I HARVESTED TWO RIPE TOMATOES THIS WEEK, or so I thought. Too bad they were all black and nasty inside. Like I said not long ago in “Tomato Troubles in a Wet Year,” we’ve got trouble here in River City. And the plot just sickened.
I’m thinking the nearly 6 inches of additional rain this last week won’t exactly be providing any curative effects, either.
What’s wrong with my fruit? The plants they came from look otherwise-healthy (all are hybrid paste types; my heirlooms are on the critical list already, having no built-in disease resistance, apparently, to whatever ails me). I actually think that the red ones with the black insides suffered not from a disease, but from some meteorological upset at pollination time, affecting the would-be seeds, which might mean the later-setting ones (many green fruits are hanging now, all apparently intact) will be OK. (Aren’t I the endless Pollyana? Please, don’t burst my watery bubble.)
But that green guy with wet blossom end? I bet he has some anthracnose, or alternaria, or something else disgusting-sounding in the fungal arena.
I am no plant pathologist, so who knows what’s really up, and I suspect even the professionals’ heads are spinning in a year that has the Pacific Northwest and parts of the South like Texas toasted, and the Northeast drowning and relatively cool.
I’m just a gardener, and a cook whose vegetarian diet relies heavily on an annual stash of all my year’s worth of tomato products that I put up. So what I all I really want to know is this:
Where’s that going to come from? The usual “staples” (like part of last year’s frozen bounty, below) are starting to look like they’ll be luxury items in this upside-down year.
after the flood: tomato troubles in a wet year 
That is awful! One hint I heard somewhere is putting a Tums pill by tomato plant roots. It is supposed to stop blossom end rot. Our tomatos were planted in Miracle Gro soil with fertilizers. Probably not the most organic but the crops are doing great. The other thing I did was put copper tape around the raised bed perimeter(no slugs!).
Here’s a good link that explains BER (blossom end rot):
http://faq.gardenweb.com/faq/lists/tomato/2000082444023571.html
The huge amount of rain washes the calcium out of the soil, collapsing the plant’s cell walls. At least the damage isn’t contagious or fungal and is limited to the tomatoes at hand….If you can balance the ABSURD amount of water the plants are getting, it should fix itself on future tomatoes from the same plant. (and if you can stop all this rain, please, send that magic to Ohio! we’re drowning!)
This is why I love to look at blogs like yours….where sensible people concentrate on things like perennials instead of re-building a veggie garden every year to see how to “learn something new the hard way” like I seem to be doing. I’m sorry about your tomatoes. At least you can FIND your plants…mine seem hidden by all the weeds, no matter how often I pull them! I just cleaned out the canning jar cupboard yesterday and looked at all those jars that won’t be full of sauce—unless, of course, I use this as a good excuse to stock up at the farmers’ market…..
Those look terrible. At first I thought they were red peppers with mold inside (the way they get if you leave them too long). I’m so sorry. I think I”ll go out now and stock up on canned tomatoes (although I gather this is an Eastern, not nationwide blight).
Aargh! I feel your pain! I am a Pac Nor’wester suffering from various tomato issues. I found your links to Cornell very helpful.
Upon the advice of my local garden center employee, I drenched my tomato’s in compost tea. Hopefully it will help.
P.S.
I am a newbie to your site and have found all of the information very helpful!
Welcome, Coryy. Yes, all the leaching of nutrients will certainly make Calcium uptake a challenge. The thing about these lesions: they are watery, not leathery, and happened on a fully formed fruit, not one that was half-developed, hence my wondering/suspecting if/that it was one of the other things.
Who knows (and a rotten tomato’s a rotten tomato!)? Cornell has a whole page about blossom end rot as well, for people wanting lots of detail. See you soon again, and thanks for the encouragement.
Welcome, Katie. I am so sorry to read of your weather, which has been the inverse proportion of here (I think we are both in one of Dante’s stages of hell or whatever, as are my friends in Texas, but each a different stage). Compost tea is a good idea, thank you, and also thanks for your kind words. See you soon.
This has been such a terrible year here in the northeast. I’m putting off ripping out all of my tomatoes at this point. They are all quickly dying of early blight. I’ve had it most years, but usually in September. The rain is killing all the tomatoes and I don’t know a single gardener who isn’t affected around here. I’ll be stocking up on canned tomatoes before the price goes sky high.
An hour north of you, Margaret, my half-dozen tomato plants are a total wash out. I have resorted to a local farmers market vendor who has a large greenhouse…
No just-off-the-vine insalata caprese for me this year (sigh!)
Welcome, Heather. I am hoarding my remaining frozen tomato sauce from 08, and hoping that at some farm market or other I find passable tomatoes for some amount of sauce, if mine go kaput the rest of the way.
Welcome, Bee Balm Gal. Greenhouse is probably going to be the way to go, you are right. And did you have to say “off-the-vine caprese”? Mouth is watering!
See you both again, I hope.
Margaret, did you read the article on our tomatoes in this week’s New York Times (Style/Dining section)? Apparently, Northeast potatoes are going to have a rough go of it this year as well. The smaller greenmarkets I’ve been to in Manhattan and the Bronx the past two Saturdays have had pretty slim pickings for tomatoes, and what I did get were just tasteless. At least the corn is good….
All of my Brandywine tomatoes are toast. They look great until they begin to ripen, then this black, rotted hole begins at the bottom and at the top (stem end) of the tomato and they just get disgusting. When green, they appear fine (and quite a dandy size), but let them put on a little ‘blush’ of color and the rotting party begins. Truly disappointing after all of the tender loving care.
Sorry about the tomatoes. They look awful. I’m afraid I’m not going to see a single tomato. Read on.
Being in the northeast with the cooler and wetter weather my tomatoes weren’t doing too bad until the deer found them. They’ve always been around but usually leave my veggie garden alone. Notice I said usually. Not this year. First they stepped over the fence and ate the tops off of the plants. When they did that I at least had some green fruit on the plants. Then to add insult to injury they came back and ate all but one of the green tomatoes off all my plants and they’ve continued to eat more of the plants themselves. Aaaack! I was so disgusted when I saw all the tomatoes gone I wanted to rip the plants out of the ground! Any suggestions on how to keep them out of my veggie garden next year???
Welcome, Karen. Yes, I did see The Times story, after the one in the Washington Post etc. Not looking hopeful at all. Sigh. See you soon again, if not for tomato news then something else maybe? :)
man, read these reports with some sense of relief since my 15 tomato plants are flowered and have green fruit…then I saw the post about ‘first blush’ and kaput…that’ll be me screaming from NW IL….sigh
Catherine
Oh, dear! I don’t want to say this, because I can already feel the barrage of blossom-end-rotted tomatoes hitting me, but here in the mid-Atlantic things dried up in late June and we have had the second-driest July on record. Therefore–no early or late blight on the tomatoes, but not many tomatoes either because it just didn’t get warm enough for them to set their fruit, and some of my most reliable performers have just turned up their toes and given in.
There is though a silver lining. We have a bumper crop of eggplant. Why did I feel it necessary to plant four of them when my husband doesn’t like eggplant even when I call it aubergine, and although I like it I can only eat so much?
I’m just a bit north of you (in Old Chatham) and, so far, my tomatoes look the best they ever have……
@Debkb: I am all about deer fence (whether just the vegetable area or the whole place. I don’t think anything else is suitable, especially on edibles, or as reliable as a barrier (whether temporary or permanent, and around a small or large area).
I am curious, Margaret, can you still use the walls of those tomatoes? From the photo it appears that they are normal — if so, it would be a shame to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Seeing them made me think of my old backyard peach tree. Just as the peaches reached fragrant peak perfection, the nasty squirrel would come along, pick one up in his furry mitts, take one bite and then throw the rest of the beautiful peach down to the grass where it would be covered in ants. At first I was disgusted, but as the days went on I changed my tune, hosed the ants off, cut away the squirrel bite and ate the rest of those peaches! Too delicious to let them go!
I would like to report that here in SE PA, I have been harvesting tomatoes for the past few weeks. I always plant a few different varieties , and I have to report that the Big Boy’s in my garden have been the best producers. My heirlooms are not so happy, ‘Mr Stripey’ past on a while ago, Brandywines are holding their own, although I found that by harvesting them before they are fully ripened, keeps the cracking to a minimum.
My grandparents were Italian immigrants and they raised 8 children on what they grew, or the animals they kept. I can remember the excitement when the old Italian guys discovered the pomodoro “Bigga Boy”, followed by “Bigga Gal”. They would grow nothing else. This year, I now know why.
Well, the rain has come again–don’t see why we can’t get two sunny days in a row–we seem to have no trouble gathering strings of rainy days!–and our tomatoes are clinging wetly to their vines. One is red, but not yet ripe, and two or three are starting to blush, including one on the “upside-down experiment.” The u-d plant is pretty bedraggled, and not keeping up with its right-side up buddies in production, but still going. What I see from this perspective is that there is lots more opportunity for the vegetation to wither (not enough consistent moisture in a situation of consistent overwatering–go figure).
Next year, I think I’ll line the frame with peat mats and plant strawberries through the sides; might be pretty, even if I don’t get fruit–the woodchucks are not tall enough to eat the plants and I do have bird-netting available! Hope my tomatoes hang in, but I am prepared for the worst…I think.
Welcome, Susan. Yes, the heirlooms really have taken a horrible beating in our wet areas. Good lesson for all of us to mix it up (which I always do….but I may mix it up even more in the future). See you soon again.
@Johanna: Yes, can use them (and will). I always cut around bad parts of fruits and vegetables, having a very high “icky” tolerance here. The scary part, though: If you were canning whole tomatoes, as I did for years, you’d never know which fruits had this inside and wow, what a disaster that would cause.
I’m just keeping my fingers crossed. My tomatoes look OK so far. (Was that thunder I just heard?!) On a related question . . . does foliar feeding really work? Many of my plants need a pick-me-up, and I have a supply of fish emulsion on hand, but I don’t want to dump more water on the roots. I could use my sprayer to “feed” the leaves, if it would help.
Prob’ly nothing would help much in a season as bad as this one in the Northeast, but some thoughts:
I’ve read that many of the tomato plants were already carrying diseases prior to sale. Tomatoes are really easy to grow from seed, and home-grown plants eliminate that risk.
Gardens Alive has a tomato fertilizer that contains both calcium and magnesium I think, both of which seem to make the plants a little stronger.
Adding regular old playground sand and all the compost than can be spared into the planting holes does improve drainage.
And then there’s the Sun Dance…..
I had to pull up all but four of my more-than-a-dozen plants yesterday because we finally got the blight. Sob. I harvested pounds upon pounds of green tomatoes, and since there’s not space in my freezer (it’s been a banner year for high-bush blackberries), I’m canning up a few quarts of green tomato sauce as I type. It’s not fresh, red, ripe tomato sauce, to be sure, but it’s still pretty good with lots of cheese, garlic and herbs. Good luck Margaret, and may this rotten rain go straight to hades.
O sorry to hear about the tomatoes. That doesn’t look good…. I hate it when that happens!!
I’m in the Northeast and this year has been a bad harvest year for me. My tomatoes and eggplants are all in the Earthbox and I think the Earthbox helped a bit but the harvest is bad compare to last year. All my tomatoes are still green though.
We could use some of that rain here in Nebraska! My tomatoes aren’t as vigorous as they have been in past years but I am getting some decent ones. I’ve added bonemeal to my soil in years past and that seems to have helped with blossom end rot. Good luck!
This has all been very interesting to me as a container gardener. Lots of admonitions to keep tomato plants evenly moist in containers. And yet, too much water seems like a very bad thing, by this post. I’m hoping that as long as the containers have adequate drainage, the roots (and the fruit) will stay healthy.
Welcome, Kristina. I offered the rain gods first-class airfare to travel your way and farther west as well, but no dice. Thanks for the tips; I added bone meal in spring, but I think the 2 feet of rain since has just about undone everything. Sigh. See you soon.
I just had the world’s worst tomato- a fake tomato from the store that didn’t even improve with lime juice. I wish I were in Mesa, Arizonia where my brother harvested an organic bumper crop and canned about 60 gallons (or so I’ve been told) of the lovely fruit. It’s just one of those years.
Welcome, Rae. One of those years, indeed. Wow, your brother sounds like he is on the winning side of the equation. Maybe next year here, huh? See you soon, I hope.
Ooh, that looks awful. No garden this year, but I’m thinking of you guys out East as the daily thunderstorm ravages outside.
same here on the Jersey Shore a disaster so far but container cherries and juliet grapes are thriving Why is that?
At least you have tomatoes to hand wring over. Here in Tx most of us have given up for the year – too hot too soon and for too long for most tomato varieties. We barely got a handful for all our expensive extra water we shared with those plants. The peppers on the other hand, are looking to provide us with a bumper crop. [Hand raised to hot dry sky] “Next year!!”.
My cherry tomato (one plant) has sprawled all over and become so heavy with fruit that it tore down a neighboring basket, yesterday. No casualties except one half-uprooted pineapple sage. I hope this is normal — it keeps popping out with more baby green tomatoes, and meanwhile the first ones are growing extremely slowly. And my big indeterminate vines barely have fruit yet. You Nor’easters have me worried.
Tomatoes seem good here but not ripe yet.
We’ll see what happens in Dakota.
I did have a pineapple sage that bloomed
beautiful red (at least label said Pineapple sage)
but have never been able to get plant again
My three tomato plants started off beautifully, and I sensed the addition of egg shell for calcium was paying off. But alas, after the Early Girl outdid herself with beautifully formed fruit, something hit all our community gardens and the plant leaves shriveled one by one, spreading quickly. It is not the usual blight, for what fruit developed seemed unaffected except by dwindling size and number, but the taste was not there either. Strange!
Welcome, Helen. Yes, the mysteries this year are many. Doubt we will ever solve them all, or know what killed what. So sorry. Hope we see you again soon, even without tomatoes. :)
I snagged the pineapple sage at a local garden center by going first thing in the morning on a Friday in June — seems like that’s the only way to get the good stuff around here — they were down to one plant already and I’d struck out for the past couple years.
Totally worth all the effort.
Margaret, am so sorry about your tomatoes, have been there, done that, but we moved this past year, put in a raised garden and my tomatoes are great for a change and hopefully I can do the same next year. Thanks for all your information.
Welcome, Ruth. Mine are in raised beds that have been prepped in a major way this spring…but nothing helps against two feet of rain. See you soon again (and send some tomatoes, OK?).
Hi Margaret -
I love your blog and have become a regular reader. I too, am suffering from blight this year in my PA garden. I have 16 gorgeous fat and thriving tomato plants, all home grown from seed, many over 6 ft. tall. I have been judiciously picking off a little early blight and Septoria leaf spot and spraying with a sulfur based fungicide as a preventitive.
Sadly, on Wednesday I noticed late blight spots on my treasured Thomas Jefferson Brandywines, grown from seed from Monticello. Next evening (last night)I had to cut down 7 of my beauties, all heirlooms. Tears stung my eyes. Surgery on the others this morning and a much stronger fungicide. I’m not sure that will even help, but I’m not giving them up without a big fight.
I can’t imagine how the Irish felt. Green blessings to eveyone.
Cheers :-)
Margaret ,Im in Claverack. My tomatoes look exactly like yours. Its my first year with a veg garden and Im so disappointed. I have 16 plants, 6 varieties and they are looking really bad. Can I harvest the ones which are very green this early? If I had raised beds ( I just made mounds) would they have fared better? Funny thing is after all this rain- they looked OK until this week. Then, in addition to these black/brown areas on the fruit about 1/2- 1/3 of the leaves on the plants (on stems which don’t hold fruit) are yellow OR crisp and brown. Strange reaction to too much water- no?
Welcome, Donna. My ‘Brandywine’ tomatoes are in the worst shape of all, too. No late blight (yet) but ugh. I am enchanted to see the post about your little combo potting shed-greenhouse creation, your new escape place. Jealous! Thanks for all, and see you soon.
@Ami: Sounds like various kinds of fungal problems, as we all have. Some cause leaves to be spotted, some then get crispy, and all manner of things. I am trying to allow fruits to at least start to color up, and in fact some are finally ripening.
Poor tomatoes. it sounds awful for everyone in the NE US this year. Hope the farmers relying on tomato crops don’t fare too badly.
We normally have issues with late blight here in BC, and after a really bad infestation one year that occurred earlier than usual, I now plant ALL my tomatoes under cover — either in the greenhouse, or well back under the eaves in our patio. It has reduced the late blight issue entirely for me. Everything is also in separate pots just in case a plant gets diseased, I can easily eradicate everything associated with that particular plant. I have all on a drip system, and since doing so, have had not issues with BER. It definitely reduces the number of tomato plants I plant now, AND requires a bit more planning at the beginning of the season, but means I actually get tomatoes I can use.
Hope the weather improves so you get a bit of summer this year!
First of all, thanks for the wonderful blog. My sister turned me on to all your blogs this spring and I’ve enjoyed each one.
After an unseasonably cool July, August has hit with a vengeance here in eastern Kansas. I’m hoping with the hot sun all those green tomatoes will start ripening soon.
I thought I was so smart this year when I planted 30 plants in an old cold frame that housed 3 goats last summer (they were my fence-clearing crew). I figured all that goat manure would give me a great tomato harvest.
Well, the plants are huge, they reach over my head, but they’ve spent the early summer producing way too much leaf and not enough tomatoes. Hopefully with the heat the fruit will catch up. There’s never a dull moment for a gardener.
I cut into my first rotten tomato today, so immediately I jumped on Google to find out what the problem is. I have the exact same problem, beautifully ripened on the outside and black and rotted interiors. Oddly, my heirlooms (green zebras & various pear and cherries) are fine, while my roma hybrids look similar to the pictures that you took. I have been so paranoid about late blight, so when my fruit ripened without any noticeable bruises or lesions I thought I was in the clear. This is my first year with a garden, and it has felt like we live in a swamp in Jersey. As soon as the ground dries, we get torrential downpour. Best wishes for the rest of your green tomatoes!
Welcome, Judy. Sounds like you have Nitrogen galore! And yes, never a dull moment. Glad you sister put us in touch, and hope that we will see you again here soon.
Welcome Lindsay. I think we had interference with pollination, as I said in the post…I have now cut up and cooked maybe 20 such fruits, and only 2 others had this situation with the decaying seeds. So I am having a little harvest now, better than nothing, and hope to at least get to put up half of my usual tomato sauce. We shall see. Again, don’t give up; this isn’t the devastating late blight or anything, at least not yet. :)
Oh, how I long for some of your rain! I’m on Whidbey Island in Washington and this has been one of the driest summers ever. We had the lightest of showers this morning but all it did was add humidity. I’ll be turning on the soakers once again. Sorry about your tomato rot! Usually that is the scurge of our gardens! Strange weather!
Welcome, Dori. I have so many gardening friends in the PNW, and all are in pain after the freakish winter followed by this impossible drought. I am so sorry. Hope we see you soon again, anyway…we can all just complain together and commiserate. :)
I’m in PNW too, near Mt. Rainier – this was my “heirloom tomato experiment” year – hah. Even getting them started indoors in Feb. only a couple varieties have set fruit, and no telling yet if some of that will ripen enough to get tomatoes and seeds for next year. Even the Early Girls have not made a good showing and they have BER to boot. Oh well. The beans and zukes are going great…will just buy fresh from the farmer’s market and canned for winter this year.