Quote:
Originally Posted by travis
The most productive and least crack prone dark tomatoes for me have been Spudakee, Big Cheef, and Not Purple Strawberry. I say this while professing a deep affection for both Indian Stripe and Cherokee Purple. I'll add that if you intend to grow any of these to sell, you should pick them as breaker stage tomatoes and ripen them indoors to avoid radial cracking and skin splitting. And you should sell them only in less than full ripe condition to avoid disappointing your customers with tomatoes that will be past their prime by the time they get home for dinner.
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I couldn't agree more with your comment about picking the fruits at breaker stage for sale, for me that would be breaker 2-3 or about half way up. I never brought fruits to sell that were ripe, but tried to bring ones that were in different stages of ripeness.
I brought them in a single layer in a standard plastic flat, single layer is also important and we had tared the scale with an empty flat and the poundage of what I brought was recorded.
If they had to remove some fruits b'c of spoilage they weighed them and that was subtracted from the initial weight.
But discussing this brings back a memory I won't forget. I got a call at home from a woman who was having a fancy dinner party,I should say that I had sheets there with all the info I knew about the varieties I was bringing and also my phone number for questions, and she wanted a bushel of only yellow and gold ones, and ripe as well.
And she wanted them ASAP. Well, it was pouring out, I don't like to pick in the rain b'c then I have to spend much more times cleaning off the fruits and I told her that.
She said she HAD to have them so her cook could work with them and said I'll pay you $5/lb. this was back in the 90's when the $$$ for heirlooms was much less.
So I grabbed my third best pair of sneakers, put my rain cape on and marched out to my tomato field pronto;
Carolyn