Due to a cooler-than-average summer, the tomatoes from our backyard garden are just now starting to ripen. I had the first yellow cherry tomato earlier today. It was really good. Tasty and delicious. And yet…
I stopped at the farmer’s market a couple of days ago and got two pints of their cherry tomatoes, and theirs were better. There was just more flavor. I am disappointed by this, because I want to grow really tasty cherry tomatoes in my own garden.
Could it be that I just need to try a different variety? The cherry tomatoes we grow are called “Blondkopfchen,” which is a variety from the Seed Savers Exchange catalog. They usually self-seed themselves every year and come up on their own in the spring.
Is there some soil amendment I should be doing, that would improve flavor?
If the tomatoes have too much water, they will not be as flavorful.
Once the tomatoes start turning red or yellow (Mid to Late July), drastically reduce how often you water them or stop watering them completely if you are in a humid enough climate.
This works for cherry, or any other determinate tomatoes (ones that go ripe together, instead of throughout the season).
Indeterminate varieties can just be reduced to a small weekly watering.
Maybe that’s the problem. We’ve been drenched with rain for the past couple of weeks, to the point that the garden is almost flooded at times. Nothing I can really do about it, but I thank you for the info anyway.
I would tend to agree, melons and other cucurbits get really watery tasting with too much water. A few years ago all my damned pumpkins were all watery and I couldn’t cook them down enough to make a decent pumpkin pie filling without almost burning them. Literally pumpkin butter with no taste=(
The ones at the farmer’s market are probably greenhoused so they can completely control the climate. I’m in an apartment so mine are in containers which I can cover if the rain is too heavy, or the nights get cold too soon, but what my mom used to do is grow the tomatoes in an elevated part of the garden such as against the house - or in a later house, she used railroad ties and built a elevated spot against the back fence, and when the weather got really bad she’d tie a clear plastic tarp up to protect the plants.
Since they are already changing don’t worry about fertilizing any more, if your tomatoes made it this far, the soil is good, and you don’t want to risk blossom rot from over fertilization. I found with container gardening, I only needed to use 1/2 a cup of homemade plant food (soil, egg shells, coffee grounds all mixed together & let to sit outside in a plastic bucket) once a month to keep the plants happy.
Hopefully the rain will stop, but maybe you could build a small trench to drain away some of the rainfall & cover with some clear plastic?