For the fifth year in a row, man do I LOVE heirlooms. Confirmed yet again black krim is greatest tomato known.
Pots can do the job just as well.
Certain varieties very susceptible to damage from wind, be careful tying off.
Don’t grow them in a vacuum, put them in an ecosystem and bugs will take care of your pests!
German green while the slowest to get going and the least spectacular, does taste great eventually and has a useful place in dishes where you can hide green tomatoes such as chile verde.
Extremely slow ripening/growth compared to hybrid.
Calcium is the most likely missing ingredient if you have pots. Soft fruit bottoms are an indicator. Eggshells to the soil or a spray applied to the leaves will solve the issue. The spray will also help pollination.
Pollination even though open in heirlooms, can be helped along manually by picking open buds and rubbing around. Heirlooms will drop a lot of flower, normal. Bees are a big help.
Sungolds are actually a touch too ripe by the time fully orange. You want to pick them when they still have slight shades of yellow, provides maximum acidity to sweetness ratio. Always plant more sungold than you think you need.
Pink brandywine is the sweetest, beautiful, and most complex fruit out there, but man is it a pain to grow! Worth it.
This I think is the coolest. I have been harvesting tomatoes since mid July. It is October in Iowa and I will be pulling tomatoes out for at least another week. For this whole time we have been harvesting multiple times per week. Certainly there was a peak in late August, but there’s been a steady dribble the whole time. This is so much more preferable to my friends who plant tons of hybrids in late april. They catch up to my plants (that started in Feb!), and even pass them, hanging so much fruit so quickly that they collapse tomato cages and result in a huge crop of tomatoes that lasts about 3 weeks at most. Then burn out and die. Not to mention they suck for flavor, who wants all of your summer tomatoes in 3 weeks if you only plant once? The heirlooms made multiple pushes and sets of fruit, drawing out the harvest and drawing out the season.
Things I learned about growing heirloom tomatoes this summer: Hornworms SUCK! The evil bastards pretty much wiped out my entire crop. Check the plants daily.
I learned that building your raised beds out of that brown pressure treated wood from Home Depot creates soil issues that transfer to your tomato plants and systematically kills them. Two straight years, same wood, different soil, different locations, same results.
Had my last bag of Black Krim sauce last night (2014 harvest) and it was great. With our move in June I was not able to plant tomatoes until he 24th of June at our new home (pots & one large above ground box) The tomatoes have just started to ripen but the texture & flavor are just not there at this late in the season. Will be building raised beds and thanks to this thread I won’t be using pressure treated wood…
Although the problem with treated wood used to be arsenic, that stopped in 2003. The problem remains that they are soaked in several forms of copper and use a solution that contains ammonia. You are much better off to use brick, concrete block, recycled lumber containing recycled plastic, etc.
Brandywine is the bomb; it’s where all the flavor stayed when many tomato breeders took a wrong turn. But I never got a long season of them, and, of course, they’re very vulnerable to tomato diseases. Totally worth it, though. Great flavor plus perfect sugar/acid balance.
I learned (after several feedings) that there is a thin plastic seal that needs to be removed from the new spray feeder. I also learned that if you don’t feed your tomato plants, they don’t produce tomatoes.
I never made sauce with them per se, but rather allowed the juices of the fresh tomato to mingle on the pizza. They have been involved in the greatest margheritas I have ever eaten. Due to the fact that even with 5 plants I still did not have a complete over-abundance, I could never bring myself to cook them down, they are just too delicious raw. The calling card of the black krim is umami, they pack a savoriness that likens them to meat like no other tomato which I can only guess is an enhanced level of glutamic acid produced as the tomato ripens. They also develop an unusual buttery texture that I have not found in any other tomato, which kind of goes along with the protein breakdowns that are required to produce the glutamic acid.
Mel upthread made some sauce with them so hopefully he can comment. No doubt the sauce would be fantastic, but I wonder what varietal characteristics it retains.
I’ve grown a lot of different ones, if you want a long growing season and prodigious yield try the “mortgage lifters”. Here in Texas I’ve had great luck with purple Cherokee, Marglobe, Caspian Pink, Mr. Stripey, and one of my favorites, though extremely low yield is Orange Oxheart which are huge one slice covers an entire hamburger.
I spent a number of years in my teens working at a plant nursery. A couple of extra tips that most folks do not know:
A strong root system is important. Unlike most plants, tomatoes can be planted far deeper than their original soil level. The stalk portion planted deeper will sprout roots and will make the plant stronger. Granted, this means more growing time in the final location, so start your seeds earlier to compensate.
Tomato vines love iron. Find some cheap rusty iron rods (rebar can work well) and place one next to the vine. The rust will provide iron to the surrounding soil.
Old ladies’ hosiery makes excellent material for tying vines to stakes. It is soft, stretches, free if you gather the cast-offs, and easy to work with.
I use the trick to plant mine “sideways” so I dig a trench as long as the seedlings, then just leave about one inch of the plant exposed. Great way to establish early root system. My grandmother used old hose like that, I haven’t thought of that in years.
I liked the sauce I made with the black krims and I would
Agree with the “meaty” comments. My 12 YO described it as earthy… The leftovers from the braised cauliflower got blended into a Hazen tomato butter and onion sauce over spaghetti squash the following night and was a big hit.
The problem w using them for sauce is excess water. So what you can do is strain some off or oven dry the tomatoes. Slice them and put in a low temp warm oven and concentrate them.