I have found only a few varieties of tomatoes that are really badly prone to sun scald and the worst is probably Red Barn but it does put out some dense foliage. However if you have to prune a lot of diseased foliage off a Red Barn it is just better to go ahead and pick any fruit totally exposed or cover it somehow. Last year with the heat very high from May through late summer and with a drought going on most of that time we had some relatively low humidity for here and I had more peppers with sun scald than I did that were free of it. Even in good year I would guess close to a third of my peppers have some degree of sun scald on them when I pick them so I just wanted to experiment and see if the shade cloth helped or hurt. I also wanted to try the early pruning of the main stalk to see if the more dense bushy shorter plant handled the sun better.
Bill
|