Wednesday was another lovely mild day for mid September with some sunny spells for good measure. Tuesday night's storms had cleared away leaving us with a dry day.
This year we've grown a blight resistant tomato called Crimson Crush. We grew this variety for the first time last year and thought that the tomatoes tasted good enough to give the variety another go. As nothing on the allotment suffered from blight last year it wasn't much of a test of its blight resistant qualities.
That's not been the case this year. This is how our Sungold tomatoes growing on the plot look. Devastated by blight the crop went from looking lovely and green to this brown looking mess in a few days. Growing alongside these Sungold are three Crimson Crush tomatoes.
At first sight these don't look too bad. They still have some green leaves and the tomatoes appear to be surviving but a closer look reveals they haven't all survived the blight.
These tomatoes on Crimson Crush aren't going to be any use in the kitchen and will be consigned to the compost heap. However, some trusses of tomatoes are still looking OK to harvest and have managed to delay the blight.
This little truss of tomatoes looks to have survived but we're probably going to have more chance of ripening the fruit off the plant.
I'm not sure I'd bother growing Crimson Crush again. It obviously does have some blight resistance but blight will win and take over the plant eventually. Our outdoor plants are the odds and sods that didn't get planted out into the greenhouse and would have been consigned to the compost heap in any case so if we do loose them to blight it's just bad luck.
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I always grow Ferline which is supposed to have some blight resistance, but that succombed to blight this year, albeit slowly. I'm down to my last five plants now - Orkado and Nimbus F1, the latter being a free packet from one of the seed companies. It's done well and I'd definitely consider growing it again.
ReplyDeleteMight give Nimbus a go next year CJ. I see it is supposed to be okay to grow indoors or out.
Delete"Blight-resistance" is a relative thing. They all succumb eventually, I think. I tried Crimson Crush last year. It didn't have to cope with blight, but it wasn't very special in terms of taste or yield. I have been growing Ferline for several years, and although it is definitely not blight-immune it does have some tolerance of blight and a more general disease resistance - and (importantly) tastes nice!
ReplyDeleteI seem to remember Crimson Crush advertised as the first completely blight resistant variety but perhaps I'm mistaken. I'm amazed how inconsistent the fruit is on Crimson Crush. Some fruits appear as though they are large beefsteak tomatoes and others as normal sized tomatoes. Taste seems to vary from one tomato to another. We wont be growing it again though.
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