2026 Avalon Peninsula Newfoundland tomatoes

[Steph S]

After three brutally hot summers, evidently the "cold blob" has reformed in the Atlantic and we are pretty much blowing hot and cold at this point, July being our hottest month, so I really don't know if we will have the same trying conditions in July - but so far it's still getting pretty hot.

The determinate tomatoes I bred for our decade of cold summers are still my favorite tomatoes.  Skipper Pink and Rodney are stable now and I missed them in my off summer last year.  So especially considering the grocery price issues I did start them among my plants and shared them out to my community of growers.  And as usual they are doing what I expect of them.

Since Early Blight/Alternaria is maybe our biggest climate change challenge, and indeterminates are reported in general to be more resistant, I also revived a couple of my small fruited indeterminate lines, as well as including some indeterminate OP's with larger fruit:  Rose, recommended by a friend for superlative taste, and Mazarini which I have grown before and is fairly early and very productive with probably the largest fruit I've ever grown.  So Mazarini is very stacked for  size genes and I am interested in seeing how that might bump up production in the smaller fruited determinate lines.  Although actually Mazarini is such a beast and very early to flower and set - earlier than I recalled - I am thinking to try Maz as a mother and diversify my maternal dna. She is very vigorous with short internodes and large, rambling clusters, and was extremely productive in the year grown.  I don't recall tasting them because they were so large (never eat anything bigger than your head?) anyway my production goes to big eaters of tomatoes, I don't want to cut something I can't eat in one sitting!
Rose, in contrast, is quite late to produce any flowers, small clusters, weakly suckering, and overall seems poorly adapted to the conditions here.  But I do hope to get some of her pollen onto Rodney and see what kind of extra tasty and better adapted beef might result.   

My own smaller fruited indeterminate lines are F4's with very different albeit equally large growth habits.   Black Kitten Paws is Stupice X Black Cherry which somehow became multiflora at F2, the black showed up in F3.  Clusters are 20-40 fruit, a pink-black minibeef with excellent taste.  I am thinking about the multiflora cluster trait as a climate change benefit - aside from the fact that Stupice is on the upper end of heat tolerance, and the plants have good self-shade architecture.  Just thinking, if your season is cut short but your first cluster has 35 tomatoes you got something. 
The other line is Medovaya Kaplya X (Kimberley X Zolotye Kupola) and is a large cherry or salad sized amber yellow fruit with a ladder type truss, very rambling and productive.  The plant is at the hotter end of the greenhouse and I'm hoping to train the long (ever so long) leaders downward in that space to really test the heat tolerance, so far fruit set is excellent.  Very vigorous grower which had some disease issues in the past but so far looking healthy.

Although I was reluctant to load up on unstable plants for selection, I had to include 8 plants from the tangerine crosses out of Amish Orange-Yellow Oxheart. Golden Songs I tried one of the lines that was put outdoors for failing to set, and did very well outside.  Kept the earliest in, two others are in the outdoor setup with a third on the fence.  Jolly Boat is an F3 out of that cross with no tangerine (afaik) and a pink black very similar to the Skipper Pink parent only larger.  Again kept the earliest in greenhouse while three others are now outdoors.    These lines have given me a lot to think about in terms of growth habit, just looking at them and how they are different from each other and from the stabilized Rodney and Skipper, in terms of needing support or not, how readily they set etc.  In the summer when I weighed out the production to compare plants, these lines did come up short.  So thinking about the reasons for that and how you would cross, select or otherwise compensate.

Also rounded out my selection of visitors with the dwarf Lime Green Salad and the micro Aztec Yellow.  Neither of them are doing particularly well but they do have some fruit growing at this point, just a bit late compared to the home tomatoes.
Oh and Tim inspired me to give actual production space to the F1 cross of Rodney x Pervaya Lyubov, which are doing fantastic and if I counted the fruit set are likely way ahead of anything except maybe Skipper Pink, in sturdy trusses of 5 or 6 fruit.  Definitely worth the space allocated.

I started my tomatoes on the late side, around April 15.   I did an experimental seed treatment with garlic after reading about some trials in that regard.  10 g of fresh garlic finely rasped to 100 ml of water.  Filtered and used to soak seeds overnight.  Hoping to remove any trace of Alternaria or other fungal disease and give the plants a fresh start.  Everything seems AOK for that but there is some new to me or previously unnoticed spot especially on Rose which I've had to prune off and evidently not garlic susceptible. 
WRT Alternaria, temperatures over 30C and sunny high UV are key to activate the spores, but IME plants rarely show susceptibility unless they are at the point of ripening the fruit.  At that time they are vulnerable and the disease shows up.  We have definitely had the conditions for spore germination but I am not seeing disease as the plants are still setting.
Wondering if fertilizing before the fruit ripening hormone change might help to ward it off...
Not everything is genetic but also our growing techniques have to be optimized for extreme conditions.

Tomato plants went into the greenhouse early in their small pots to make space for peppers under the lights, and actually seem to have matured more quickly that way.  Starting early doesn't always mean earlier fruit - we did have a very cold and late spring after a super long heavy snow winter. But greenhouse temperatures have been higher than I expected as well. It's a rocky place and maybe there is just residual heat from the mass here. IDK.
 
The season is going pretty well so far, with decent set not a lot of lossy temperatures. The greenhouse has been between 90-95F but has not exceeded 95F.  So there are some drops attributable to that but there have been sets on the same days as well.  Skipper Pink will have the first ripe fruit, some time in July and probably getting close.  They still have tons of flowers to set though.

So that's about the size of it. Will post some pics later.
 

[Steph S]

I'm in the deluge of harvest work these days without a break.  Garlic, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes.
But it rained and I took a day to go through my pics.
I have clean seeds from early fruit of my two stable varieties, Skipper Pink and Rodney, which I'm planning to OSSI pledge when I get another break.

These are rugged tomatoes, what can I say.  I had the pleasure of visiting a friend's new garden last week, where they put my plants in the ground for stake it and forget it.  Skipper Pink was an early treat, Rodney "is great" she said, and the F1 of Rodney and Pervaya Lyubov was lying on the ground with at least a dozen  clusters of fruit a few inches apart, "these are boring" I said and she defended with "it's a good sandwich tomato".  Very healthy plants for outdoors and lots of fruit. The "Warbler" (name change pending since there is an OP now of that name at Bunny Hop) also was useful, but only the Kitten Paws crapped out and didn't grow.  In the OP's, Mazarini produced a couple of fruit but Lime Green Salad had nothing.  This tends to confirm my view that the dwarfs need more heat to produce - I got some fruit in my greenhouse and they are delicious, very nice.  I do like LGS and made a couple crosses with it so hopefully we can get past the climate/earliness challenge.

In my place, a different season with some surprises. Skipper Pink failed to pollinate some of its early fruit and produced some seedless pea sized raisins, while the seeded fruit on those racemes were much larger than normal.  It was earlier than others by more than 10 days.  Rodney were later than normal.  Pretty much everything late, and after a brutal prune down this weekend there are still a ton of fruit waiting to ripen.

OP vs F1:  Well @TimDH I was duly impressed.  The RodneyxPervaya Lyubov plants were incredibly easy to manage and very productive.  Aside from the regular production of clusters up the plant, they were actually the first to have disease or insect damage on the outer canopy, which I pruned off, but they then did not invest heavily in producing more foliage, they just grew up their fruit and leaves stayed healthy.  When leaves started to go it was the lower foliage below ripening clusters, so the maintenance was really orderly.  The darn things were like a tomato machine.  And WRT the blight resistance, anazingly good, considering that Pervaya Lyubov is one of the worst.  The down side, unfortunately, the taste of them is very ordinary.  It's the slice you got on your burger at the takeout.  With both parents being on the sweet side, I was really surprised how boring the F1 could be.  I noticed before that an F1 involving yellow and red would be bland tasting, and maybe it's just the combo of red and pink that shuts out the deeper flavor?  IDK.  Size of the F1 was probably closer to Rodney than Pervaya Lyubov, Lime Green Salad shown for comparison in the same grow.
I did make a cross with Rodney and Mazarini, still green, but I also got crosses between Mazarini (huge size genetics as shown below) and an F4 I'm calling Jolly Boat, which is a pink-black small heart very similar in taste to Skipper Pink parent but twice the size, very super sweet and meaty.. I just love these.  I have a second F1 fruit growing with pollen from Rose, which was very unproductive and late but by reputation a great flavor parent, we shall see.  Obviously these are unstable F1's but they will make an easy growout for me because they're all pink.  I might find out something about those flavor combos.  Rodney X Mazarini would be an interesting grow just to confirm F1 cluster genetics re simple cluster dominance as also the duel of size between handy and OMG.
Largest Mazarini weighed in at 561g, that's probably the biggest fruit I've grown and a good bit larger than my personal ambition.  I actually prefer medium sized fruit, and a safer bet for the grower than investing in huge fruit representing a huge loss if anything goes wrong...

Too many tomatoes ATM.

[whwoz]

Some beautiful fruit there Steph