A Bad Year For Tomatoes

In early July, I harvested my first tomato of the season.  While I've been harvesting continuously since that time, the crop this year is pretty meager.  This year, I've been hit by a triple whammy:

• Weather - This has got to be one of the coldest summers on record here in Northern California and tomatoes like heat.  Last week the high temperature one day was 69 degrees Fahrenheit and not a single day during the week crossed beyond 74.  In fact, high temperatures for most of the month have been in the low to mid 70's and at night the temperature has dipped into the 40's. 
• Aphids - These are typically a problem for me, but this year its been worse then ever.  I attempted to kill them with diatomaceous earth.  Frankly, I found this to be totally ineffective.  By the time I decided to switch back to insecticidal soap, the damage was done.  (In case your wondering, diatomaceous earth is a naturally occurring rock that is ground into an abrasive powder. When dusted on plants, the sharp, abrassive edges of the particles are supposed to kill soft bodies insects.)
• Fusarium Wilt - caused by several types of fungi, this disease causes the leaves to wilt and eventually kills the plant.  I typically grow many of my tomatoes hydroponically, so once the fungi got into the system it effected every plant.  There's no cure and I'll have to try to sterilize my Autopots to get rid of the fungi. 
  

I expect to get enough fresh tomatoes for the season but there will not be much surplus to can.  This is sad since our family looks forward to using our canned tomatoes in recipes in the dead of Winter when we all need to be reminded of Summer.

Photo: Tomato Wilt

Well, there's always next year.

Comments

[Julianne]

The few tomatoes we've gotten have been quite small--almost not worth harvesting. The aphids devoured our broccoli plants earlier this year. I would like to say that they have thankfully left our tomatoes alone, but with a crop this meager, it doesn't much matter. We're hoping for more success when we get our roof garden up and running. In other sad news, moths took over our beehive :( any gardener knows that success in gardening comes from persistence!

[Cynthia Sandberg]

How is your grafted tomato experiment doing? Eager to hear about it in our cool, Northern Cali climate!

[H. Mark Delman]

Hi Cynthia:

This year has been so strange from a weather perspective that I cant really draw any conclusions. I had a poor year all the way round with my tomatoes .... cold weather, aphids and wilt made for a poor harvest. The grafted tomatoes did not appear to do any better than the others. I will test again next year.