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Thursday 29 December 2011 Summer 2011 As usual, the Red Alert, Northern Delights, Glaciers, and Polar Beauty did the best. The Northern Delight, as it has in previous years, gave us buckets of nice ripe tomatoes. The Red Alert gave us the first red tomato of the season around the first week in July. Otherwise, as it was for the rest of the heat-loving plants, the quality and quantity of the harvest was less than previous years. We tried another Bush Early Girl, who turned out to be an ugly duckling. The Siberia variety, again, was a bomb, as was Valley Girl. Previous years The list of varieties that work and don't work come from the seed basket in the office - I've just gone through the seed packets and remembered what worked and what didn't. Hopefully we'll be a little more research oriented in 2011. The basic lesson, however, is that a fair number of varieties don't work well in the Galena greenhouse, even those varieties advertised as "short season" or "great for the greenhouse." We discovered a few things. For the most part, indeterminate tomatoes don't do as well as determinate tomatoes. This makes sense, as the season is supershort up here and you don't want the tomato plant spending time and energy making leaves. The other thing we've found out is that there seems to be an optimum size for the tomatoes to be productive - about three inches in diameter. Anything larger than that, and the productivity declines. We found this out with the Bush Early Girl, which gave us a few big tomatoes, and little else. Other, smaller tomatoes, such as the impressive Northern Delight, gave us smaller tomatoes but also far more tomatoes. |
Red Alert. September 2011. 
Joe shows off two ripe tomatoes. August 2003. 
Glacier. August 2003. 
Early Tanana. July 2007. |