A beefsteak tomato in Seattle? This summer?
I thought the day might never come this summer, but I’m finally at the point of the tomato season where the fruit is ripening faster than I can eat it. And while it’s mostly the always reliable Stupice and Sungold thus far, I’ve also managed to grow some pretty impressive beefsteaks.
Every year I experiment with at least one new variety, and this year I chose Ispolin, a Siberian beefsteak variety, and it didn’t disappoint, especially considering the relatively short summer we’ve had this year. Large, firm fruit, meaty but not mealy. Maybe not the most flavorful tomato I’ve ever had, but a decent balance of sugar and acid, which is especially impressive considering our dearth of heat and sun. I’m definitely trying this variety again.
Who's up for a BLT?
So how’s it going for the rest of you gardeners.
Good lookin’ tomatoes, Goldy. Wish I had a few at our house for a little BLT sandwich action!
Goldy, I think you may be my new hero. Even though I picked this as my debut year to grow tomatoes, I have a fine crop of bright green Roma’s plus a few Burpee Big Boys (still small and green) nevertheless. It rained yesterday, but is sunny and 67-degrees today; do I need to covering the plants with plastic when it rains?
Goldy, what’s your secret? Our tomatoes have just started to ripen, and it’ll be a much smaller haul than usual this year, due mostly to the lack of, you know, sun. Has it just been that much sunnier in South Seattle than near the water in Fremont?
I’m jealous.
I’ve posted here before about my complete inability to grow tomatoes here. They always got hit with a fungus just before the ripened.
So I’ve stuck with my cherry and apple trees, instead. Last year we had a bumper crop of both. I figured this year would be a “recovery” year anyway (fruit trees tend to rest some every other year), so I used the opportunity to prune them way back.
But it ended up far worse than I could have imagined. The cherry trees didn’t produce any fruit at all – I think a spring windstorm blew away the cherry blossoms just as they flowered, so the bees never pollinated the trees. But I didn’t prune the apple trees, so I expected some fruit from them.
But last weekend as I inspected the trees, and the fruit was just turning from green to red, I noticed that leaf curl had completely ruined one tree and the apples were ruined. The second tree had apples, but the leaves were also showing signs of leaf curl and quite a few of the apples were displaying signs of the fungus as well. I picked the ones that were halfway ripe, the rest I’ll probably dispose of this weekend.
2
That would describe my “crop” as well.
No offense, I love produce right out the garden, but COSTCO sells flats of delicious beefsteaks for about 6 bucks and 4 large celery hearts for about 3 bucks, a box of spring greens for about 3 bucks, etc., etc. Organic fruit is ridiculously cheap.
I’ve been enjoying fruit and BLTs for breakfast and salad for dinner all summer.
My garden sucked — I gave up and tilled it. And I’m thankful for COSTCO. But damn I’m jealous of those tomatoes, Goldy.
I’m going for raised beds and hoops next year.
We have been eating tomatoes for about a week. Stupice were the first, now one of the black russian varieties has produced a few ripe fruit. We have gone in and cut off all blossoms and some of the growth to try to force the fruit to ripen. Lots of tomatoes, but still mostly green.
I keep track of Growing Degree Days (base 60). Average high and low temp each day and subtract 60. Throw out any negative numbers and keep track of cumulative positive numbers. Last year as of this date the total was 640, this year it is 362, using reported temps at Seatac. Thus cumulative heat this year is about 56% of what it was last year. While this year is only a little below average, the timing of the heat we have received has been poor…simply terrible June.
We had really good berry crops this year and cool season greens did well. I’m really sick of spinach and mustard greens. Our basil all died. We got a few tomatoes, not many and they’re not that good. I should be able to harvest a little bit of garlic this weekend.
I tried to grow upland cress, epic fail on that one.
My scallions are doing great. On the other hand, I have no idea what you do with scallions and no idea why I planted them. At least, however, they provide some green in the garden. For you gardening experts out there, do raspberry plants have a fairly short window of productivity, like say 5 years? Mine put out just a few berries this year after several years of being prolific.
@9 you need to prune out the older, woody, non-productive vines.
10
But, that would require some work, wouldn’t it? You should know that as a liberal, I am incapable of work. Lounging on my ass collecting government paychecks is the extent of my talents. Maybe I can find some undocumented workers to do this–what do you call it, pruning?–work for me.
9, 10, 11: LOLz
Beautiful! I love this variety. They’re the watermelon of the tomato world. You’ve done a great job with your garden this year.
It’s Duck Season!
It’s Rabbit Season!
No it’s Duck Season!
No it’s Rabbit Season!
No it’s Duck Season!
No it’s Rabbit Season!
No it’s Tomato season!
How about sharing with your Christian brethren?
Yours in salivation.
I’m hoping to salvage something from my crop this month. All of my plants were hit with blight 3 weeks ago. I gave the leaves a copper bath and the fruit still looks healthy, but green. I have a few starting to blush now….
Happy BLT
leftist @9,
Actually, raspberries do get “tired” after a while, and I’ve been gradually digging up and replacing crowns that have become less productive… sometimes with lateral shoots, and sometimes with new varieties I’ve ordered from Raintree.
I started with all Summit everbearing (came with the house) and have added Golden Summit, Dinkum and Tulameen.
@11
Good luck hiring illegal immigrants the Obama Admin has been deporting them in record numbers
http://tinyurl.com/343cx4x
And their numbers have dropped by 8% recently.
http://tinyurl.com/29tpno6
Maybe you could hire an out of work BIAW member?
Hmm… Maybe the Obama folks have gotten it backwards and we should be keeping the illegals and deporting the BIAW members.
hey no accountability for parents:
Seattle Public Schools and its teachers union reached tentative agreement on a contract that allows student test scores to be used to evaluate teachers.
Geov @3,
No real secret. Well prepared raised beds (8 inches high, double-dug, two-feet deep), composted chicken manure and run of the mill organic fertilizer. One dose of fish emulsion about a three weeks after planting.
But mostly I just choose varieties that grow well here and are fairly late blight resistant. As for ripening, I stopped irrigating a few weeks ago to stress them out a bit.
Very impressive. Spell check is working on your comment thread.
Is this a new feature?
Looks like it could use another couple days of ripen time.
Well, paraquat got the cash crop and Rabbit from Mr. McGregor’s jumped the fence and got the lettuces and henbane, but my nasturtiums are lovely, thank you.
Sincerely,
Chauncey Gardner
Dave @23,
I’m color challenged, and the variety was described as pinkish, but it smelled and felt ripe. That said, I’ll certainly try them at various stages of ripeness, and from this first one, I don’t think mealiness is going to be a problem.
– (From Gus Was a Friendly Ghost, by Jane Thayer)
Word on the street is that nasturtium seeds give you a serious buzz if they don’t kill you first. Perhaps us nasturtium gardeners can hire a grant writer to get us some of that USDA poppy money left over from Afghanistan.
Goldy @ 17,
Thanks.
Michael @ 18
I can’t imagine a BIAW member being productive. I think I’d see a break lasting all day, with a bunch of ranting and whining about the government and illegals, followed by a demand for higher pay.
@28
I think I’d see a break lasting all day
sounds like your typical union shop….
@21
Goldy, I may have to try this technique of not watering as well. Does that stimulate ripening of the green tomatoes currently on your vines?
Do you just stop watering completely? I have quite a few green tomatoes right now that could use a little impetus.
6. Zotz sez: Puddybud is just another word for arschloch spews:
Predictable from a lazy, stupid bastard,
NOTHING beats fresh veggies & fruit out of the garden. Good looking tomato Goldy. You should enter it in the Fair.
We have already gotten hundreds of tomatoes. We have 6 plants each of 6 different varieties. We were harvest almost 3 dozen/day for 2 weeks. Now it has been wet and temps at night in the 30’s. Things have slowed waaaaay down. We have a friend who loves to can them. We just gave her all the extra’s and she will give us 1/2 dozen big jars.
Glad to see you have some survivalist skills Goldy. You will have lots of inept hungry mouths to feed with your NW Division of Lunatic Moonbats lead by the most incompetent, lazy bastard known to mankind…YLB
Gimme @ 29 said: “sounds like your typical union shop.”
A story I heard from the factory floor at Boeing this morning…
“See that guy over there? He’s supposed to be installing a seventy-cent spacer. But there’s no spacer with that part number in the bin. And the aircraft drawings don’t allow any substitution.”
“New Breed (the non-union company handling 787 parts logistics for Boeing as part of a Boeing management union-busting tactic) shows quite a few in inventory, but say they say they don’t know for sure if they really have them or not. And they can’t deliver them to the factory until Tuesday, as all their drivers are allocated through Friday afternoon, and then there’s the holiday. Apparantly I can’t get a management over-ride because all New Breed managers have already left for the Holiday.”
“And over there…” (pointing to several other idle workers) “…are the guys who were supposed to be starting the systems check. But they can’t do that until the spacer is installed, and the part which fits on top of the spacer is installed as well.”
“So why are they still hanging around the airplane, if they can’t do anything?” I asked.
“I’ve posted them as guards. If you don’t have anybody working on the airplane, crews from other airplanes will sneek in and steel your parts, so they can complete your own jobs.” He replied. “I’ve got two of my own crew out looking for a chance to remove a spacer from any other aircraft, if they get the chance.” he said, as he winked.
“So if you can’t get anything done, you guys will be off all weekend?”
“Nope.” He said in feigned horror. “The 787 program is still way off schedule. Management says we WILL have crews working all through the holiday weekend. Of course, there’s very little that can be done, because we won’t have engineering support, no parts, etc. We’ll have a skeleton crew here, because that’s what management demands. But it’s all nonsense”.
Heh…
mylaptop:~$ b hacols ‘-f=c -c=tag:eq~klown -C’
+——-+
| count |
+——-+
| 10203 |
+——-+
1 row in set
and…
mylaptop:~$ b hacols ‘-f=c -c=tag:eq~klown,body:matches~”*klown|moonbat|obamao|rasmussen” -C’
+——-+
| count |
+——-+
| 2258 |
+——-+
1 row in set
Heh.. Hate much klown??
ahhh yes, YLB’s lifes work in full form.
Some people are proud to have a career
Some people are proud to have well raised kids
YLB is most proud of the HA Database…lol
geek…its whats for dinner…..
34 – heh..
mylaptop:~$ b hacols ‘-f=c -c=tag:eq~tehchickenshit,body:matches~”*cleveland steamer” -C’
+——-+
| count |
+——-+
| 5 |
+——-+
1 row in set
Feces – it’s what passes for tehchickenshit’s brains.
@35
does your wife know your into that stuff YLB?
YLB and his basement- what strange things lurk there…
YIKES!
Maxiass and his mind–what strange things lurk there. Cover your eyes and ears, children!
masaba @30,
Yeah, withhold water to the edge of wilting. Stressed plants will tend to try to ripen more quickly, so that they can produce seed before they die.
Proud Communist…
where all your stuff is his…and all his stuff is….still his.
hive mentality…its whats for dinner…
36 – Never heard of that term until YOU brought it here.
And you repeated it 5 times.
What a filthy “mind”..
YLB house: where dirty sanchez’s are free.
Heh. Found another of the tehchickenshit’s miserable handles.
Attached to yet another comment from the fetid dungheap of his “mind”.
http://horsesass.org/?p=26678#comment-997809
OT Breaking news:
The sungolds are ripening nicely, the yellow pears are still quite green and the black krims (the ultimate for tomato sandwiches, IMHO) are just starting to get some color. This was a pathetic summer in SW Washington.
Just picked the last of my Jalapeno’s. I think I got 12 peppers total this year and they’re warm not hot.