Tomato Growing 2024

For me tomatoes should be red! So I've never bothered too much with other colours, perhaps once or twice with yellow in the dim and distant past. A lot here grow all colours, so will be along soon, but I suspect all colours will be the same in as much as they change colour (lighter green) when becoming ripe.

 

Thanks for the advice @Philippa and @DiggersJo , I'd thought I'd pinched out all the side shoots yesterday but it looks like I missed some.

I'll get rid of No. 3, I don't think it will do much and it saves on watering it!

 

@Burr I have grown Green Zebra before and find the flavour is best when they're still firm. leaving them to go a bit soft diminishes both flavour and texture.

We have had 2 tomatoes so far - one large Buffalo Steak weighing in at 470g and a medium Cherokee Chocolate. Both very tasty.

 

First Cherokee purple (a week later than last year), banan krasnyi(a week earlier than last year) and outside nagina f1 picked yesterday. The sungolds are now producing in abundance. Plus picked two white knight aubergines, they are a mini variety.

 

Thank you both for the Green Tomato advice! I’ll put it into practice!

Loofah, There is an initial outlay for a dehydrator, of course, but it’s cheaper to run than a low oven. We eventually went for the dehydrator and have been happy with it. Having said that, you have to have somewhere to store the dehydrator, but it does free up the oven, which has to be on for hours, and we like the fact that, because you can plug it in anywhere it means you aren’t heating up the kitchen when the weather is quite warm anyway.

 

Our last place there was a guy who dried his toms inside the car on the back window shelf.

 

Perfect! Our car yesterday reminded me of Mary Berry, '180 fan'. You could have baked a cake in there.

 

Just a thought re blight resistant toms - I had a free packet of 'Toddler' which is supposed to be blight resistant and they are now beginning to ripen nicely. I have also grown 'Primabella' which looks very similar. I notice the fruits on both are more shiny than usual, could this mean that the blight spores are less likely to settle on the fruits? Of course they would still settle on the leaves.

 

3.5 kg today, but only because these decided to get ready at the same time. Not that many tomatoes on my plants. Some varieties yet to taste.
From what tasted, absolute Wow! goes to Xanadu Green Goddess (on photos). Poor performance for me, but fantastic fruity taste. And another one was "Sveta from Italy", just a given name. But again fantastic sweet-savoury taste. All the others taste approximately the same.
Maybe I'm too spoilt...

 

I suspected as much JWK.
I'm mostly trying to find varieties I can grow outside so I can free up some space in the greenhouse. So far none of the ones I've got outside have blight so I can't compare them but I'm not complaining. I tried growing melons this year but they were a spectacular failure! Never mind there's always next year.

 

When do you think any plants with flowers but no fruit are too late to bother with - asking for a friend. I’m thinking the compost heap is about to gain some green…