Good tomato harvest year

Having been delinquent once again about keeping up my blog, with such feeble excuses I won't even name them, I want to finally post a report on this year's very pleasing tomato harvest.

As I reported in a previous post, I have several varieties of family heirloom tomatoes from which I derive my own seeds each year. This year, in addition to these home-propagated beef, peach, and roma tomatoes, whose correct names are lost in history, I also purchased supposedly disease-resistant seeds from a commercial seed company (Sperli's Delizia F1 hybrid), and some bush tomato seeds from an organic seed cooperative ("Balcony Star").

I've been having a good harvest from all 5 varieties, but it has to be said that my self-propagated tomatoes simply taste better - remarkably so. The bush tomatoes have been producing a large number of smallish round salad tomatoes for weeks, pleasant-tasting but bland. The hybrid tomatoes are healthy and meaty, but also not really better-tasting than local tomatoes purchased in season from the green grocer.

None of my tomatoes have been affected badly so far this year by blight, with the exception of the bush tomatoes. This hasn't, however, daunted them in producing prodigious amounts of fruit. Here one of the bush tomatoes, on our fifth floor patio, i.e. without contact to other blight-carrying plants (you would think):

The yellow "peach" heritage tomatoes win hands down as the family's favorite tomato. I am worrying a little, though, that they might be losing their specific characteristics through cross-pollination, and will be doing some research on preventing that for the future. Last year, my peach tomatoes were much "yellower" than they are this year.

Last year's peach tomatoes:

Peach tomatoes from this year's harvest (the bottom two rows in the dish), with more red in them:

Still, they taste fabulous. Runner-up for favorite tomatoes are the roma-style heirloom tomatoes we call "paprika" tomatoes. They cut like butter and are mild with firmer flesh and little juice.

In the photo below from left to right: peach heirloom tomato, paprika heirloom tomato, Delizia F1 hybrid, Balcony Star bush tomato. My heirloom beef tomato has pretty much finished producing fruit this year, and we've eaten them all, sorry.

One new problem has presented itself this year. For the first time, we have a deer(s) in the garden! This is terrible! I've seen them twice when I've gone to the garden early in the morning, and see their tracks and droppings around the things they like to eat most: roses, lettuce, and tomatoes. In fact, they've pretty much ruined some of my roses by constantly biting off the buds and tender leaves and shoots. We've conferred with our neighbors in the allotment colony about this and reported it to the administration. The outer periphery of the allotments is protected by a deer-proof fence, but the gates are open during the day and the garden colony is large enough that once in, they can easily hide during the day.

So we tried various things such as hanging streamers of red and white cordoning at strategic places, etc., to no avail. Finally I resorted to wrapping or covering all the tomato plants in garden fleece, i.e. "bagging" them. This has been very effective, but doesn't look too great. It was fairly easy to do since all my tomatoes are in pots under the eaves to help prevent blight.

It could be that bagging the plants has reduced the harvest somewhat, but it's hard to tell.

Thanks for all your comments on my last posts and happy harvesting to all of you fellow vegetable gardeners.

Early propagation of tomatoes

Finally it's February, and according to most garden calendars I can now start propagating tomatoes from seeds. Last year I didn't start until March, and that was a little late for our warm area here in the Rhine-Neckar delta of Southern Germany. By starting early, I'll have very sturdy plants by April, when they'll go into large pots along the warm south wall of my allotment cottage.

This year I decided to purchase windowsill propagation sets from the garden center, rather than just planting seeds in a hodgepodge of yogurt cups and fruit trays on the windowsill. It's not really a luxury, since they are incredibly cheap. Here are the two I bought, including biodegradable cells, propagating soil mix, covers, and even some seeds (radishes, dill and sunflowers). I decided not to go for electric heating, since we have some very warm windowsills.

A friend who has been growing tomatoes for years gave me some seeds year before last. For over twenty years she has removed the seeds from the choicest fruits of her best plants and saved them for the subsequent year. Following her example, I harvested seeds from my three favorites of the plants I grew from her seeds. The seeds along with their gelatinous surrounding substance are placed on aluminum foil, allowed to dry (making them stick on), labeled, folded to keep out the light, and stored. I don't know the correct names of the original varieties, and after so many years of selection and propagation, the plants may not even conform to them anymore.

We call them "paprika", "peach", and "oxheart" tomatoes. The peach tomatoes are large and yellow (even their seeds, in the lower left-hand corner of the foil above, look yellow), the oxhearts are huge and meaty, and the paprika tomatoes are long, pointed and firm-fleshed. From last year's harvest:

peach and oxheart tomatoes from last year's harvest

sliced peach tomato - delicious!

paprika tomato

So I'll be propagating these three again. However, later in the summer most of my oxheart tomatoes developed some kind of blight, as did my neighbors' tomatoes as well. Since I have my tomatoes in pots under an overhanging roof, meaning they don't get rained on and have no contact with garden earth, I was less affected than others, but some of my tomatoes still looked like this:

For this reason I want to try some allegedly resistant hybrids this year, in addition to our own "heritage" tomatoes. This hybrid, Delizia F1, claims to be resistant to tomato tobacco mosaic virus (TMC) and to fusarium wilt, two widespread tomato diseases.

I've also ordered bush tomato seeds (Balkonstar, Lycopersicon esculentum) from Dreschflegel, a cooperative of 14 farms that produces and markets organic seeds. Many thanks to Sisah's blog for introducing me to this link, even though I ended up ordering more than I'll probably be able to plant (besides the tomato also paprika, pumpkin, zucchini, and lentil seeds, something I've always wanted to try).

Does anyone have any experience with disease resistant hybrid tomatoes?