Do you grow tomatoes?
Outdoor Ontario

Do you grow tomatoes?

Charline

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This year, my tomatoes taste better and some of the skins are not as thick as they were last year. I believe it either has something to do with the weather or my watering. What do you think?


Wanna see?


https://youtu.be/oKHv_FPxtjg?feature=shared


Shortsighted

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Your tomatoes seem to be healthy and blight-free and therefore worth the effort of growing.  Without any doubt, any garden-grown tomato is an explosion of flavour when compared to the insipid produce from a store, excluding perhaps a few items occasionally available at Whole Foods or Farm Boy.  The soil here in the backyard is contaminated by blight, which can remain in the soil for seven years.  Growing tomatoes here would require a sequestered container and virgin soil and I've got enough to do as it is, I don't need any more work.  I'm sorry Charline, but while watching your video I kept expecting a Monty Python surprise, like you feigning choking on a tomato, going into convulsions, or just spitting macerated tomato bits over the bowl while pretending that it was otherwise delicious; or taking a drink of water and then having a spray of water douse the entire table as if from a garden hose.  I could go on but it would get even nastier.  I can't help it ... can't take anything seriously ... I'm addicted to the absurd in a Trump-filled world and with Putin on the fritz.  How can anyone take anything seriously any more.  Even art is now the antithesis of beauty, having developed into something vulgar, ugly and absurd.  I'll have some coffee now, relax and watch your video again because it is rather quotidian and therefore soothing.  Tomatoes should be one of the joys of eating.  Plenty of sun, and regularly-spaced rain works for grapes, so why not also for tomatoes.


Charline

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Thanks for the comments.


I would have had more reactions to the tomatoes except I was too focused on sampling.


I read that Early Girl was a boring tomato but it was actually a pleasant surprise! It was very juicy with a distinctive sweetness. if I was thirty and hungry, I would eat the Early Girl because it is more juicy and filling.


You mentioned blight. Did you see the brown patch at the bottom? What was it? But when I was eating it, I totally forgot about it and ate the whole thing. Did not feel any difference.


The only small problem for my balcony plants is mildew due to the heat from the air conditioner. I would go to a health food store to get some neem oil. I think.


Shortsighted

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I would imagine that mildew requires moisture and if your plants are inside under the influence of AC then moisture would not be an issue.  AC does remove heat and moisture from inside and directs it outside (fan blowing over compressor) so where is your internal source of heat, beside that entering from the outside?  Even a window unit would have the compressor on the exterior section.  My father used to grow both Early Girl and Sweet 100, among others, but the blight won out.  Changing the location of the bed didn't help much more than a year.  When he was in the hospital I brought a whole bowl of cherry tomatoes (red and gold) into the room and shared them with a neighbouring patient who couldn't believe that tomatoes could actually taste like that.  Store-bought tomatoes are mostly used for colour, not taste.  In order to genetically engineer tomato DNA to produce long-lasting fruit, that can withstand some abuse through shipping and handling, it must lose some other trait, which happens to be taste.  Society has created its preferred hierarchy, looks before taste, beauty before brains, fame before talent ... you know, the product of propaganda.  You will appreciate what we want you to appreciate, place value where we want you to place value, or cease to understand what quality even means, just like society has collectively agreed to cease to understand or value what privacy even means in everyone's strive to be famous.  So now we have beautifully uniform, perfectly-shaped bland tomatoes without the hint of a visual blemish and never mind that in doing so we have removed the very sole of the tomato, not very good and not very bad, just milquetoast.  As long as it looks good and we can sell it and make an obscene profit.  Also, a tomato with character might be wildly appreciated by a few with taste and hated by even more people that can't handle such qualities, and that situation might harm commerce.  I could go on but I've already alienated half the population of this forum ... all three of you.


Charline

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Thanks again, SS.


My plants are on my balcony near the AC under a roof.  I only have a small balcony.


Shortsighted

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A small balcony is perfect when it's filled with talented enthusiasm.  I'm sure that yours is decorated with TLC and a panoply of original ideas.  I'm convinced that you wouldn't have it any other way.  It's too bad you are not equipped to design your own tomato and call it Northern Girl, grown from the cracks in the Canadian Shield, able to make long stalks that rival sunflowers, ripening faster than a speeding Sylvaner, able to leap into the harvesting basket with a single nudge ... why ... it's Northern Girl!  My mouth waters.  I didn't mean that the way it sounds either.