2009 Garden in Review- The Tomatoes

The 2010 Pinetree Garden Seed catalog has arrived and I hope to get my seeds ordered before the end of the year. Before I do that I want to review last year's garden successes and failures. By the way, all of last years seeds were ordered from Pinetree Garden Seeds 2009 catalog.

TOMATOES:

Ultimate Opener(F1 Hybrid, 57 days)
This was the first tomato of the season but it was only about a week earlier than Tigerella. It had average flavor and good disease resistance.





Tigerella(English Heirloom, 55-65 days)
This was my favorite tomato this year. It was quite pretty with it's subtle stripes and had great flavor. The fruits were small at 2 inches but were great for quartering for a salad or pasta. It was very prolific. Now that I see that it was an English heirloom I know why it did well in our strangely cool summer. Tigerella was also the last of the tomatoes to succumb to early blight and by mid September even they died.

Manyel(heirloom)
This was a great tomato to layer in a Caprese Salad along with Tigerella. So beautiful! Surprisingly tart and not weak flavored at all. Probably the most prolific of all the tomatoes until it was struck down by late blight in early September. It grows in clusters of 5 and had a good mid-size fruit.



Yellow Currant
If you want TONS of tiny thumbnail size tomatoes this is the plant for you. I literally could not pick all of these. They are prone to cracking especially after heavy rain. They are quite vining and took over a whole 6 foot concrete reinforcing wire cage from top to bottom and up the other cage. I actually prefer the taste of Sun Gold or Yellow Pear when it comes to small tomatoes.


Cuostralee(French Heirloom)
I wish I actually could show you a picture of the fruits but just as they were starting to ripen within 3 days the entire plant succumbed to late blight disease. They would have been my largest tomatoes because they were about 2-3 pounds each.





It was a very challenging year for tomatoes. Most of July was cool in the mid to low 70's. Perfect for me but the tomatoes were slow to ripen. The first one ripened around the 3rd week in July. At the end of August we had cold, wet rains which I think helped lead to late blight. By the middle of September I had to pull up all the tomatoes because they were rotten from the late blight. Also, most of the tomatoes I planted this year were heirlooms and I don't think they had much disease resistance. I'll try most of them again though because they were all great tasting and I think they would do fine with regular summer heat.