Hi everyone, we will soon be embarking on a new tomato season, for the last five seasons I have
Had a problem with GREY ROT & HARD SKINS I have tried different strains ie. Hybrids & Heirlooms, pesticides, fumigating every season, washing the floors, looked on the internet etc, the one that really beats me is that a lot of growers have never heard of hard skins.
Sounds like mainly the "treatment" is prevention- don't let any part of the plant touch the soil, keep the plants well spaced and pruned for good air circulation, don't let the support systems rub on the stems/ branches, only water the soil, not the plants.
By hard skin, do you mean thick or tough skins? That varies by variety and conditions. Dry conditions and high heat encourage the skins to toughen up to prevent moisture loss. Other than thick or tough skins, nothing came up in a google search about hard skins on tomatoes.
Grey mold is a problem with hairy leaves and high humidity. Get good spacing on the plants. Trellis them up and prune out the suckers and remove the leaves on the bottom of the plant. Mulch and avoid overhead watering as much as possible. If you are not growing resistant tomatoes then in wet; humid weather you probably have to have a regular fungicide program. You can use Neem for prevention at this time of the year or you can use a sulfur spray. You have to pick one or the other oil and sulfur don't mix well and will burn or kill the plants if used within two weeks of each other.
Thick skins is usually a varietal thing. It is either thick skins with good crack resistance and decent disease resistance or thin skins and cracking.
Sweet cherry thin skin hybrid sungold; cracks when it is ripe
Sunsugar, very sweet cherry, beating out sungold in taste tests for the last couple of years, better crack resistance and is not tart before it turns sweet like sungold.
Sweet 100 very prolific, disease resistant, and one of the easier tomatoes to grow and succeed with.
Brandywine, old fashioned tomato flavor, very large tomatoes so don't expect a lot. Potato leaf variety. Huge plant. Needs to be on a regular fungicide program no resistance to fungal disease. Fruit does have radial cracks, it is a soft fruit so it does not travel or keep well but the flavor makes it worth growing.
The medium sized tomatoes are the best for the larger tomatoes in terms of yield, disease resistance and taste.
A lot of people like Early Girl. It is early but stood up to the heat pretty well. It did stop producing in the upper 80's but started up again when the weather cooled.
I liked Big beef and new big dwarf. I got good sized slicing tomatoes that were fairly disease resistant. They did not have the flavor profile of Brandywine, but they were a lot easier to grow.
The black tomatoes were pretty good in flavor but not the most productive Black cherry, Black Krim, and Carbon.
Jet Star is a hybrid tomato that is medium sized, has good disease resistance, is fairly easy to grow and looks pretty (red and round). It is slightly sweet so if you like the tangy ones this is not it.
Green zebra, Cherokee purple, Aunt Ruby's German Green, and Kellog's Breakfast are other favorites of my friends.
