Rotten Tomatoes

Gardening is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get. Okay, so you know, but you don’t know if it’ll actually come to fruition.

With the abundance of green tomatoes on the vines in our garden boxes, from some we planted from seed, some we purchased, and some that sowed themselves from the previous year, I thought for certain our tomato harvest would be plentiful. Instead, an abundance of rain and cool weather has not only prevented them from ripening, but has caused them to start rotting. I’d say a little over half our crop has rotted out, and that’s quite a bit from an already miniscule amount of fruit these plants have produced (on the ones that actually produced fruit at all.) I guess this is what they refer to as slim pickings.

My original thought on the matter was that we would at least have green tomatoes to fry and dip into some freshly made garlic mayonnaise, but now I don’t know if we’ll even have that. The only two tomatoes that have been giving ripened fruit are the Roma and Sun Gold (orange cherry) plants, the latter being the more proficient. Our Early Girl and Oregon Spring seem to be the most susceptible.

So I decided to do a little more research about rotting tomatoes, and a whole host of things I didn’t consider popped up. I did think blossom end rot could be the culprit on some, but most of these fruits were getting all brown and squishy in various areas and not near the blossom end. As it turns out, even though our summer has been less than ideal, the sun we have been getting has been scalding the tomatoes, probably due to an insufficient amount of leaves to protect them. That, and it also appears that a couple of the plants have early blight which severely decreased the amount of shade available to the fruit. Due to this, there will absolutely not be any tomatoes in that box next year. Methinks lettuce and spinach will have to take their place.

Gardening is a lot of trial and error, and unfortunately this year had a lot of errors, both on our part and the cool, wet summer we had. However, we had absolutely delicious onions, carrots, and strawberries, and our herbs did extremely well too, especially the basils and sage. Our squashes are a different story, as from the thirty or so pumpkin plants we have two pumpkins, and from the four zucchinis we actually pulled four zucchinis… all from the same plant. Oh well, you can’t have a good harvest every year!