The 2024 Tomato Harvest Begins

Our 2024 tomato harvest began in earnest today. Here’s who came in first.

We’ve plenty of fresh picked Big Beef x Costoluto tomatoes

A little over a week ago I was wondering if it was going to be a decent year for tomatoes. I’ve had some trouble with blossom end rot with the San Marzanos in one of the tomato beds, and a couple of the others just didn’t seem to be in any great hurry to blossom and fruit.

The one set of tomatoes that did seem to be doing well were the 3rd generation Big Mama tomatoes I wrote about a couple weeks ago. However, four of the eight plants look to have become determinates and have since started showing signs of dying back. (The four determinates are the slicer variant. The plum variants are apparently indeterminate, which is interesting.)

Then, this past Thursday a water pipe in the crawlspace under our house sprung a leak (probably days before I discovered it), and I was forced to shut off the water for the weekend until the plumber got here to repair it on Monday.

It hasn’t rained here in San Diego in over two months, so all my water barrels are dry. Plus it’s super sunny and the daytime temperatures are regularly in the low-to-mid 90’s. Normally at this time of year I have to water every other day to keep the garden from frying, but, with he water off, that wasn’t an option. I just had to hope for the best and see what would survive.

The pipe was fixed this morning, so I scurried down to the veggie garden to turn the irrigation on and survey the damage.

Sadly, the cucumbers, cauliflower, and broccoli are toast. The beans look as though they took a beating as well. The peppers and tomatoes on the other hand, look like the rode out the drought without much more damage than some wilting leaves and dropped flowers.

In fact, the big beefsteak tomatoes, a four or five generation old cross between Big Beef and Costoluto, went from being big greeny-yellow tomatoes taking their sweet time to ripen, to nearly a full bushel of red-ripe fruit.

Going without water for a few days seemed to kick the tomatoes into high gear

Now we have 15 or 20 pounds of tomatoes ready to process and jar, so I know what I’ll be doing for the next couple of days. (I’ll also be thinking about why letting those tomatoes go dry made the fruit ripen faster.)

Hooray for small disasters not leading to bigger ones. Let the 2024 tomato harvest begin!