On Thu, 23 Apr 2015 11:45:50 -0400, songbird
wrote:

Boron Elgar wrote:
...
I am a devoted composter and have gotten great "volunteers" from the
winter's store-bought tomato leavings that have contained seeds in
what has gotten spread on beds come spring.

what kind of season do you have? it seems
that ours is too short for most volunteers to
do much.

Northern NJ. Spring has just sprung the past couple of weeks. But I
also direct sow tomato seeds every year, though, and that makes them
later than volunteers, too. I can usually harvest well into October.

if i were going to grow a lot of different
OP and heirloom varieties i think that would
be more interesting and have a better chance
of getting decent results, but i've been banned
from trying other varieties now. we have too
many tomatoes in storage ATM so it is likely
we're skipping a major planting of tomatoes
this year and will just put in a few cherry
tomato plants.

I do not can tomatoes. I consider them edible seasonally and
delightful at that.

As I have mentioned, I have my tomato plants very, very close together
in the plot. The thing is so dense it is difficult to harvest at
times. I have to lift plants out of the way to see ripe fruits at any
real depth.

as for diseases, our location seems to favor
certain types of late season blight, but if we
can get a crop through the mid-summer it doesn't
matter what the blight does. it doesn't ruin
the fruit. last season was unusual for us in
that the disease took 90% of the crop just in
the last few weeks of ripening. greenhouse
people said it was last seen in this area 80
years ago. likely weather and growing medium
related, but hard to prove without a lab to do
the work and ways to trace things...

I have gotten blight or other fungal problems with tomatoes at times.
I gave up on rotation planting, as that did not seem to solve the
problem. I think weather is a big contributing factor with my
disorders, none of them too serious. I also grow in large tubs on the
deck, where there is no crowding. That doesn't eliminate the problems,
either, but I have never had huge losses.

Boron