Green Tomato Size

Look how big my green tomatoes are getting!  These are still from the first flush on the Giant Syrian plant.  Too bad only 1 out of 25 flowers are turning into green tomatoes now.  They don’t like to set fruit when the weather is this hot.

Soon these will be ripe and I’ll be able to can up some salsa!

Tomato Update…sad looking plants as August 2008 rolls around

My tomatoes all got blight!  It’s a fungus, I’m told.  The back yard has been INSANELY WET this year, and that probably helped the fungus grow.  I still got very nice looking tomatoes, and I’ll still get a bunch more, but the plants are dying quickly…very, very quickly.

Patch of 12 tomatoes in late July. Dying of blight fungus.

Clockwise from the closest corner…Rutgers, Super Marmande, Gardener’s Delight, Cold Set and the mystery pear tomato that snuck into my seed packet.

Closer shot of the sad, dying tomatoes

The fruit doesn’t have a problem…it’s just the green leaves of the vine that are dying.  I’ve already harvested 24 pounds of tomatoes from these 12 plants and I expect to get almost that much more before they are completely dead.

Gardener’s Delight cherry tomato doing slightly better than the rest.

I actually doubt I’ll grow these fun cherry tomatoes next year.  My main use for them is in canned stuff and it’s a pain to peel and seed these smaller ones.  They aren’t a tiny cherry tomato…some are golf ball size…but still, it’s a lot more work to get 10 cups from these little guys than it is from bigger fruits.

Gardener’s Delight Cherry Tomato

It’s hard not to love these guys though.  Very attractive, very prolific, very tasty and pretty large as cherry tomatoes go.

Close-up of Gardener’s Delight Cherry tomatoes

The ONE plant that lost it’s label!

This year I planted 4 varieties of tomato.  Gardener’s Delight cherry tomato, Super Marmande, Rutgers and Cold Set.  I started them all from seed in March and along the way, one seedling cup lost it’s label.  I guessed at what it was, and planted it with two other Rutgers.

Now that it has grown, it has set a large number of 3 inch pear-shaped green tomatoes.  I didn’t plant a pear-shaped tomato seed…on purpose.  I don’t even own a packet of this type of seed.  Strange things are afoot in the backyard garden.

So what’s more likely?  Do you think I got a random seed that was in the wrong packet, or do you think my seed came from a tomato that got cross-pollinated before it was saved?

Green plum tomato...not mine.

This picture isn’t from my garden…I found it here and used it without permission.

Radish harvest, green tomatoes, baby broccoli

I harvested these radishes tonight…the first time I’ve done enough “picking” in one night this year to use the word “harvest.”  Interesting how they can vary so much in size.  These were picked from a 2 square foot patch that I planted together with carrots.  I left almost as many radishes in the ground as I picked…the others didn’t seem ready yet.

There are baby green tomatoes (between the size of a pea and a marble) on my Gardener’s Delight cherry tomato and my Cold Set tomato.  There are flowers on the Rutgers and Super Marmande as well.  Very promising!

This little broccoli flower is only a little over an inch in diameter.  I’m hoping it grows up big and tasty along with all it’s friends.