A Tomato Jungle

Okay, for those of you who don't know, we can't really let our tomatoes ripen on the vines. The birds around here are vicious little beasts that seek out all manner of fruit and peck the heck out of them. I've even noticed that they've been going after the green tomatoes lately.

Our response, if you've read my other posts, was to encage the entire kitchen garden with chicken wire and fish nets. As a result our losses to flying pests dropped from somewhere around 90% to about 30%, which on the whole is a big improvement over before. However, we still have to pick most of our tomatoes at the breaker stage in order to rescue them before the smaller birds who can get past our defenses can find them. For the most part, I've seen that they get about half of what we don't manage to find at the breaker stage, and usually within 24 hours after the fruit begins to change color.

We do use bags to cover some of the tomatoes, and we manage to let some of our tomatoes ripen on the vine, but if you've ever tried to bag every tomato in your garden, you'll either run out of baggies, or you'll get tired of bagging tomatoes on a daily basis. Thus, harvesting at the breaker stage or just past the breaker stage is a decent enough comrpromise for most of the fruits, and for those we bag - it is nice to have a fully vine ripened tomato every once in a while to boot.

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Anyhow, the tomatoes in our garden are huge. The so-called determinate and semi-determinate varieties are bigger than most indeterminate plants I've seen on this island. One, probably a Kewalo, has already reached at least 7-9 feet high, and doesn't look like it is slowing down...

The Brandywine/Porterhouse plants are also quite tall now. I'm not sure which they are, but I'm 90% sure they're Porterhouse tomatoes from our Burpee seed order. So far I've only found one fruit on the six vines, but I'm hopeful. As usual, I think the plants are having trouble setting fruit... probably heat distress, but just in case, I'll be side dressing the tomato boxes with fertilizer this week.

But the whole point of this post was to point out how the garden is a veritable tomato jungle. Plus, it seems to fascinate people who have never seen such large tomato plants before. Even I'm somewhat amazed at their size. Of course, now that they've all begun setting large loads of fruit, we're down to a daily harvest schedule of morning and evening checks. We may not be harvesting loads of tomatoes, but more than enough for personal consumption and to give small baggies away to friends.

That's all for today. And no... Sorry... No pictures.