Tomatoes as tall as I am
Two of my tomatoes plants growing at the community garden are nearly as tall as I am. The White Cherry & Blondkopfchen — both are in the picture below — come up to my shoulder, and have long since outgrown their four feet tall cages. I’m fully a believer in the amazing starts and planting instructions from Love Apple Farms. So far there are 3 unripe White Cherry fruits along with some smaller ones. It’s taking a while for the fruit to set, but that’s the name of the game in San Francisco.
I have 8 varieties of tomatoes growing — 4 at my house in pots and 4 at the community garden, but it’s just those two that have grown that tall. It’s been fascinating to see how the various types of tomatoes grow, blossom and set fruit so differently.
The Black Ethiopian tomato at the community garden has started setting fruit as well, although only a few.
The Rosalita Cherry tomatoes in a pot on my deck — a fairly windy and foggy spot, but with decent sun — have the most fruit so far. Surprisingly, the Rosalita has even more fruit than any of the plants at the community garden where it’s warmer and they get more direct sun. Rosalita gets the award for most prolific tomato so far.
The other varieties I’m growing are Taxi, Black Cherry, Green Doctors and Green Zebra. Taxi is in a pot on my deck. It’s a much more compact plant than the others and was much later to start blossoming. There are only 1 or 2 tiny inklings of fruit setting yet, but it seems like the plant has hit a growth spurt and has lots of new sunny yellow blossoms.
The Black Cherry tomato is also in a pot on my deck, but out in the front of my house. I wanted to experiment to see if the conditions (sunlight & wind mostly) are better there. This plant was the first at the house to set fruit, and has a couple small fruits growing now, albeit slowly.
The Green Zebra is Bex’s plant, and her favorite tomato. It’s in a 5 gallon bucket on the deck. (I’m also experimenting this year with different containers.) It hasn’t set any fruit yet but has the healthiest looking rich green leaves out of all the plants. It has several big blossoms though. I might need to move it to a spot on the deck where it gets a little more sun.
Green Doctors is a green cherry tomato plant at the community garden. It’s not doing so well. The leaves are super funky looking, curled in and purplish, and I found little red aphids crawling around on it last weekend. However, it seems like growing flowers that attract beneficial insects has done the trick because I counted 12 ladybugs crawling around different parts of my plot. I’m hoping they will make a meal out of the aphids.
I’ve been using liquid fertilizer to keep my plants healthy — I make a “tea” out of worm castings from my worm bin. I also wanted to try out a combo fish-seaweed fertilizer. I was visiting Fire Escape Farms last week (a really cool pop up gardening store in the Mission District), and wanted to support her so I bought some there. I’ll fertilize the tomatoes every couple weeks for the rest of the season, probably.
What kind of tomatoes are you growing? How are they doing?
Read more about my adventures in tomato growing in chilly San Francisco.
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Nice-looking plants!
I’m also growing Black Cherry and a variation of yours, Red Zebra. I agree, Black Cherry has been the most productive so far… tall, lots of leaves and flowers, the first to fruit. I have seven types of tomatoes growing… and I think 19 tomato plants. “Think” because I planted 16 of them, but have some volunteers growing wild in my yard. They’ve gotten so big that I can’t tell how many are in that crazy mass.
Oh, Rebecca! I am so envious. I am not growing Black Cherries this year. They are productive tomatoes and hardly cracks in our weather.
Well done!
I have lots of green tomatoes…although the Sweet Million has a few that are starting to change color. Weather in Seattle has been cloudy and rainy so I’m surprised I even have green tomatoes.