The State of my Tomatoes This Year

Chris Mousseau

This year’s growing season started off fabulously. We had a prolonged cool and wet spring so I waited until the beginning of June before finally transplanting tomatoes and annuals: the soil by then was warm and moist. I mulched well, things started to grow and, for a while, all was good in my little garden world. What I noticed quite quickly though was how few flowers appeared on the tomato stalks, and how few baby tomatoes developed from them. From a spray of a half dozen or more flowers, only one or three tomatoes appeared. If that. Of course I’m going to blame the lack of rain. In my corner of the county only a half inch or so was recorded in July. My rain barrels (from which the garden is exclusively watered) were nearly emptied, then were nearly filled, and are once again nearly empty. And we all know what inconsistent or inadequate watering means for tomatoes…the dreaded blossom end rot, which develops when calcium in the soil isn’t dissolved into water and taken up by roots. It’s afflicting about half of my already meager crop.

From the top, these Kenosha paste tomatoes look just fabulous, don’t they? But from the bottom…
Ugh!

It doesn’t help when you go out one morning to discover a pair of gargantuan tomato hornworms busily munching away on not only leaves but green tomatoes as well! (That’s what the featured photo at the top is…) Anyway…a trip to one of our local farm stands in a few weeks to purchase a bushel of San Marzano’s is in the cards this year…

14 Comments

  1. Uh, oh! Very disappointing. I think I’d harvest what I could, salvaging the edible parts & use that in a sauce. By the time I discovered 3 Tomato Hornworms, they were covered by Braconid wasp cocoons, so I left them alone. You’re going to make sauce from the Marzanos? Can or freeze? Hopefully next year will be a better gardening year!

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  2. I remember a friend mentioning the year hornworms destroyed her father’s tomato crop, almost literally overnight. I don’t remember seeing one, but this one makes the truth of her claim seem possible.

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    1. Yes, they’re absolutely voracious! Happily I’ve only found the two…so far…and if there were more the damage would be obvious.

      Weird thing though is that I almost want to let them be…knowing the spectacular huge moths they turn into…

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  6. When we kept chickens, we would grab hornworms off our tomatoes with tongs and throw them into the coop. Where I live now, we never realized we had the hornworms until we found them drowned in the swimming pool. Blossom end rot I never could figure out. Seems like, when one gets a good crop of beautiful tomatoes it’s no small thing!!

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  7. Oh dear, how frustrating! Some years are bad but some are good… so I wish you better luck next year Chris! Mine often have blossom end rot too, but I have managed to avoid it so far this year. (Fingers crossed). But we just had two nights down to 7°C and the tomatoes did NOT like that! I am just so grateful we don’t have those horrible hornworms to deal with here….

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