259 The 2023 Tomato Preview Show!

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by SmartPots, the original lightweight long-lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA! Visit smartpots.com slash Fred for more information and a special discount, that's smartpots.com slash Fred. ♪ Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, well, you've come to the right spot. ♪ It must be spring and it's time for our annual Tomato Preview Show. Today, a couple of real tomato heads, nursery owner Don Shore and myself, talk about growing tomatoes. We talk about all sorts of things that are read, including the winning and losing tomato varieties of 2022. Remember, all gardening is local. Which tomato varieties are we going to be planting in 2023? Here's a clue for you, the varieties is something old, something new. We have advice for the first time tomato grower. Start small. And how to thwart summer diseases of tomatoes. And of course, don't plant your tomatoes too early. Kind of a tough thing for us tomato heads, so we have tips on timing your tomato planting. It's all in today's episode 259, the 2023 Tomato Preview Show. We're podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful of Butylan Jungle in suburban purgatory. It's the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred Podcast brought to you today by SmartPods and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let's go. I was just reviewing my notes for my 2022 vegetable garden. And on September 30th, I made this note, shortest tomato season ever. Well, all gardening is local. And here in northern California, we had one heck of a heat wave in late August and early September. Record high temperatures. And that's why it became the shortest tomato season ever. So I am extremely optimistic about 2023. I hope Don Jor is as well. He of Redwood Barn Nursery in Davis, California. And Don, how was your 2022 tomato season? Well, actually it was very good. But I have to say that the plants took a lot more water than usual. I was deep irrigating those vines. I was giving them 10 to 12 gallons of water a week. Generally all at once if I possibly could, because I'm out in an open field, a normal garden farm type situation, not a raised planter, such as you deal with. As long as I kept them going, kept them vigorous, they did well. But you have to agree with you that heat wave did a lot of damage to a lot of varieties. If their fruit was exposed on a morning that was going to get over 110 degrees, what I would do actually is pick it and bring it in so that I knew that that particular fruit wouldn't get scalled or sunburned as typically happens when made of fruit that's close to ripe is hit by 9,500, 105 degree temperatures. You know you're going to get some injury on that side of the fruit. 116 degrees, which we recorded two days in a row in the Davis area. Absolute record, just for the month, but all time record followed by five more days over 105. Yeah, it kind of finished up the crop for a lot of people, especially if their plants were drought stressed. I did put in an optimistic note after I wrote shortest tomato season ever back on September 30th. I pointed out that the gardeners delight the sweet million, the sun gold, the valley girl, all have flowers though. Maybe they will bear fruit. And then I turned the page to October and on October 25th, I wrote, removed remaining tomato plants. Shortest tomato season ever. Thanksgiving tomatoes are commonplace here. Christmas tomatoes aren't that unusual, but last year they were. A lot of them finished up and that heat just finally took its toll. I did have a couple varieties that really impressed me for their ability to continue later on. Usually there's a half dozen varieties that'll keep setting, keep fruiting all the way through October and into November. But I do want to mention one all time top 10 champion just kept on going. I was still picking those in early November. And I've got to bring this one in new girl. The new girl is giving early girl a run for the money because it was continuing to fruit all the way through October. New girl was one of my better performers while tomato season existed in 2022. I will be planting new girl again as well as its sibling valley girl. Yes, these are all competitors to the throne of the one of California's absolute favorite varieties. Early girl has been an all-purpose hybrid tomato here since the 1970s. It's very, very popular and for good reason. It sets early. It holds and ripens early. And then well, we don't typically get a lot of fruit on it through the hottest part of the summer. You almost always get that late August, early September set when we get cooler periods, which we do. And they'll ripen here since we have such a long season, usually sunny and warm all the way into the mid part of October. You'll still often be picking early girl as late as, well, as you know, even as late as Thanksgiving. Because of that, there've always been breeders out there looking to be the next early girl. And I think we've got a couple of them that are actually good contenders for that now. Last year in 2022, the seed company Seeds and Such, because I must have ordered some seeds from them, they sent me a complimentary package of a hybrid tomato called early doll. And I decided I saw that sitting there in the box of seeds. And I go, I'll try that this year. It germinated. As I would expect, even though it allegedly was packaged for the year 2022, packaged tomato seeds can last what four or five years. So I have high hopes for early doll, although I don't see it in their latest catalog, but they do have it online. And the early dolls, supposedly, yeah, I know, maybe that's why it was part of 2022 free seed giveaway. It says it's one of the earliest tomatoes we have ever offered, says seeds in such online 55 days from planting to fruity. Early doll, well, yeah, 55 days is great. And we'll certainly see if that one gets into their list. I mean, this company has come up with a couple real good ones. And you and I both know that the one that they're sending out as a free freebie three years ago, we all gave them great feedback on the one that they've now labeled. It's a keeper, which is very productive. It set well set early, very firm fruit. And I'll mention that one took the heat very well as well. So we got to we got to keep trying these. I have a feeling. I'm not sure why there's going to be more hot spells in our future. Yeah, yeah, be advisable for us to make notes, not just about what sets early and what produces well into the season, but what takes direct hot sun well on the fruit and on the vigor of the vine. I mean, this is something that's going to be future gardeners may wish to know about our experiences with extreme heat as things change. I just put it that way. So last year, I tried three new tomato varieties for me. I tried the it's a keeper big beef plus and bodacious. And I noticed that in my notes throughout the spring and summer, I don't mention them anymore. So I'm not so sure I would plant them again. Bodacious has done very well for me three years in a row. And it did very well last year. It's actually one of my top producers of all the new varieties that I've been trying. So I do urge people to try that one. You're only going to be able to get the seed for that, I believe from Burpee seed company. I think it's theirs. Yes. And it's not something you're not going to find it at most garden centers. I do know a small one in Davis. It's likely to have it. Not everybody around is going to see it is not cheap. Let me tell you with that. Now that you're taking us on a nice scenic bypass that has me scratching my head is I was at a big box store at their garden center portion of the big box store. And I was looking at those poor young sacrificial tomato plants that are one inch or two inches tall that people are buying now, even though, like I said, we're waiting for our first 80 degree day. Heck, we would settle for a 70 degree day. So I feel sorry for those tomato plants, but they had actually to their credit, they had a good supply of cool season vegetables, which still make a lot of sense to plant in USDA zone nine in March and April, because you're going to get two more months unless the heat sets in extra early of growth. But the price. The price, Don, a four inch tomato plant was going for 595, a six pack of cool season vegetables, small babies, little ones, 698. It's like the price doubled overnight. Maybe I better raise my prices. That sounds pretty good. Yes, the prices have definitely gone up. And there's a reason, a couple reasons that are fairly obvious for that. One is the cost of heating greenhouses. You don't get tomato seedlings available in March. If you don't have a heated greenhouse, as you know, if you do it at home, you've got to do them indoors, move them out, move them in, move them out. They're not doing that in big whole sal yards. They're using propane or natural gas to heat those greenhouses. Greenhouses don't work when it's cloudy. So we've had a lot of cloudy days, like say 50 70% of our days have been cloudy from January, February into March. The greenhouses weren't working real well anyway. And the cost of seed is definitely going up. And what you'll find is that there's a lot of growers that just aren't going to take on a brand new untested, untried variety, no matter how exaggerated or let's say retail oriented, the claims and the catalogs are because of the cost of the seed. I've got one grower that tells me he's not going to do anything that's cost more than a nickel of seed. But some of these are closer to 50 cents or more as seed. I'll try them. You'll try them. I'll see if they do well. And I do men, you know, coming back to bodacious, that one has been very consistent for me now, including during extreme heat. To me, it's the best alternative to a beefsteak that you're going to get here in the Sacramento Valley or regions like the valley where it gets so hot in the summer. It takes the heat much better than a beefsteak type and it's a similar slicer. You can slice it with it's got a lot of that connective tissue that holds together for a sandwich, makes great sauce, sauces, things like that. But I do have a rule. I don't recommend a variety until I've grown it for at least two seasons, preferably very different seasons. We just went through a very hot summer. We've had cooler summers and it is never the same variety that's consistent with the very few exceptions. Bodacious so far, so far is a real winner for me. I'm not sure whether yours was just a fluke or something, but I do suggest trying it again and tested for two or three seasons before you rule it out. Big beef is a good example. First year I grew it, it was great. 30-35 fruit close to a pound apiece. I thought we've got a winner here. The next year I grew it 10 fruit. So that does happen and you need to test them for a couple years under a range of conditions. We'll be back after a quick break. If you have questions about food and farming, check out Ask a Farmer. We share information about Canadian grown food from dieticians, food experts, farmers, and those involved in the agriculture industry. Explore how your food is grown and raised and get useful information to help you make confident food choices at the grocery store. I'm your host Clinton Monchak, the Canadian farmer. You can listen to the Ask a Farmer podcast on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This may be the reason why because of fear of the weather, you might say that I probably am leaning this year to smaller tomatoes that will ripen quicker. So I'm guaranteed some tomatoes. The tomatoes I've chosen, I think the biggest one might be 8 ounces. Is a better boy about 8 ounces? Yeah, that's not right. Champion is in the same size range. There's a whole bunch of red tomatoes that are classic, reliable, better boy, champion, delicious, whopper. Those are four that I find very similar in how we use them, generally very similar in their performance. Of the four, the most consistent year to year has been champion and it's easy to remember the name, but all four of those are good. Better boy has been very consistent over the years. You get into the really big ones. You are taking some gambles. It seems to me from experience that there's more issues with blossom end rot, for example, when you have a very large tomato and you get it in early and it gets going and it's fruit, so it sets fruit. You get all excited and then you notice that the bottom is discoloring on the fruit and that one's going to be gushy on the bottom and no good. That's a tent we know probably that's a temperature and moisture-related phenomenon, but it does seem to hit the bigger ones or worse or maybe it's just that it's more disappointing when it does. I'm not sure. The key is diversify the portfolio. Yes, good advice across the board. Get some interesting sauce tomatoes because in my experience a lot of those are just very consistent, reliable cherry tomatoes. You know you can't go wrong with cherry tomatoes. Juliet. That's a sort of an in-between one that's cherry sized but firm-textured, incredibly popular. It can be a little hard to find this year, so look around for it, but try to get a whole bunch of different kinds. A couple early varieties are a very good plan and make sure you get something interesting out there so you can test some new varieties. But you're right. I think the big ones, you're just asking, I don't do nothing but oversized tomatoes. Let's put it that way. I go with the Big Zach Hybrid, the one that's grown actually as a championship sized tomato. I've had great years. I've had one year. I got 35 fruit. All of them were over a pound. They were all beautiful. One year I got three. That's a pretty big range. It was the only one I planted. It would have been a little disappointed. Well, yeah, you bring up a good point too is that for one thing, all gardening is local as we're kind of talking about here and everybody's results are going to be different. But one thing that you've talked about in the past that makes a heck of a lot of sense is by local, by those tomatoes that were developed where you live. We've often used the example of that classic heirloom tomato brandy wine, which I imagine does fine in brandy wine, Pennsylvania. Which I think is a fairly mild climate as far as I can tell, at least compared to what we have here. There's a seed breeder up in Maxwell, California that's been introducing some phenomenal tomatoes. Maxwell is about as valley as you can get here in the Sacramento Valley. They certainly get as hot as we do if not hotter up there. Most people go buy Maxwell on highway five and don't really notice it, but there's a really good deli there. There's a golf course there. There is the breeder of tomatoes. The chef's choice series have all been introduced by a company up in Maxwell. And every one of them so far has been a real winner, particularly I mentioned it many times on your program, Chef's Choice Orange, one of the first ones they came out with, hot performer for me year after year, big fruit, very firm. Now they have yellow and of course red and pink and striped and purple. And I think there's even a white one and now a black one. Several of these have won the All-America selection designation, which I think you can explain better as to having been tested in a wide range of circumstances. Exactly. They have test gardens from coast to coast and many different climates. They have national winners. They have regional winners as well. And if you go to allamericaselections.org, you can find their complete list and be prepared to download a large PDF of all those winners. But yeah, if you go by that, that's not a bad barometer to use for choosing tomato varieties. How about among your customers? What have they been raving or pooping about in the last year? Juliet continues to be extremely popular. Sungold as the top cherry tomato, there's always new ones coming along that try to challenge sungold for that position. And there are some really good cherry tomatoes out there. But that one continues to be just one of the favorites. By the way, one of the favorites everywhere. When I posted a question on a Facebook group of nursery professionals, what are your top five tomatoes? Sungold was on almost every single list as was just record early girl. Though those are consistent. Champion continues to be very good. I do have a lot of older customers. I'm not sure why who seem to really like Ace. And these older guys in their celebrity, I'll tell you, you and I aren't huge fans of celebrity, but there are some people out there that just clamor for it. So it's a good producer. I've had issues with Sunburn on it and other things. But I have to bring it in for those guys. You know how these old gardener guys are. They can be kind of grumpy. Yes. Have with their after. The other thing is a lot of them are still asking about heirloom types. I've gradually gotten to the point where if someone walks up with just heirloom tomatoes to the counter, I say, well, I want to suggest you try a hybrid too, just to see how it performs compared to those. Because you mentioned brandy wine. That's a good example. Very popular rarely produces more than one or two fruit here has been my experience. It doesn't take the heat well. There's others. There's other heirlooms out there. Mortgage lifter. It does reasonably well most years for me. Cherokee Purple has been extremely well for me. It was my top of producer in 2021 of all my tomatoes. The largest number of fruit was Cherokee Purple of all things. So it's a good one for the Valley and good one for hot climates. But you've got to try different things and be sure to get at least one or two in there that are hybrids and preferably that have that hybrid built-in disease resistance that can be very important in some areas. The heirloom that has done well for me consistently over the past probably 15 years is Gardener's Delight. It's not as small as a cherry. It's more like a plum size or a little bit bigger tomato. And it does produce throughout the season and is usually my latest performer as well. Gardener's Delight. And as far as a good cherry tomato that I've always grown, it seems. And I still grow it because it keeps performing a sweet million. Sweet million, super sweet 100. These are all in the same category of just very, very heavy producers. Now most cherry tomatoes don't have hybrid disease resistance built in. Cherry tomatoes in general had not had that. And if you're listening in an area where diseases are prevalent, you might look for the disease resistance listings on the label of some of the newer hybrids because that can be a problem, especially in places where people have rainfall during the summer. But I would say that the sweet 100 sweet million crowd, you can't go wrong with them. And in general, cherry tomatoes, of course, are very, very successful. I do want to mention one that's a local favorite over in the Davis area because we've got an older gentleman who's been advising the master gardeners here for years. And he's absolutely right about 4th of July. 4th of July is a consistent performer. You will have fruit by the 4th of July, even if you planted on about the 1st of May, as I've done to test that. It's very pretty, bright red, good flavor, small, 3 to 4 ounce fruit, very productive, relatively compact plant. It's actually described as being, I'll do some jargon here, determinant. But my experience is it continues after that first wave of fruit and continues to produce later into the season. Though it's been a very consistent performer and I find myself recommending it to novice gardeners along with a cherry tomato and a good hybrid and maybe one heirloom that catches their fancy because of the name or something like that. And that's three or four plants should give you enough tomatoes for a summer if you're just a first time gardener. I've told you about SmartPots, the original award-winning fabric planters. They're sold worldwide. SmartPots are proudly made 100% right here in the USA. They're BPA free and lead free, making them safe for growing vegetables and other edibles. Well, the folks at SmartPots have added a new product to their lineup perfect for building the healthiest soil imaginable for your garden. By composting, it's the SmartPot Compost Sack, a large 100 gallon fabric bag that's lightweight, yet extremely durable and lasts for years. It can hold 12 cubic feet of pure compost. This rugged fabric is entirely porous containing many micro pours that allow for air circulation and drainage. It's easy to start a compost pile with the SmartPot Compost Sack. Just open the sack, set it on level ground, and start adding ear compostable materials, grass clippings, vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, and more, as well as fallen leaves, straw, and shredded paper. Next, place the optional cover over the sack. That's all there is to it. SmartPots are available at independent garden centers and select Ace and True Value Hardware stores nationwide. You can find the location nearest you at their website, and you can buy it online from SmartPots. Just visit smartpots.com slash Fred, and don't forget that slash Fred part. Because on that page are details about how, for a limited time, you can get 10% off your SmartPot order by using the coupon code FRED. Do it at checkout from the SmartPots store. Visit smartpots.com slash Fred for more information about the complete line of SmartPots lightweight, colorful, award-winning fabric containers and their new compost sack. And don't forget that special farmer-fred 10% discount. It's SmartPots, the original award-winning fabric planter. Go to smartpots.com slash Fred. Let's get back to our conversation about tomatoes for 2023. With California nursery owner Don Shore, who reminds us, if you're a first-time gardener, don't let your eyes get bigger than your tummy. Oh please first-time gardeners out there. Please have a small garden and only start with a few plants. And like you say, those training wheeled tomato plants are an excellent way to begin. A smaller tomato, a cherry tomato, a mid-sized early performer, and maybe one that's going to give you something that is a good slicer. Yeah, bigger fruit and a bigger plant. And the thing is I also deal with a lot of customers where we are who have limited space, you know, a smaller backyard. That's where the determinate tomatoes can really be helpful. You know, these are the ones that grow essentially to a certain size. They more or less terminate in a bloom. It's not 100%. But they tend to put on one big crop and then they're pretty much done on relatively compact plants. Ace is a good example of a determinate tomato. One of the best known ones is Roma, which will produce almost no matter what you do. And a lot of new gardeners may not have enough room to train a 12-foot vine, which is what an indeterminate tomato vine is capable of becoming. They may not have gone out and bought an actual tomato cage that really holds a tomato. They probably bought one of those little 32-inch things that hardware stores sell. And they're going to have tomatoes running all over the place. So they're probably better off with a more compact variety that produces reliably, kind of all at once, frees up the space in August or September for the fall crop stuff that you want to start putting in at that point and gives them enough to freeze some, make some sauce and feel successful. Because one of the biggest issues with tomatoes, honestly, as you and I both know, is training them and keeping them in their place. Because they can become very large plants. And that's great. The bigger it is, the more fruit you typically get on a variety. But you were talking about eight, 10, 12-foot vine in some cases. And just for the sake of clarification, determinate tomato plant tends to produce most of its tomatoes at one time, perfect for canning purposes. And indeterminates are that sprawling vine that will start producing in July and keep producing through November. It may slow down a little bit when it gets too hot. But generally speaking, it's a small but consistent supply of tomatoes throughout the year. Yeah, my father was a tomato gardener in coastal San Diego, and he could plant tomatoes in January and still be harvesting them when he was putting in the new one's next January, because he never froze back. And they would continue steadily all through the season down. They're also becoming like 12 to 15 foot vines. Determinate varieties have some advantages. And for complete novice gardeners, there's even these very dwarf tomatoes that have come on the market. And I went ahead and tried a couple of them. Little in the pulley, little sicily, names like that. And I don't know what you officially call these. They're definitely determinate because they only grew to grew to about 18 inches. And they set one big crop of about 10 fruit about three ounces each. Okay, you could fit it in a 10 gallon container with no problem. You could even stick a little baby bush basil plant in there if you wanted to. And it was a fun thing to do. It's obviously not something that a serious gardener is going to do. But for someone who's just getting started with gardening, it actually was a pretty fun way to go. So if you're unlimited for space, I have a lot of customers in a college town who are living in an apartment with a balcony, maybe there are tomatoes out there that will fit in your situation. Tumbling Tom is another one you can do is a hanging basket tomato. The key with these, they still have pretty big root systems. So you got to keep them watered. And during the drought years, we've had a lot of problems with people just insufficiently watering their tomato plants. And that really curtails yield late in the season regardless. And if you have a climate change on your farm or Fred bingo card, you can cover it now because determinate tomato plants may be our biggest help for a tomato garden with climate change with these wacky swings of the weather because a determinate tomato is going to give you an ice crop and then probably a hunker down for some unusual late summer weather. Yeah, and people want to know how they can have a vegetable garden and conserve water. And honestly, most vegetables need the square foot bases about as much water as your lawn does. Most people don't have a 2000 square foot vegetable garden. They do have a 2000 square foot lawn. So the first way to conserve water is get rid of the lawn and just convert 10% of it to vegetables. But tomatoes need a lot of water as they're getting going. A lot of water as the fruit is developing and expanding. And then in the case of a determinate type, you can do just like the farmers over here in Yolo County do basically shut off the water at that point that if it's in the ground in a container that would be a little too extreme. But you can certainly cut back on the watering as the fruit is ripening harvest your fruit and you're done. And so your plant has gotten a good amount of water. You've gotten a reasonable crop from it. You clear it all out. It's the end of August. It's time to plant Brussels sprouts. We should point out that Don lives on class one egg soil. For those of you that have clay soil, you may not you may want to be a little bit more judicious about your watering of your tomato plants. You don't want the roots sitting in water. Correct. And also many people are probably gardening and raised planters such as farmer Fred, which is a whole different watering discussion. It's a lot of water in a small area for short periods of time. Basically, it all has to do with footprints. But that's a whole different episode here. Well, what you do is I hear from this guy Fred Hoffman that you go out and you get a soil moisture meter that has a Bluetooth thing that tells your computer when you need to water. Well, you got to get your computer to figure out how to go out there and turn on the water. Yeah, it's a combination moisture meter and soil temperature gauge. And yes, it'll even set off an alarm if it gets too dry. So when you're on vacation, it just tells you that's the one back here and he's turned on the valve. Oh, no, you just do it from your smartphone. That's all. You know, you get one of these modern irrigation control systems where you can do everything and including close your garage door. But hey, what are you starting and what are you growing that's new this year in the way of tomatoes? Well, there's a new variety that I started two years ago on the basis of a customer's recommendation planted it last year as well. And I can now tout it highly is called rugby. Rugby is a new hybrid. It's got VFF. Want to explain to people what that means? Verticillium, fusarium, one and two, I guess, resistance. Both of the two of the three strains of fusarium and rugby is a very large sauce type tomato. It's like a giant Roma, except the plant is in fact indeterminate and produces the roughly six to eight ounce fruit, which is way bigger than Roma. And they're very meaty. They hold up well in the heat. They continue producing well all the way through the season unlike Roma, which is a determinate all at once kind of tomato. So rugby is one that we're growing. We were able to bring in the seed. You can still order the seed online. There's a couple American seed companies that carry it even though it was introduced in Bulgaria. And rugby is a phenomenal producer that has moved up rapidly. The fastest ascent from try this to my top 10 list that I've actually ever seen for a variety on my list, which have been ongoing for well, for four decades now. So rugby is now up there in my top 10 as one that will replace San Marzano in your garden, replace Roma in your garden. You now have a sauce and salsa tomato rugby VFF hybrid. Available now at totally tomato.com, one of my favorite tomato catalogs and also from Eden brothers.com. And maybe if you're a real gardener, you probably have a stack of about 25 garden catalogs that you peruse this time of year every year. And I've pulled aside a few of those that have tomatoes on the cover because I want to see what these new ones are. And when you read their descriptions, you well, let's just say, if you're familiar with how they used to describe the playmate of the month in playboarding as far as what they liked, you know, walks at sunset along the beach, things like that. A lot of these descriptions of tomatoes and catalogs are very similar in that regard. So for instance, Gurney's catalog features their tomato of the year is the early darling hybrid. They say new variety raises the bar on early season tomatoes, early darlings, brilliant red, three to four ounce fruits are some of the best tasting flavorful extra early tomatoes we've tried. And they're not biased at all. No, it says it says it has high crack resistance. The fruit quality is superb. What is the downside to high crack resistance? Cracks of tomato cracking can lead to spoilage as the fruit is ripening. And it is characteristic of some heirloom varieties. It's been a huge problem for me with Amish paste, which for a long time was was one of my favorite sauce tomatoes. And as they're expanding and then beginning to ripen, splits will occur in the skin up near the stem. And if that happens and any moisture is in there at all, it'll start to rot and decay very quickly. So you tend to have to harvest them before they're fully ripe and it can lead to some spoilage. So crack resistance, which I think is usually related to moisture irregularities. In other words, not keeping the soil evenly watered, it can be a big problem on some varieties. And I'm assuming that this is more of a problem in rain, high rainfall places, when the rainfall is erratic, that's my best assumption on that. I didn't know that they could breed or select for that, but I do know some of the old heirloom types that can be a real problem. Some of the Italian heirlooms, I mean, I'm a big fan, as you know, of costiluto jenivese. But the ones that have that fluted, I don't even know how to describe it, but the fascinatingly ribbed pattern, they can split along those ribs and that can become a point of spoilage. So crack resistance could be a very desirable characteristic. Grinnies wouldn't be my first go-to company for things like this. I looked at the companies like Burpee that have a long history of introducing really good varieties, nothing against Grinnies, but that's just not ever been their background. So I tend to, like you have, I think there's about 15 or 20 catalogs stacked up on my table right here. That includes companies that are nothing but tomatoes and companies that have been famous for decades for their tomato varieties. Now you mentioned earlier, the bodacious tomato from Burpee, their new one is vivacious. Yeah, I've got some of that going. They're not cheap. Notice the seed price. Oh, 20 seeds for 895. Yes. Yeah. So we're going to have maybe a little premium price on those four-inch ones. But yes, I do kind of trust their descriptions because they know they have a reputation to uphold. There's also locally here in the Sacramento Valley and also in the East Bay, Brad Gates, Wild Boar Farms always has new to me anyway, new ones that I either haven't tried before or don't recall him having had before. These are not hybrids. These are open pollinated selections that he's stabilized. So they're like heirloom, but they're modern. So they're modern heirlooms, right? There's a classic definition of an oxamoron. He's got one called Napa Chardonnay that I think is just fascinating. And I'm going to grow this one. It's a very productive cherry tomato. That's what we need with pearlescent pale yellow fruit. Okay. Purlescent. We've written pearlescent. Yes. Sweet rich flavor hangs well. This is a key thing that I notice of on some varieties. So you can harvest whole clusters at once. Anyone who's grown cherry tomatoes knows that could be a big selling point. Having to go out there and pick them off individually out of clusters with fruit in various stages of ripening. That's annoying. So this one will hang on there until the whole cluster is ripe. You can pick it like a cluster of grapes and bring it in. And I can't wait to see a pearlescent pale yellow cherry tomato. Purlescent. Napa Chardonnay. Napa Chardonnay. All right. Going. I'm still rolling in my head the idea of high crack resistance. Does that mean that the skin is really thick? I would assume it probably means tougher skin. And that actually has some advantages as we know. So a champion, one of the reasons I come back to that one also mentioned lemon boy in this regard. Those are two that are really typically still have good fruit on them in the first or second week of November. Why? Because they're tough skin. You might think tough skin isn't necessarily desirable, especially if you like to cook with tomatoes. Some of the soft-type tomatoes will emphasize how they're thin skin and easy to peel. Well, if anything goes wrong, like say, I don't know, 4 inches of rain in early October, which happened last year, 4 inches of rain in late September, which happened what two years ago, something like that. Hail in the early fall or just a sudden period of colder weather. Any blemish in the skin of a ripening tomato will become a point of entry for decomposition organism. In other words, bacteria and stuff that will get in and cause the fruit to just go bad right there on the vine. Heifer skinned ones and champion and a yellow lemon boy, excuse me, are too that I know for a fact, just have a tougher skin. They hold up better. And I would think crack resistance may be another way of saying heifer skin. But you know, tougher skin is not really good catalog marketing jargon. Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean by catalog descriptions that sometimes these descriptions might be couching something else. For a slicing tomato, that wouldn't be a big issue. One that you're cutting into wedges for your salad. Yeah, if you're cooking it into a sauce, you probably gonna have to skim out those those skins. But it is really cool to live in a place where you can have tomatoes at Thanksgiving. You have a small yard and you think you don't have the room for fruit trees? Well, maybe you better think again. Because Dave Wilson nursery wants to show you how to grow great tasting fruits like peaches, apples, pluots and nut trees. Plus they have potted fruits such as blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, boys and berries, figs, grapes, hops, kiwi, olives and pomegranates. These are all plants that you can grow in small areas. You can even grow many of them in containers on patios as well. It's called backyard orchard culture and you can get step by step information via the Dave Wilson YouTube videos. So where do you find those? Well, just go to Dave Wilson dot com, click on the home garden tab at the top of the page. Also in that home garden tab, you're going to find a link to their fruit and nut harvest chart. You can be picking delicious, healthy fruits from your own yard from May to December here in USDA 0 9. And something else you're going to find in that home garden tab. You're going to find the closest nursery to you that carries Dave Wilson's quality fruit trees and they're in nurseries from coast to coast. So start the backyard orchard of your dreams at Dave Wilson dot com. You're listening to the 2023 tomato extravaganzo with nursery owner Don Schor and let's delve into the topic of thwarting summer diseases of tomatoes. This description for the early darling hybrid that's in the Gurney's catalog also goes on to say that the determinate plant plants bear very heavy yields before summer diseases set in. Right. So there's a rainfall climate issue. We don't usually get summer diseases here in the Sacramento Valley or anywhere in Interior or Lulan, California unless they're soil-borne disease such as Verdicillium, Fusarium or the nematode problem, which is a parasitic organism. They're talking about probably about late blight, which can be a big problem in places where it rains. We don't have overhead sprinklers on our tomatoes here. And so once we get to May and the humidity is dropping every day to let's say the 20s or 30s or lower, pretty much every disease stops. I had a customer come in a couple of years ago just moved here from Indiana and he just walked in and said, okay, I just planted my 50 tomato plants and I stepped back a little bit. So 50, okay. And they're two feet apart. All right, that's going to be a fun jungle by mid-summer. And he wanted to know what fungicide rotations were recommended here in California to keep those summer diseases at bay because back there they used three that they rotated, which is very important if you're listening in Indiana or Florida or places where it apparently rains in the summer. You want to use different mode of action so on and so forth. You don't have to worry about that. Anywhere I think west of the Mississippi and south of Oregon. So if you're in a dry climate where it's where you're irrigating in the summer and there's no overhead rain and no sprinklers or nothing like that happening, you might get a little late blight on a tomato plant and you can typically prune that right out, put it in a bag, dispose of it, and that's the end of it. But if there is a place where you had a rainstorm and there's a little late blight on a tomato plant and there have been years when this happens, he'll just move right down the road. In his 50 tomato plants, two feet apart, you have an infection laboratory there. You're asking for trouble when you plant them that close together. He didn't realize how big they get out here. But the good news is typically summer diseases are not a huge issue for us in the dry climate that we have. But the problem is you can create those problems. If, let's say you have a vegetable garden right next to a lawn and the lawn has sprinklers, if that sprinkler water hits those tomato plants, especially if it's late in the afternoon, you could have those disease issues. Right. Or if you don't have full sun or if they're real crowded or you add all those things up and you do get something like late blight, you might have it spread rapidly the next time the sprinklers come on. In our climate, just allowing them to be a little more open perhaps pruning it out as soon as you see it, learning to recognize the three different leaf blight diseases that typically happen on tomatoes. And the summer one is the late blight. It can really cause a lot of dieback very rapidly. So once you see that, if you've had it, try to adjust how you're irrigating, try to prune them away from each other a little bit. The only time I'd recommend pruning tomatoes is for disease problems like this. We generally don't have to prune tomatoes at all in our climate, but there are places where I'm told they do this specifically to reduce the density of the interior of the vine to get better airflow through there, to keep them from growing all over each other so that if they do happen to get late blight, it tends to at least move more slowly and they can do something about it. There are fungicides labeled for it and the may choose to do some of those, but in general, our best recommendation is to use any change in the environment that you can adapt to reduce the spread of something and of course, remove it quickly. If you see leaves getting infected or worse still, a whole branch beginning to die back rapidly. Space your tomato plants three to four feet apart. Full sun is good. I'm rethinking the whole idea of full sun though, and I'm wondering if late afternoon shade isn't a bad idea with some of the hot summers we have started getting. Yeah, this is how my comparison isn't completely fair because I moved my entire vegetable garden because of gophers to a place where there were no gophers and still are no gophers. It happens to get shade from about five o'clock on. Both all morning, all afternoon, and then the very hottest sun of the day, the shadow pattern was going over those plants, so that may be why some of my varieties didn't have as bad sunburn. It wouldn't be a bad thing to have a little bit of late afternoon sun on them. Of course, we aren't trying to tell people to plant tomatoes in the shade. That generally is not a good plan, but a little shade from the 116 degree temperature, that might make a little difference in how much fruit gets to the table. Well, since you brought it up, mention a few tomato varieties for people who maybe at most only have six hours a day of full sun. Well, ACE is a good one for that. It's a nice compact grower. Shady lady, if you can find it, Shady lady is another compact grower that people have done very, very well with smaller, fruited types. I think any of the girls, really girl, new girl, are going to be good choices. You did the valley girl and there's dirty girls out there for some people who want the open pollinated version of early girl. I think that it's a keeper would be great. I think that almost any one, two or three ounce fruit type cherry tomatoes are the slightly larger ones are going to be good choices. They have people who only have one side of the house they can guard not. They want to know, well, is the east side or the west side better? With that choice, I'd go to the east side. Morning sun is better than reflected afternoon sun. You might not even get fruit set with reflected afternoon sun because of arm to the pollination process from those kind of temperatures. They have found that cherry tomatoes grow into these monster vines, but they do produce well in that situation. So looking for smaller, fruited types would almost surely be a better bet than trying to grow a very large, fruited tomato where you only have, let's say, four to six hours of sun. It really gets into the definition of what is full sun. Eight hours a day, in my opinion, is full sun. Four to six hours is the minimum. Anything less than that, it's going to be very challenging to do well with tomatoes. I have tested a couple others. I've done, I'll say it slowly, brin sipa borgizi, brin sipa borgizi, which is the sun drying tomato in a surprising amount of shade. You'll did well. I was very happy with it. So that's one that people might want to grow if they're into Italian cooking and want to sun dry their own tomatoes. That one did well. It's a small fruit. So again, I think the smaller, fruited ones that yield more quickly, probably better choices in that situation. I am facing a new challenge this year here since the January wind and rainstorm blew down my neighbor's 60 foot cedar tree, which fell in my yard. And he took out his suffering oak tree that was next to it. So for the first time in six years, I have a full sun backyard, which means I have to, this will be a very experimental year for me to see what does well where. Yeah, you're going to have more heat on the plants when they're blooming. And that can be the other effective heat that we don't talk about as much. Many tomato plants won't pollinate, self pollinate. They don't need bees or anything like that. They're all self pollinating above about 90 degrees. And some of them, one of the reasons beefsteak does not do well here in the valley is that we are above 90 degrees like most of the summer. So when they flower, the fires just fall off. And you'll probably want to look at some of those reliable ones that are somewhat more heat tolerant with respect to self pollination, not just with respect to how well the fruit can take that kind of heat, but whether they're going to even set fruit for you. I had a customer who planted on that west side, you know, while you had the choice was east or west, he did the west side, he brought me a picture of four tomato vines growing great, not one of them, four different varieties, not one of them, had any fruit because he had managed to create a spot that was too hot for them to properly self pollinate. It was literally too hot for the flowers to set fruit. So you may want to do a little experimenting and see what can take those kind of high temperatures better for self pollination. I do keep coming back to champion for that because I directly compared champion and better boy in that regard and in a very hot summer when they were side by side with comparable conditions, champion did continue to fruit longer during the season. The thing to look at in the in the cage are their fruit distributed all the way up the cage or there are a whole bunch of fruit down the bottom two to three feet. And then it goes up and out of the cage and all the next fruit is on the branches that are cascading to the ground. At the end of the season, that's your best indicator as to whether that variety was pollinating okay during higher temperatures. Early girl generally does not. Better boy does okay. Champion definitely did better. With a name like jumping worm, you would expect this soil creature to be hopping all over the country. Well, it is. More and more locales are reporting outbreaks of this mulch eating soil till the storing worm Debbie flower and I talked about jumping worms on two previous episodes of the garden basics podcast first in episode 126 way back in August of 2021. And again with an update in episode 217 recorded in August of 2022. I would invite you to go back and listen to those two shows and we'll have links to those episodes in the show notes. However, we're updating the jumping worm information in the latest beyond the garden basics newsletter and podcast. If you're searching for more information about the jumping worm, you can get it in the beyond the garden basics newsletter, which includes a side by side comparison of jumping worms and earthworms. So you know exactly what you're looking for. Plus, we mentioned two new control tactics that are being researched at the University of Wisconsin. And we have for you some calming advice. We may just need to learn to live with this critter, but there are ways to keeping your soil in top shape. All that is in today's beyond the garden basics newsletter. For current newsletter subscribers, look for the issue entitled jumping worms update again. If you're already a subscriber, it's probably in your email waiting for you now, or you can start a free subscription or read it online. It's free. Find the link to the newsletter in today's show notes or sign up at the newsletter link at our homepage, garden basics.net. I would imagine being that it is California that on the first Sunday, did we have one sunny weekend in February? I can't remember. But it's usually the first sunny weekend in February. People flock to the nurseries to get their tomato plants. Did you have that run? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. We've been talking to people about tomatoes since late January. Mostly they're kind of understanding this year with the pouring rain alternated with freezing weather that it's a little inappropriate. But we all say repeatedly, for best results, we plant tomatoes in April peppers and eggplants in May. Yes, melons too. And for the end me. And after we get the 14th person asking when we're going to have them, I say, all right, next week, I'll bring in our first sacrificial tomatoes. Put them out there and you can watch what happens to tomato seedlings when they're outside and the nights are getting to the upper 30s and low 40s. It's not frost that we're worried about. The roots get so cold, they immediately start to show macro and micronutrient deficiencies. They stop growing. They just look basically look stunted and happy. And then when I bring new plants in two weeks later, they're much more robust in those cell and I throw out the first ones. Though I call them my sacrificial tomatoes, they're out there with a little sign over them right now that says it's too early. And that seems to get the point across. Yeah, I want to buy tomatoes early. I get these old guys that want them early. They're going to transplant them. They want to know why none of us sell six packs of tomatoes anymore. That's a whole nother conversation. I say, well, you know, if you really want tomatoes in late January, early February, you need to go to a place that has a heated greenhouse. There's a good nursery chain in Sacramento that has heated greenhouses. Go to them because they'll probably, I assume so, be willing to go in the greenhouse and bring you a couple plants to sell them to right out of the greenhouse. You don't want to put them out in the open where the nights are getting that cold. It's not good for the seedlings. Yeah, and you've pointed this out many times as well that you don't want to put tomatoes in the ground to be be set by the ravages of nature until the nighttime temperatures are consistently above 50 degrees. Yeah, 50 to 55 is ideal. So all temperatures, what really matters. So those of you with raised planters can find with your, you know, high tech, soil sensors, soil temperature, 60 degrees is what we look for for tomatoes to go in, which typically is about the third week of April. Some guy that has a birthday, I can't remember his name, has his birthday about the third week of April. And so we all plan on his birthday. Daytime highs around 80, typically that's late April. Don't put your peppers and eggplant in then tomatoes will recover. They'll just sit there and do nothing if it's too cold, but they'll catch up a few weeks later. You've gained very little, if anything, peppers and eggplant. If you plant them before the soil is about 70 degrees, the nighttime's around 60 degrees, we've hit 85 at least a couple times. Your peppers are going to be stunned at all seasons. I test this every year just for fun, put a few in early, put more in a month later. The one's put in a month later, always outperform the first ones that I planted. They're set back by being put in early tomatoes. It's not as bad. They'll recover because they're typically rather vigorous plants, but there's no advantage to it. And sometimes we get, I don't know, late frost or hail or things like that, they come along and do more damage to them. So there's no real gain from early planting. We don't have to hurry here. We've got a season that goes all through October, practically. You're going to, you have a long growing season here, and you don't really have any reason to rush out there and get them planted in the first sunny weekend in February. The beauty of living here where we do in California, you could start tomato seeds in April, plant them in June and have tomatoes by August and have plenty of tomatoes. I test this every year by planting some in the first week of July, because I always have some leftovers and some plants in the first week of August. And plants put in the first week of August, put on a line that I'm running the water a lot. There's peppers and things like that on it, not with my regular tomato line, gave me great yields in October. Each plant produced more than 20 fruit. So we have a long season here and it's very sunny. We have zero cloud cover and zero rainfall basically between first of May and the end of September, typically. And so they get everything they need and the soil is still warm, they'll keep going. So you can, it's not really too late in early June to plant. Sure, you'll get more yield if you get things in earlier and get them trained up and have more flowering points, more fruiting points. It's not too late. It's going to be a late start for a lot of people this year. The soil is completely saturated here in 2023 with all the rainfall, not just happening now, but happening in the next week or two as well, apparently. So they're going to be saturated soil conditions, going to be a while before people can get in and prep their beds. Don't worry, you're not too late. We're not going to run out of tomato seedlings. I sometimes hear that concern. There's going to be plenty of seedlings out there, if anything, kind of a glut at first. And you can continue planting all the way through May and into June. And if things go haywire in May, there'll be tomato plants probably in one gallon or two gallon containers at the nursery. We learned this a long time ago. Yeah, we'll take some of the ones that are getting a little tall and stick them in one gallon within two or three weeks. If not faster, they're rooted all the way to the bottom. Personally, I do recommend for those of you old guys out there who buy your plants early because you want to get them and you're afraid we're all going to run out. Keep them moving. If they're in a little three inch pot, four inch pot, or worst of all the little six packs, shift those into a bigger container to get a bigger root system and a healthier plant. By the time my plants go on the ground, they're very typically 18 to 24 inches tall, sometimes taller. They've been sitting in one gallon containers in a nice sunny location. They've been growing nice and healthy and they go right in the ground. They don't miss a beat. And what I hate to see is people buying four inch pots of tomatoes in March and planting those four little plants out in early May. They're a little stunted at that point. They got some catching up to do. So invest a little bit of one gallon container and potting soil and move them on up to the next size. Keep them moving so the root systems can develop properly. If I'm transplanting tomatoes, historically, I do the transplanting during the NCAA basketball playoffs, which are going on now. And if they need another transplanting, that would be probably in mid-April. And I wait for my birthday and transplant them again. Transplant them again or into the ground if it's appropriate. Yes. When everybody needs to have that one place near the front door or outside on the south side, the traps a little heat so that they don't have to worry about them on a cooler than average night, in a place where it's warm during the daytime where the plants can grow nice and healthy, where it's easy to keep them watered. That's really important. Start collecting them by the time mine go on the ground. Some of them have been in one gallon pots for two, three, four weeks, but they're nice and healthy. That's the key. So if you do grab them early, I know the type, when I see a display of tomatoes, I own a nursery and I walk over to it and look at it and see what they've got. But look, here's one I don't have. I'll buy that one even if it's really March. So I understand this. I then think, all right, this one goes into one gallon can as soon as I get home because I know it's going to be a few weeks before it gets in the ground. Keep them moving, keep them healthy. Then you'll get a good start to them. Very commonly, I used to joke that I'm planting them below the gopher's zone because I'll dig a knife. Nice deep hole, 18 inches deep if I have to drop them way down the bottom because they will root out the stem. So planting your tomatoes, you're uniquely planting tomatoes deep is actually a very good way to go. And my joke is that gophers are lazy and don't go that deep. So they have actually gotten past the gopher's zone by doing that. It also gives you better results in the long run. A deeper rooted plant gets off to a better start that way. We should point out that the tops of the tomato plants are still above ground, correct? Yes, yes. And Jesus. All right. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for that clarification. It's called photosynthesis. It's one of those things. I'm looking forward to, for us, a very different tomato growing year, but very satisfying. And besides that, we are out of homemade salsa, and I need to make more. I think the biggest difference this year will be there's plenty of soil moisture. And we didn't realize last year how big an impact that had the last two years at such low rainfall 2021 2022. But when you went out to plant, you were digging down into soil that was dry. And I realized that in my whole bed, I put on the drip system, I ran it for actually several hours to completely hydrate the whole zone. Needless to say, that won't be necessary here in 2023. The soil, if anything, is I think the term is a field capacity. It's completely fully saturated and water is running off as I look out the window. Though I don't think I'll have any concern with that. But a lot of the impact and a lot of people out there, maybe it was their first or second year gardening started in the pandemic and they had really disappointing results. The soil was very dry. It wasn't your fault. Yes, you weren't watering enough, but you had no way to know that there was literally no soil moisture down there. This year, we're off to a much better start as far as that goes. As I always caution, all gardening is local. Your results may vary. Yes, every year is different. That's the weather, hot, cool, lots of rain, drought. Tomato plants need even moisture when they're getting going or else they just don't do well. What about fertilizer? You mentioned that I'm on Class 1 agricultural soil. If they get anything at all, it's something at the time of planting. Either put down in the hole or it's actually typically in the soil next I moved them into. These new potting soils already have plenty of nutrients. I might give them one feeding with fish emulsion as they're getting going and that's it. I don't think for most people listening in an area with reasonable true garden soil that it's necessary or advisable to give a lot of nitrogen to tomato plants, let the plant tell you. Let the plant be your guide. If it's not growing well, it might need some nitrogen and that's pretty much all it's likely to need. I do not recommend high phosphorus fertilizers. Don't add any of those funky soil additives that your friend on Facebook mentioned. They do not need Epsom salts. I saw one recently where a lady was putting a cup of sugar in the hole once she planted tomato plants because they quote, made them sweeter. Let's suggest that maybe social media is not your best place to go for advice on how to plant your tomatoes. Don't overfeed them because they'll just grow really rank and won't actually fruit as well. Be the young plants with a gentle fertilizer or turn something into the time of planting. That's typically most places people are listening. All you would need, the exception would be raised plantar beds where you may need to add some supplemental nitrogen either by incorporating it at the time of planting or perhaps side dressing a few weeks later. My cat is very familiar with the sound of me shaking the one gallon fish emulsion bottle and comes running. We've adopted it as a way of fertilizing young seedlings in the nursery because we're growing them organically. It's about a two-day process of the fumes dissipating. It does have a nursery-ish smell so we're not too objecting to it too much but it's a great fertilizer but definitely attracts certain critters. Well there you go. All right tomatoes 2023. Go for it. Start small. Have fun. Diversify your portfolio. Don Shore, he owns Redwood Barn Nursery in Davis, California. He has a website too. Redwood Barn.com. Check it out. Don, thanks for all the great tomato tips. All right. Always great to be here. Let's talk at the end of the season and see how it went. The Garden Basics with Farmer Fred Podcast comes out once a week on Fridays plus the newsletter podcast that comes with the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter continues and that will also be released on Fridays. Both are free and they're brought to you by SmartPods and Dave Wilson Nursery. The Garden Basics podcast is available wherever podcasts are handed out and that includes our homepage, Garden Basics.net and that's where you can also sign up for the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast. That's Garden Basics.net or you can use the links in today's show notes and thank you so much for listening.