testing sample. I forgot to mention that the soil test was finally, finally submitted late last week.

I updated our spreadsheet with the today's tomato plantings. We're managing 20 seedlings in the front yard and a whopping 56 in the back yard. Yikes!

On a side note, I was able to identify the plant with no tag that has a tomato on it – Yellow Perfection.

While I had our tomato listing intact it still took a couple of hours to prepare the spreadsheet for 2010. I believe that is fully ready to go.

Also, I've started the documentation of our 2010 tomatoes – getting the information off of the tags or labels on the tomatoes. A couple have already been lost but I'll do my best to capture as much information as possible.

This morning I noted that Violet Jasper has a growing tomato on it.

Double Digit Harvest Days Are Behind Us For 2009

Sunday's harvest: Snow White(2) and Babywine for a total of 2 tomatoes.

On Saturday I mentioned to my wife that I think our double digit harvest days are over this year. I had pored over Snow White(2) and while there are a lot of growing tomatoes on this plant, there were few mature ones. As you can tell by this harvest, that proved true.

Today's harvest: 2 Snow White(2) and Patio Princess for a total of 3 tomatoes.

I stapled the loose fence on the west side of the “koi pond” back to their fence posts Sunday afternoon.

Tomato Analysis For June

Let's compare June's totals with the June 2007 totals...

In June 2007 we harvested 1259 tomatoes. In June 2008, we harvested 1538 tomatoes – 22% more.

However, last year I harvested from 22 different tomato plants among 34 planted tomatoes (65%). This year, I harvested from 23 different tomato plants among 52 in the ground (44%).

This year's June totals have been dominated by the Red Currant harvest. Out of the 1538 harvested, 1337 were Red Currants. That left only 201 tomatoes over the other 51 existing tomato plants (one died).

A week or so ago I predicted that we wouldn't hit last year's numbers. Then Red Currant really kicked in, harvesting 97 followed by 139, 136 and 98 tomatoes.

Therein lies the rub: Until the other plants start “cresting”, the numbers will rise and fall based on the Red Currant harvest. And Red Currant's best harvest may very well be last week's numbers. The second largest harvest, Husky Cherry Red shows signs of “cresting” having harvested 7 followed by 10, 19, 17, 15, 7 and 6 tomatoes over the past week.

We'll get a good harvest total from a lot of the smaller backyard tomatoes. These include Salisaw Cafe, Stupice, Black Plum Paste and perhaps Sioux and Kimberly as well. In the front yard, Piccolo looks pretty good. And Red Currant looks healthy enough to get a second wave.

Beefsteaks: Paul Robeson and the back yard Black Krim look particularly happy.

Disappointments (so far): Garden Peach, Snow White Cherry, Big Rainbow, Micro Tom.

In short, this year's tomato plants appears to be about two weeks behind last year's tomato plants. The July numbers should expose this.

Snow White Cherry, Black Krim Have Tomatoes!

Sunday morning I spent about an hour “training” all the tomato plants. While training the front yard tomato plants, I noticed Snow White Cherry and Black Krim have tomatoes.

We spent most of the day at my mother-in-law's house. She has 10 tomato plants. I was planning on doing a lot of work on them but honestly, there was very little to do. She's doing a great job with her tomato plants. We brought down two full garbage bags of paper mulch and laid the paper mulch around the tomato plants. Also, we watered it to tamp it down. But that was all.

We got home a little around 11 PM. With a flashlight I picked 49 Red Currants and 3 Husky Cherry Red tomatoes.

More Tomatoes!

There are lots of new tomatoes noted this morning. All of them were quite small, but they were tomatoes nonetheless. In the order they were found, Kimberly, Aunt Ruby's German Green, Lime Green Salad and Red Yellow Cap have tomatoes.

For point of reference we have two Lime Green Salad tomato plants in the front yard, one near the curb and one in the “koi pond” (our signature area). The one with the tiny tomato is the one near the curb. In my internal front yard tomato document this is the first one listed. Thus, the one near the curb will be Lime Green Salad (1) and the one in the “koi pond” will be Lime Green Salad (2).

A Micro Tom tomato looked as if it may be slightly darkening. Next to it is Red Robin, which looks very happy in the container. It has another branch of tomatoes and now numbers at least a half dozen.

The only “koi pond” plants without tomatoes are Lime Green Salad (2) (understandable, it was planted April 26) and Snow White Cherry. I was a tiny bit worried about Snow White Cherry about a week ago. But since then the growth on this plant has taken off for the better. Also, I remember tomatoes arriving late last year for this plant but it ended up the second most productive tomato plant in the garden. In other words, no worries.

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 -- Snow White (in a container)

We thought we planted Snow White, but the tomatoes sure looked and tasted like Garden Peach. Garden Peach needs more room than what this container provided. For that matter, this would have been true for Snow White as well...

2007 Tomato -- Snow White Cherry

My wife's favorite. They're her tomato candy. Plant was a monster, getting a least 7 feet high before leaning to the north. Had I high support for it, I'm sure it would have gotten taller, say around 10 feet. Prolific. It was on a pace to overtake SunGold's production when SunGold rose from the dead and produced a hundred or so more.

Very good tasting, great for salads.