Wizard of Id by Parker and Hart for September 17, 2018

Would you rather have crop failure?

Guess why?

Or you end up picking them all green to avoid the Freezing rain and snow storms and they don’t ripen until January.

Make spaghetti sauce then.

This only happens when you use magic.

Or determinate cultivars. Get an indeterminate variety, like Better Boy.

Ain’t mommy nature wonderful..

Safety in numbers. With that strategy at least some are bound to escape from being eaten.

That could sell the surplus to the peasants as throwing material …

Not sure about that…never had enough sun to grow them, but NOTHING tastes much better than a good home-grown tomato! Alone w/a little salt, a slice on a sandwich, cut up in a salad, just so many ways to use them. And there is a very real difference in the taste between a home grown and a hot-house tomato. A home grown tomato is out of this world!

Mine don’t all ripen the same day… not even on the same plant.

What’s more, I also like growing some indoors, on a windowsill or a table by the window. Fresh-plucked tomatoes in the middle of winter are wonderful.

same thing happens with my figs…green to ripe in 24 hrs all of them.

Perfect timing. The Fink has a speech next week.

That’s exactly what I want to happen…..if I want to can tomatoes or make salsa! :o)

I wouldn’t know; apparently the birds/squirrels/fieldmice/deer like them green!

Can it,Wiz ;)

Or, just a thought you know, may be space out your plantings? ? ?

The Wiz has not learned that there are two types of tomato plants, determinate and indeterminate. The determinates were bread to all ripen at the same time to make it easy to harvest a large commercial field all at the same time…

The indeterminate varieties are for home gardens and continue to grow for several weeks producing tomatoes that ripen at different times across a month or two.

I buy ONE “early girl” tomato plant each spring. I have WAY more tomatoes constantly than I eat. Even when the dog discovered he LIKES tomatoes and he steals one per day.

I put in one Better Boy, one 4th of July (early variety), one Roma, and one that was supposed to be a yellow variety called Lemon Boy. The latter ended up being a bi-color beefsteak type.

With the warm weather we’ve had since the start of May (supposed to be highs the 90s all this week), production has been heavy. The 4th of Julys have been particularly prolific. Too bad they don’t taste as good as the Better Boys. The “fall wave” is well under way.

I’m allergic; therefore, I don’t care.

That always seems to happen to my neighbour. I keep getting freebies and I can’t eat them fast enough. Thankfully he doesn’t grow zucchini.

So true.