August 23rd update:
Picked my first 2 Big Beef tomatoes today, along with another 5 Black Cherry tomatoes during this past week.
The Big Beef's probably need a couple days to finish ripening. So far that Black Cherry plant has produced about 40 tomatoes, most of which are either not ripe yet or just barely starting out. I've picked 13. Due to the late plant out it's only about 40" tall.
Today I picked another two Big Beef tomatoes with BER to throw out. They aren't far enough along to even use the good part for fried green tomatoes. It's frustrating.
Both 1884 plants have tomatoes going ok and not affected with BER. The one plant has at least 3 tomatoes, the other 1.
Better Boys are still taking their time - no hint of ripening yet.
Since I've been so curious as to whether there are any potatoes growing in my grow bags, and if so how big they are, I decided to harvest one of the bags. It was the only one with all the top vegetation dead. I knew they would only be salad size and they were. Ended up with 26. A few were only pebble size, and the biggest was between 1.5 to just under 2 ounces. I have an old postal scale that only measures by the half ounce. The average size was between .5 and 1 ounce - again hard to be specific with that scale.
Probably this evening or tomorrow I will boil a couple for tasting. Unfortunately, the rain got into the coin zips that I put the ID tags in, so I'm not positive of the variety. I was thinking it was the fingerling (La Ratte), but after harvesting I think they are either the German Butterball or Carola.
My main goal today was to find out how productive these were in grow bags. I'll be happy with 26 per bag if that's what I end up with! The rest wont be harvested for about a month. I want to give them as much time as possible to grow.
The 'stumps' are not going to produce. There is still 1 flower open on Mammoth German Gold, but I'm not holding my breath. The other flower did not pollinate.
Czech's Bush just never took off in regards to vegetative growth, and never had flowers. Will give both a couple of weeks to DO SOMETHING before tossing in the trash.
Report on potato taste later. After a little boiling then served with a little butter.
Jeff
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