Detailed grow report: Lofthouse Big Hill tomatoes in containers in central Oklahoma

This year among many other types I am growing several Lofthouse Big Hill tomato plants from seed supplied by the Experimental Farm Network.  The Big Hill is a determinate bi-color slicing tomato variety developed by Joseph Lofthouse as a market tomato suitable for growing in irrigated fields in Utah at some altitude.  

My container garden (raised tubs, some sub-irrigated, others not) is in central Oklahoma, where the growing season is months longer than in Joseph's part of Utah.  We often have wet springs followed by up to three months (most years) of very hot dry weather, during which it's difficult to keep my containers evenly watered.  Then two or three more months of cooling weather with more moisture.   The result is that I get a lot of some never-by-me-identified yellow-spotted-leaf-death disease before the weather dries out, and then my chief problem June through August is keeping fruit from cracking like hell due to soil moisture fluctuations as the plants dry out, get watered, dry out, get absolutely flooded by a freak thunderstorm, dry out, wilt from drying out because I forgot to water, get watered, dry out....  

Any plants that survive to September (and many do not!) typically put on a complete second set of growth and pump out another  crop of fruit until terminated by frost in late October or November.  Needless to say, I tend to prefer indeterminate saladette and smaller types, which don't tend to suffer so badly from the cracking problem, nor are they as likely to die after the first flush of fruit, like big determinate slicing types often do.  (It's not the determinate nature per se, I think, that does them in; rather, my chronic levels of lower-leaf yellow-spotting-and-dying disease are stressful, and plants that produce a bunch of big tomatoes very rapidly don't seem to tolerate it as well as vine-y indeterminates that can outgrow it.)  

Still, I wanted to try the Big Hills because I like big colorful slicing tomatoes, and I know they have some genetic diversity like all of Joseph's varieties.  I figure a few generations of selection may help with any problems they have in my hellscape (from their perspective) garden.  And their open flowers give me some chance of accidental hybrids (I am too lazy to work at deliberately cross-pollinating things).

I started half a dozen Big Hill seedlings, and I think three or four made it into good containers outdoors this spring.  The biggest and most promising plant snapped clean off at soil level in a very strong gust of wind, as I reported here.  

The second-biggest set a bunch of fruit very early, which is just now starting to ripen.  I say very early because I am comparing it to a big yellow slicer type, unknown variety but heirloom I suspect, that is grown by a local-ish organic farm in huge hoop houses that they can open up as the season gets hotter.  I planted seeds from the big yellow slicer on the same day, and transplanted (also on the same day) one of them into the same container as this Big Hill.  That plant is just now producing flowers for the first time and has yet to set a fruit.  Meanwhile, seven fruit so far on the Big Hill, four of them quite large and two of them already starting to ripen:



Our spring was even wetter than usual this year, so I got a lot of the lower-leaf yellow-spot disease.  Big Hill had about as much as most of the other varieties in my garden, and less than several.  It's been a reasonably good sport about me pruning off those afflicted branches before they fall off, perhaps not quite as quick to throw up new green sprouts as my indeterminate babies but keeping ahead of the loss.  Then we got two weeks of hot dry weather in June (Big Hill was happy) and an anomalous couple of weeks of  intermittent Gulf-flavored monsoons.  Some of my plants went delirious with delight at the very warm (but not hot) weather with lots of rain and huge humidity; Big Hill just soldiered on.  (The yellow spot pathogens were very VERY happy throughout my garden. )

Since then things have gone back to normal, except not quite as hot or as dry as true normal.  All of my cherry and saladette tomato plants are starting to produce, some quite copiously.  A couple of hybrids bought late and at random as good-sized plants from the big box store (an Early Girl and something called Husky Red) have been making slicing tomatoes for about a week. But the Big Hill is my only seed-grown slicer to have set any significant fruit yet, and BY WEEKS AT LEAST is the first to start ripening fruit.

Unfortunately fruit cracking on the Big Hill is definitely a thing.  I don't hold this as a defect; every kind of tomato is prone to cracking in my garden, due to the uneven soil moistures resulting from my container-garden methods. (There's a whole host of countervailing good reasons I grow this way, or so it seems to me -- but that's for another different post.)  I measure the crack-prone-ness of a new variety against my old standard benchmarks.  If my Juliet hybrid cherries are cracking their cast-iron skins (not so far this year) than a variety that cracks gets a totally free pass; I have yet to discover a tomato less crack-prone than Juliets.  If my yellow pear-shaped cherries are cracking, which they do fairly readily but not severely, than a new variety that does not crack is doing well.  If it cracks when my yellow pears crack, it's normal; not the anti-cracking miracle tomato I someday hope to find or make, but no aspersions.  By this rough yardstick, the Big Hill gets at worst a mild side-eye; it's cracking severely (in the manner of most slicers) when just a few of my yellow pears are.  



Today I noticed that the ripest fruit (although I think it would have benefited from a few more days on the vine) had severe cracks on the bottom to complement the ones on top I was already watching.  So I picked it.  I think I can get another day or two of table-top ripening before the cracks lead to spoilage.  I was quite startled when I saw the bottom of the fruit to see how much more red it was than the top.



FWIW, the other fruit still on the vine has not cracked nearly as bad at this one.  The next-nearest to being ripe has much smaller top splits, no bottom cracking, and just a cosmetic smidge of the harmless concentric cracking.  

These are the first tomato plants I've ever seen with the big, bushy, almost daisy-like flowers.  The flowers do a thing I've never seen before on a tomato; some of the flowers that don't set fruit turn black and rot/mold right there on the end of their stems, a little splotch of decay in their green calyxes.  I'm not sure if this is a new-to-me behavior or if all unfruitful tomato flowers do this but, being generally so much smaller, are less noticeable.  Anyway, it's no kind of problem, just interesting.

There's another Big Hill growing cheerfully in a five gallon bucket (just set its first fruit) and possibly more in the jungle of container plants that I'm not paying too much attention to.  I also have several big yellow and orange slicers growing in the ground, and the Big Hill there looks happy, but a few weeks behind the container ones.  I will update this grow report as the season progresses.  

I'm pretty sure the county extension could identify your yellow spot disease so that you could know what you're up against.

I actually have a pretty good idea, but pretty much on principle I do not fret about plant diseases -- which includes not getting bogged down in the nitty gritty "if the spots are mostly grey with purple dots in the middle it's this bacteria, but if they are black with chartreuse edges it's the such-and-so virus" disease keys.  I already know I am not going to do one damn thing to treat them, so what use knowing the precise name?  I don't use sprays or powders of any kind, not even the various ones people think of as "natural".  I encourage a flourishing ecosystem of predators in my garden, which keeps disease-spreading insects down, and my entire strategy beyond that is to select (and to a much lesser extent, eventually, breed) varieties that are immune or at least indifferent.  There are varieties of tomatoes that utterly fail in my garden; there are others that do pretty good.  I'm always watching for plants that do better than "pretty good" and some day I'll get there, if I live long enough.  

Dan:

Thanks for the detailed grow report. Selecting for anti-cracking would be a foreign concept for me. One of those inadvertent selection things that's going on with my tomatoes, is that I pick at first blush. They ripen better for me on the table, than in a field full of predators, pests, weather, and irrigation.

A variety that showed up one time was like a paint ball: A rind on the outside, then liquid juicy inside. The "exploding tomato" that someone described in another thread.

That's what's so fun about this!  In one of your early articles on landrace gardening I remember you discussing how it automagically creates varieties selected to please the grower, with all of his or her idiosyncrasies, including subconscious ones!  For instance, I have a color vision deficiency; I can't even detect "first blush" the same way other people can.  I need considerable color, almost full ripeness even in the case of pale yellow tomatoes, before I can see/notice that a fruit has started to color up.  I don't tend to grow tomatoes that ripen to pink, green, white, or other less-dramatic colors in large part for this reason.  

One advantage of container gardening near my front door is that my lazy rescue dogs keep the deer and racoons mostly well away.  I do prefer the richest flavor of a fully sun-ripened tomato, and I can often get away with leaving them on the vines, if I can manage their soil moisture properly.  (Birds and grasshoppers and rodents do get a few, but the raised containers in particular keep rodent predation down; they seem really disinclined to expose themselves up high under the rich array of raptors that live here.)  On the rare occasion that I am certain of heavy rain in high summer, I do tend to run go harvest essentially any tomato with enough color that it will ripen indoors, because cracking is otherwise inevitable.  

I also don't waste many tomatoes that suffer cracking, because I can either table-ripen them before they mold at the cracks, or I can eat them half-ripe.  Some people like "fried green tomatoes" (not at all my thing) but I have learned that a half-ripe or even fairly green tomato still works well in a roasted vegetable mix, which is a common meal for me.  (Yesterday I had a big bowl of roasted long beans and eggplant with a few damaged semi-ripe cherry tomatoes, my first okra of the season, and a single yellow pepper mixed in there.)  

One of the reasons I was excited to grow the Big Hill was that I know damned well it was selected for a completely different set of conditions and preferences than mine, but I was pretty sure I'd find things to love about it.  So far, its stout bush shape and extremely rapid fruit production are endearing it to me, as well as the gorgeous blood-red streaks and intrusions of color in the mostly-lighter interior flesh.  I'll save seeds from the fruits that crack the least, and see how it goes.   Thanks!