Weird weather did produce some winners (and a few winter tomatoes)
Rugby tomatoes can be used for sauce, drying or fresh for salads. They can be slightly heart-shaped or rugby-ball-shaped, and have shown to be good producers in the Central Valley lowlands. Kathy Morrison
Huddled indoors on a cold and rainy December day, I can find warmth in thoughts of summer – and tomatoes.
Now is prime time to order seed for next year’s vegetable garden. But what? Should I let 2024’s failures (and a few successes) guide my picks? Or should I give new varieties a try?
Overall, I had a disappointing tomato year due to poor timing. I planted in late April and early May, which proved to be too late. My vines were just hitting their stride in July – the hottest July on record – and got very poor fruit set.
The plants that survived that heat enjoyed our relatively mild August and set some late-season tomatoes. The big surprise? How much my vines grew in late October and November. Massive plants, they still were blooming on Thanksgiving. But the weather got too cold for their green tomatoes to ripen on the vine. I finally pulled the plants shortly before Christmas (with green tomatoes now slowly turning red on the kitchen counter).
My best producers were Rugby (a paste tomato shaped like a rugby ball), Lemon Boy and Chef’s Choice Orange. Coincidentally, those varieties also were among the 2024 stars for garden expert/podcaster Farmer Fred Hoffman and Don Shor of Redwood Barn Nursery in Davis.
Hoffman and Shor discussed the 2024 tomato season in depth during a two-part podcast, “2024 Tomato Winners (and Losers),” released Friday (Dec. 27) on Hoffman’s “Garden Basics with Farmer Fred.” They came to some interesting conclusions – heirlooms really do hate high heat, some tomatoes can take a little shade – as well as offered useful tips for more tomato gardening success in 2025.
“It’s really good to do this show (in) December, January, so the people who are getting the seed catalogs and watching them pile up on their desks can start marking some of these varieties,” Shor said. “Some of them, you will have to order yourself. You’re not going to find them in most garden centers.”
Hoffman, who lives and gardens in Folsom, picked his last vine-ripened tomatoes on Dec. 18. They weren’t pretty, but they tasted good on a sandwich, he noted. He had three varieties that kept producing tomatoes into December: Rugby, Principe Borghese and Jet Star.
Principe Borghese is a Shor favorite; small and pointy, it’s a little Italian sauce tomato, available from Rare Seeds and Seed Savers Exchange, among others. Jet Star is a fast-maturing hybrid slicer, similar to Early Girl; it can be found at Tomato Growers Supply Company.
Shor grew 35 varieties in 2024 and kept detailed notes on each. He was especially impressed by Rugby, which can be found at Totally Tomatoes and West Coast Seeds.
“We can’t tout that one highly enough,” Shor said of Rugby. “It’s being marketed as a sauce tomato but I’ve got customers who are slicing it and using it as a regular slicer. It cooks down great. It’s not going to be in garden centers, very likely, unless the buyer or the grower at one of the large local chains is listening. Rugby is one you should definitely put in your program because it's just not that widely known yet. But every year I grow it, every year I sell it and plant it, people rave about it. Yield is great. It takes the heat well, sets very well early as well as late, in my case, at least this year. So it’s a really, really high quality tomato.”
Shor also praised Chef’s Choice Orange for its firm texture – he harvested about 60, including many 1-pounders and a late-season second crop – and Bodacious, a big red slicer that matures early.
Both Hoffman and Shor had luck with Lemon Boy, a sweet yellow, medium-size hybrid. Shor said he stopped counting when his Lemon Boy produced more than 100 fruit. “It just really outperformed everything this year,” Shor said.
To hear more (or read the transcript), go to: https://gardenbasics.net/.
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Garden Checklist for week of Jan. 12
Once the winds die down, it’s good winter gardening weather with plenty to do:
* Prune, prune, prune. Now is the time to cut back most deciduous trees and shrubs. The exceptions are spring-flowering shrubs such as lilacs.
* Now is the time to prune fruit trees. (The exceptions are apricot and cherry trees, which are susceptible to a fungus that causes dieback. Save them until summer.) Clean up leaves and debris around the trees to prevent the spread of disease.
* Prune roses, even if they’re still trying to bloom. Strip off any remaining leaves, so the bush will be able to put out new growth in early spring.
* Clean up leaves and debris around your newly pruned roses and shrubs. Put down fresh mulch or bark to keep roots cozy.
* After the wind stops, apply horticultural oil to fruit trees to control scale, mites and aphids. Oils need 24 hours of dry weather after application to be effective.
* This is also the time to spray a copper-based fungicide to peach and nectarine trees to fight leaf curl. (The safest effective fungicides available for backyard trees are copper soap -- aka copper octanoate -- or copper ammonium, a fixed copper fungicide. Apply either of these copper products with 1% horticultural oil to increase effectiveness.)
* When forced bulbs sprout, move them to a cool, bright window. Give them a quarter turn each day so the stems will grow straight.
* Browse through seed catalogs and start making plans for spring and summer.
* Divide daylilies, Shasta daisies and other perennials.
* Cut back and divide chrysanthemums.
* Plant bare-root roses, trees and shrubs.
* Transplant pansies, violas, calendulas, English daisies, snapdragons and fairy primroses.
* In the vegetable garden, plant fava beans, head lettuce, mustard, onion sets, radicchio and radishes.
* Plant bare-root asparagus and root divisions of rhubarb.
* In the bulb department, plant callas, anemones, ranunculus and gladioli for bloom from late spring into summer.
* Plant blooming azaleas, camellias and rhododendrons. If you’re shopping for these beautiful landscape plants, you can now find them in full flower at local nurseries.
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