Yesterday afternoon, I inspected my tomatoes extensively for the first time since the stormy weather ended. It appears that (so far…) there's no more blossom end rot. This time, it really was only the "first fruit" that was affected. Hopefully. Of course, this saga may change again.
Last Tuesday, I shared photos to show what this “blossom end rot” affliction looks like. I said in that post that I’d harvested two tomatoes that weren’t ripe, but had the affliction, and added, “I’m trying an experiment: Will [the two tomatoes] ripen up a bit more, or will the rot take the whole thing before then? I don’t know, but I want to find out.”
The results are in: They ripened just fine (photo up top). The rot didn’t spread, and so last night I cut out the affected part, then chopped up the good part and cooked them as part of a tomato sauce I made for a pasta meal. The tomato was just fine except for the small bit at the bottom.
In that same post, I said that “I also picked a bunch of green tomatoes, ones that so far show no sign of rot, to see if they’ll ripen normally, or if the rot will appear.” So far, no rot (which is what I expected), and two of the tomatoes have now started to ripen. The largest one has imperfect skin, probably from being picked too early, so if it completely ripens, it, too, will become part of a cooked tomato dish of some sort.
My lessons so far are, yes, the green tomatoes do seem to ripen without developing the rot, and also that the rot affliction itself may have passed. I need to make sure I give the plants plenty of water (when it’s not raining all day…), but it seems that the crop will be good after all. Maybe.
It’s good enough news that I’m now seriously thinking about how I might change things for next year, which is quite a big turnaround for me. I’ll also plan how I use my Vegepod more deliberately: It’s doing very, very well, but I have too much of some things and not enough of others. Live and learn.
I only revived growing tomatoes in 2017, after a break of many, many years. In 2017, I planted some tomato plants I raised from seeds I took from some supermarket-bought tomatoes, and they were very productive. Nigel had been largely indifferent to me planting tomatoes—until they started to deliver.
The next season, he was much more interested, and we planted store-bought plants. That crop was the most productive of them all, producing tomatoes into winter. Nigel was thrilled, and even shared a photo of the winter haul on his own Facebook page. I have no doubt that if he had lived, he’d have been even more involved in gardening the following season; he died around a month before it would’ve been time to plant for the 2019/20 season. I planted nothing, of course, and shifted to Hamilton in January, 2020, around the time the tomatoes would’ve started producing.
Clearly, for me something as simple as gardening can carry a lot of extra weight. Even so, the whole reason I began this again was that I like growing my own food, and that’s still what matters to me. I definitely wouldn't say that gardening is a passion, but like so many other things, I think it's interesting and fun, though not something I feel driven to do.
My hopes for this year’s tomato crop have revived. Maybe my future in growing them has, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment