September 9th update:
After a couple weeks of fairly warm weather it's beginning to cool down finally. High 70's daytime, upper 40's low 50's night temps. The tomato plants didn't like the hot weather last week, but are still alive.
Good news with one of the 'twigs' or 'stumps'. I have a Mammoth German Gold tomato about the size of a quarter growing. It wont get very large since the plant it still around 10-12" tall, but with a little luck it'll still have time to grow and ripen. If not, I'll use it for a fried green tomato. Real happy to see that last weekend when I stopped by the garden.
There were a couple large green Better Boy tomatoes that I wanted to use for fried green tomatoes, but they are already starting to ripen and I don't have any milk or flour at home so will wait for other tomatoes to grow to size.
Happy that my 1884's are growing without getting BER at the moment. There are 3 on 1 plant and 4 on the other. All of the early 1884's ended up with BER, so will be watching these close.
Black Cherry has quite a few tomatoes on it but I only see one starting to ripen. I guess I should let them fully ripen, as the ones I've had so far I know I ate well before they achieved full ripeness. Just couldn't resist! They are very good.
Potatoes - I've gone through two more of my 10-gallon grow bags to harvest the potatoes. Both bags were La Ratte (a fingerling). They were all small, salad size and some too small to even eat. A few were pebble size. Most though were probably between .5 and 2.5 ounces. Even using containers it's alot of work, adding soil as the plants grow, then looking through the soil for every little potato. Not that it's not worth it, it's just time consuming.
I'm guessing the reasons for such small potatoes are because: 1) I started late (3rd week of May I think); 2) I did not fertilize the initial soil I put in the containers (since the roots of the seed potatoes grow down, some folks fertilize the soil right below where they place them); 3) I planted 2 or 3 or in a couple of cases 4 seed potatoes in each 10-gallon container. Because of the late start date I don't think it affected potato size, but I can definitely see how putting more than 2 seed potatoes in a container could crowd them. The biggest factors were probably late start date and possibly not being watered enough during the hotter weather.
I did get good yield in terms of numbers for La Ratte however: 53 in one of the grow bags and 75 in the other. The first grow bag I harvested was either Carola or German Butterball, and it did not have as many, I believe it was in the 30's.
There are still 8 more bags to go through. Will wait until the weekend to harvest another one. Just wish the taters were a little larger.
Jeff
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