Saturday 19 October 2013

Tomato finale

This past week has seen the final few fruits being picked from all but one of my tomato plants. Although the advent of cooler (though not yet cold) weather has slowed the spread of blight quite dramatically, it has also meant that the tomatoes outdoors are not ripening any further. Bringing them into the warmth will do the trick though.


With the fruit all gone, there was no reason to leave the plants in place, and I was eager to take them down before the foliage went really soggy, so yesterday I cut them all down and bagged up the blight-infested greenery for dispoasl at the council tip. All that is left now is a line of short stumps:


Actually, one plant did escape the cull - the "Sungold" one. Despite being very tatty at this late stage of the proceedings, it is still producing some viable fruit:




So the tomato season is finally drawing to a close for another year (sigh...), and it will probably be many months before this colourful salad we ate last night can be repeated. Fortunately the freezer is packed with tubs of tomato sauce to keep us supplied during the Winter months.


That salad is the one we call "Gaucho Salad" - named after the restaurant in which we first encountered it. It is made with tomatoes of as many different shapes, sizes and colours as you can muster, with very finely-sliced shallots and (my own variation) a sprinkling of fresh Thyme leaves. A few minutes before serving, it is dressed with a little red wine vinegar.

This is my assessment of the various varieties I grew this year:
1. Ferline. Slow to produce ripe fruit, but very heavy crop of huge fruit. Good taste. The best all-rounder.
2. Orkado. Very good yield of big, even-sized regular fruit. Early cropping. The best in terms of taste.
3. Cherokee Purple. Heavy yield. Big fruit. Very good-looking. A lot of seeds, so not ideal for making sauce, but very impressive in salads.
4. Sungella. Good crop of medium-sized yellow fruit. Succumbed quickly to blight.
5. Tigerella. Unremarkable this time. Decent quantity of fruit, but the characteristic green stripes were not much in evidence.
6. Red Pear (Franchi selection.) Visually interesting, but a low yield. Several were very misshapen.
7. Zapotec Pleated. Very deeply-ribbed fruit with few seeds. Good for sauce. Skins a bit tough.
8.Russian Black. Fruit mostly very misshapen and very prone to cracking and splitting. Some went bad before ripening.
9. Sungold. Good crop of small golden fruit in massive trusses. Skins initially very tough; softer later on.
10. San Marzano. Late to crop due to poor location. Reasonable crop, but fruit rather uninteresting. Few seeds, so good for sauce.
11. Maskota. The only one grown as bushes (others were cordons). Good yield over lengthy period. Rather uneven ripening (a bit blotchy). Great for snacking - very popular with the grand-children!

13 comments:

  1. All our tomatoes have now been gathered in too.

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  2. It's always interesting to read a full round up of how each variety performed, I think it helps to decide what to grow next year as there's just so many different varieties to choose from. I'm not bothering with San Marzano again, it took them so long to ripen and there's still some in the conservatory which are really quite green.

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  3. OH MY GOSH! That tomato dish looks lovely! I want to grow enough tomatoes to do that next year. Ironically, I just got some shallot starters. It's a sign, ha.

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  4. It's really useful to know what tomatoes did best. I always grow Ferline and Sungold, but I've made a note of a couple of your other varieties to try next year as well.

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  5. I love tomatoes, so I will never stop to plant them on my garden. You planted so many interesting variety. You really inspire me. Thank you for sharing.

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    1. Thanks for the compliment Endah. What sort of tomatoes do you grow in Indonesia? I expect you have some varieties that are very different to ours.

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    2. In my country, we have very limited variety of local tomatoes. So many interesting variety of tomatoes seeds, must be imported, especially from UK, Aussie and Taiwan. To get special seeds we must order it before to the seeds agent or distributor, and we have to wait for about two months to get it. Sometime the seeds that we have chosen and ordered before from seeds catalog didn't available. Very complicated process.

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  6. You encourage me, Mark. I appreciate the great pictures and commentary you provide. My tomatoes hung in there until two weeks ago. Question: what is the plastic tube around the base of each tomato plant? I suspect it keeps the critters away but want to be sure.

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    1. Marion, the plastic tubes are the means of adding water to the reservoirs in the bases of these "self-waterng" pots. You can see these containers described more fully in a post I wrote in March 2012. The link is here: http://www.marksvegplot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/tomato-pots.html

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    2. I thought so at first as well but looking closer at the picture I realise that its probably just the tube that goes into the soil to get water to the roots faster.

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  7. This may sound like a stupid question, but can you overwinter the plants you have trimmed down? I've never known anyone to trim them like this before, so wondered whether it is possible to continue their production next season from the same plants. If you can overwinter them, do you fleece cover them or stick them indoors at all or just leave them as is outside?

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    1. Hi Rozzie; I have never tried over-wintering trimmed-down tomato plants. I think they would just rot. I always start again from seed, each year. The stumps of mine are just awaiting the right moment for disposal. In the right conditions, the tomato is a perennial I believe, and I also know that these days you can buy many types of grafted tomato plants, so it must be possible to over-Winter them somewhere / somehow!

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    2. Thanks Mark, Yeah I've certainly never even thought about it until I saw your post here with them trimmed then wondered if it was possible! I might try it with one and see how it gets on, if it doesn't work its no big deal since I was planning lots of new varieties for next year anyway!

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