As promised and before the summer slips any further into the past, I figured it was high time I give you the final run down on how our tomato plants did this year. We planted 6 plants and while it felt like the actual harvest part of the season was rather short this year, we still ended up with lots and lots of tomatoes to eat so we can't complain too much. We chose a couple of regular red varieties as well as several heirloom varieties. Those heirlooms......they sure are tasty tomatoes! We chose the varieties that we did because we like them to first of all, be very flavorful. But we also like for them to be very meaty, not have very many seeds and to have a fairly thin skin.
Here's a bit about how each plant did....
1. Black Krim (greenish-red) -- 29 tomatoes totaling 10 lbs., 1 oz.
2. Carbon (greenish-red) -- 13 tomatoes totaling 3 lbs., 9 oz.
3. Giant Belgium (red) -- 12 tomatoes totaling 3 lbs., 8 oz.
4. Cherokee Purple (greenish-purplish-red) -- Our favorite of them all.....very meaty, not many seeds, delicious flavor! -- 19 tomatoes totaling 4 lbs., 14 oz.
5. (another) Cherokee Purple (dark greenish-purple) -- 15 tomatoes totaling 3 lbs., 3 oz.
6. Kentucky Beefsteak (red) -- zippo, zilch, nada tomatoes
The Kentucky Beefsteak totally pooped out on us, very early in the growing season. We have no idea why. It just up-and-died one day. Boo.
I always think it's interesting to look at the numbers at the end of a season, to see which plants might have produced less numbers of actual tomatoes, but perhaps each one was larger, resulting in more overall volume.....or which plants produced a bumper crop of tomatoes but maybe they were smaller. I just think it's interesting to see how they all did and it gives us a good idea about which varieties we may want to plant again next year and which ones (ahem...Kentucky Beefsteak) we might want to avoid! Haha. As you can see above, the Black Krim was the big producer this year! It did WELL. The other 4 were all pretty similar in how well they produced.
Bartley is the one who watered and cared meticulously for the plants all summer and while it was a lot of work for him, he would also be the first to tell you how rewarding it is to be able to grow veggies to eat, that we otherwise would have bought at the grocery store. We bought 6 little tomato plants in the spring (+ paid for the water to keep them alive) and harvested over 25 POUNDS of tomatoes! Love that!
Anyhooooo......that's our tomato run-down for 2011. Did you plant any tomatoes this year? If so, how did they do?
