Rotten Tomatoes

Along with a lot of success in my new garden I have had a few failures.  The biggest and most heartbreaking failure so far is my tomatoes.  I planted my usual cherry tomatoes which are doing 'alright' but the plants I had the biggest hopes for were a heritage variety 'Tigerella' and an acid free 'Roma'.

All of my tomatoes started out with wonderfully strong growth, happily setting out side shoots and flowers.  The trouble began when the plants began to set fruit.  The cherry tomatoes continued to grow at a slower rate but the 2 large breeds stalled, big time.  I thought I was doing everything right, a good long soak every 3 days, a weekly feed of smelly seaweed and none of my chicken poop tea which is too high in nitrogen.

They may look red and delicious but my large breeds of tomatoes are a disaster

The striped Tigerella should be "very sweet, rich and fruity tasting".  My dreams for these beauties were large bowls of tomato salads, sliced in sandwiches, fried for breakfast, chucked on the BBQ or even just gobbled up in the garden.  Mine are not sweet, rich or fruity.  They are dry and musky tasting, like they're going from unripe to bad in one foul swoop.  A disaster.

The Roma were meant for sauces, bottling and preserves but they are even worse, the foliage is turning brown and the fruit are succumbing to blossom end rot.  You can see the early stages below.  The soft spot at the base slowly turns from grey to brown, then black and rotten.  The tomato is pretty much inedible, the inside is dry, the seeds are black and the fruit tastes rancid.

The beggings of blossom end rot

There was a short sit and cry in my garden, my tomato plants adding to my pain, dropping some of their half grown fruit from the vine as I sat there.  I soon picked myself up again, deciding this is something to learn from.  Heck, this is my first summer in a new property and in a different zone no less.  No more sub-tropical Auckland for me - we're in the temperate foggy, frosty, windy Waikato.  And I have a huge paddock over my back fence, southerly winds have pelted over the hay field this summer, beating some of my vege patch within an inch of it's life.

After a little research I have found that blossom end rot is due to lack of calcium, needed for cell formation and strong tomatoes.  Next year I will spend more time prepping my soil with blood and bone, pot-ash and other goodies.  Fingers crossed we will reap the benefits with feasts of fresh tomatoes and a larder full of tomato sauces and preserves.