I must admit, this was a tough year for my garden. I am the Tomato Lady and should have beautiful tomatoes and to be honest, I thought about questioning my calling. Slugs, flea beetles, aphids, early blight, late blight, splitting, cat facing, you name it, I had it. The weather was cold and rainy in June, then it got really hot for a long time, then it rained. All of my tomatoes split. You expect most of the cherries to split with their thin skins, (juliet is a fine tasting tomato with thicker skins that don’t usually split) but no the larger ones. The Black from Tula, which I adore, split exactly around the middle, the Sungolds and Honeybunch split stem to stern and the Oxacans, (which I won’t ever grow again, mealy texture, small) split without out the rain. Every last one of them. The only ones that didn’t split were the Nebraska Wedding, Old Fashioned Goliath, Joe’s Pink Oxheart and Mountain Gold.

At the end of the season, we picked all the green ones and left them on the porch to ripen. because of the slug bites and splitting, they rotted before they ripened so i just threw them all in the compost pile and shut the door behind on of the worst seasons ever. 

My peppers did not do well either. The heirloom shelling beans, all 7 varieties, had some sort of issue from the moment they came up. 

Hope springs eternal though, there is always next year. 

Note: the plants themselves were glorious and I’ve talked with many of my customers who said they had great success with their tomatoes and gardens. Below is an Aussie that one of my customers has grown. It was the first of the season. Isn’t it lovely? And big? I can tell you they are tasty.