Harvested 27 tomatoes on 8/27 evening. The Brandywines are huge with some tomatoes almost 2 pounds. The harvest bucket felt like 20+ pounds. The plants are producing heavily which may be why they’re dieing — they put everything they had into this harvest. Each plant does have a lot of tomatoes so I shouldn’t be complaining about not getting a second harvest. Have to give most of this away. I don’t feel like canning and I still have the canned harvest from last year.
Tag Archives: tomatoes
Blight
Late blight hit the Celebrities and Big Boys. Not sure why this happened. One theory is lack of nutrients. I have been lax fertilizing as of late and I did not add compost to the mix this year or any slow release ferts. Another theory is blame it on the sunflowers again. They may be a vector and using them as buffer plants may have brought this on. The two Branywines are unaffected and very healthy. All tomato plants are producing a lot of tomatoes. I probably should be measuring the harvest with a scale. Maybe next year. Despite the blight I would consider this year’s tomato crop to be a success in that it produced a decent amount of nice round tomatoes without BER or cracking or other weirdness. I’m probably around 60-70 harvested so far. A second wave harvest is doubtful. The Brandywines have a shot at a second wave but I don’t see any new flowers on them either even though the plants themselves look good. A couple Celebrities look kind of stunted. In past years the Celebrities were the hardy ones — not this year. Maybe Gethsemane in Rogers Park sold me bad tomato seedlings. I have already decided not to use them next year because of their selection has been poor. This seals the deal for me.
Harvest Porn
Harvest on 8/22. Eggplants from fat eggplant in caged position 1 which is growing extremely well. The tomatoes are producing without BER and will probably reach an average of 25/plant or 200 tomatoes total for the year. This haul was 17 and today (8/25) there were 13 and they keep coming day after day. Second wave harvest might be doubtful as some kind of blight is setting in. More on this later.
Update 8/20
No pics. Celebrity tomatoes not doing well and dying on top. Brandywines look very healthy but also have some brown leaves. No mites. This may be due to lack of nutrition since I didn’t add any compost into the mix this Spring and I’m behind on fertilizing. Fat eggplant in caged position 14 is stunted due to sunflower. Fat eggplant in caged position 1 is very big and healthy as well as its two habenero companions. None of the 8 habs in NE corner will produce anything. The sunflowers there look very nice however but they don’t play well with others. Tomato harvest is coming in. Second wave looks unlikely or maybe small due to flowers dieing even though there are tons of bees due to the sunflowers blooming. We’ll see. Maybe later I’ll post some harvest porn. Until then….
BTW: It hasn’t rained since I can’t remember. This might be considered a drought right now and watering is a PITA.
Note: Veranda north wall box was not being watered properly because I couldn’t see it. Drip irrigation for these boxes is a must. Soaker hose on alley level boxes somewhat work but is not a solution. Those boxes need proper irrigation. That is all….
Sunflowers as buffer plants
Here’s a shot of all 14 caged positions with sunflowers in bloom. There are a lot of bees now and it looks like the tomatoes have a lot of flowers. As mentioned before these sunflowers drink a lot of water and they don’t seem to make for good companion plants. The habeneros shared with sunflowers are probably not going to produce anything. Out of 12 habeneros planted I might see 4 plants produce anything. Next year sunflowers will not be used as companion plants and will have to have their own container.
Alley Vines
Something is wrong with alley vines. They aren’t growing and some of them look dead. Not sure if it’s watering related or what. From my finger tests it seems the soaker hose gets to the entire planter. Nothing I can do but wait and see. This year I let them grow on their own. Maybe that’s a problem. The soil might need to be regurgitated next spring — I don’t know. Don’t really want to add another project to next Spring. There could also be some dust in the air from the water project on Palmer that has drifted into their soil stunting their growth. It’s a mystery now. We’ll see how they are in a month when they should be at their peak. The Veranda vines are doing very well and increasing the size of west wall boxes has helped.
The SE corner sunflowers had another drooping session on 7/28. It wasn’t even that warm out and they ran out of water after I watered them the night before. Watering is a big problem with these sunflowers in containers and I don’t think that 2’x4’x1.5′ = 12 cu.ft. is big enough to hold all those sunflowers (~12). May need to look into going 2′ high on containers in the future. The edge of the roof line can hold more weight since the weight the underlying beams can hold relates to its sheer strength which can be rather large. Don’t want to overdo it however but I thing 2 cu. ft. / square foot roof area = 200 lbs can be supported by the current joists. Harvested 4 Ichiban eggplants (the skinny ones). Those plants look smaller than last year — most likely due to sharing space with a sunflower. I didn’t expect these sunflowers to grow so big based upon what the seeds said on the package.
Tomatoes look OK. Some Celebrities look a bit stunted. First wave harvest still a couple weeks away. The Brandywines and Big Boys look healthy. Noticed a bunch of volunteer habeneros mixed into a couple of tomato plants. Never had this happen before. They are small because habenero seeds take a very long time to germinate. All this potting mix moves around from year to year so eventually a hab seedling was bound to emerge. Ironic since the purchased hab seedlngs have struggled this year, so much so that these little sprouts may actually produce more habs by the end of September.
Update 7/29: After checking the soaker hoses tonight I don’t think the far south planter is getting enough water. The soaker hoses seem to be distributing water unevenly.
Sunflower Companion Plant
A sunflower companion plant rises high above the rest of the tomatoes. Saw an almost red tomato on a Celebrity and it didn’t have BER and it is of decent size. I’m sure it will be ready to pick tomorrow and it will be the earliest that a decent tomato has been harvested on this roof. I did use quite a bit of lime in each container. Overall there are a lot of green tomatoes and so far little evidence of mites. I did not see any live crawling ones yet but might have seen one of their webs. Still doing hard water showers every day. That is something that can’t be done with drip irrigation.
Update 7/27: Picked first tomato tonight from a Big Boy. The tomato was around 8oz (decent size) and had a little Blossom End Rot (BER) at the bottom. Cutting into it revealed the BER went into more than half the tomato. Although it didn’t look bad from the outside it was bad on the inside. It didn’t taste that well either. This is the earliest decent tomato picked since I’ve been growing tomatoes on the main roof (2005). Usually first picked tomatoes are small and total throwaways. BER does go away as the plant gets its circulation going so BER should be expected on the first few. It becomes a problem when it hits every tomato in the first wave of harvest which has happened in past years due to stress on the plants and Mark not completely aware of what is going on. So far no mites seen. Some curled leaves but no mites. Not sure what is going on with them but it doesn’t look like a problem right now.
Caged Position 3 and 4
Here’s a shot of caged position 3 and 4 taken on 7/14. Caged position 3 contains 1 eggplant, 1 habenero, and 1 sunflower as companion plant to attract bees. Last year I used Cleome but Gesethemane where I buy seedlings chose not to carry it this year so I was stuck with seeding sunflowers. Caged position 4 (right) is a Brandywine tomato that looks pretty healthy. Last year I skipped Brandywines. After discovering mites and getting a decent crop last year I decided to try them again this year. Like last year the caged position layout is as follows:
OTOTTOTTOTTOTO
where O is something other than tomatoes and T are tomatoes. The O positions provide a buffer in case disease hits one of the tomatoes. The buffer plants will hopefully keep disease from wiping out the entire crop like what has happened in so many past years. The eight tomato plants are 4 Celebrities, 2 Big Boys, and 2 Brandywines. Throughout the years I have found Celebrities to be the most resilient of tomatoes. The O caged positions vary. Some have two eggplants some have eggplant and habenero. Most have a sunflower to attract bees. I think Cleome is better at this because they flower much sooner than sunflowers and they’ll continue to flower throughout the season. These caged positions are the plants I focus on for study.
To the left are caged position 4, 5, and 6.
You may notice that the cages are starting to lean. I’ll need to rebuild these next season. I have a design to prefab these on the ground and then snap them together on the roof so they’re straight and square. This design was cobbled together back around 2007 using scrap wood. But it works well. As can be seen from this shot all plants get a metal hoop cage which also helps support the plant.
End of Year Harvest
Massive harvest yesterday. Over 50 tomatoes (I lost count). This might be two dehydrators of habeneros. I only grew 8 productive habenero plants and they all produced unbelievably. I realize I should be counting but I don’t have any past data either for comparison. Visually and using my memory, I suspect that the per plant harvested habs were around 1/2 better — possibly more. This could be from adding mushroom compost or an increased amount of potting volume per plant compared to growing them in 5 gallon buckets. It’s possible I’m giving them 50% more room for their roots to grow. I’ll have to work some numbers later but this is definitely a clue to influence the design of the NE corner replacement box next season.
Tomato Harvest Resumes
Tomato harvest resumed yesterday (after more than a week) and while up there I picked a bunch of habeneros, eggplants and cucumbers. The tomato plants are waning. They still have mites. Hopefully next year I can thwart the mites before they establish a colony because once established they seem impossible to eliminate. I estimate the second harvest to last a week or so with about 8 or 9 tomatoes per plant (65-75 total tomatoes). There is no more growth in the plants so after this they’re done for the year. I’m not complaining about the tomatoes this year. The morning glory vines however …. more on that later.
Update 9/11: Harvested 15 more decent sized tomatoes today. There might be an average of 10 greens/plant left so projected harvest might be more than 80 until the end of season. Habeneros also are coming in as well as 9 large cucumbers.