Edibles: Weather stymies the fruits of his labors

"I have yet to get a ripe Momotaro. One of the worst years for tomatoes. Too cool in mornings July, Aug. & Sept."

So wrote Wally Prestbo, the King County Master Gardener responsible for tomatoes at the Bellevue Demonstration Garden, in a recent note to me.

Because Prestbo logs daily high and low temperatures at his Sammamish home, he means exactly what he says about cool mornings this summer.

After having bragged up the Momotaro tomato for three years, I'm a bit embarrassed it hasn't come through better this year. Though I've harvested some fruits from my eight Momotaro plants, they've been fewer and later than in previous years for just the reason cited by Prestbo. Given this cool growing season, I suppose I should be grateful to get any.

Difficulties of the season notwithstanding, my eight varieties performed differently. Here's my 2008 tomato report card, followed by comments on each variety:

Matina -- B

SunSugar -- B

Early Girl -- B+

Momotaro -- C+

Stupice -- C

Brandywine -- D+

Eva Purple Ball -- D+

Paul Robeson -- F

Matina -- This small-fruited, German heirloom came on about 10 days after Stupice, so the plants sized up better and were more productive. The fruits had better color than Stupice but were a shade less intense in flavor this year.

SunSugar -- According to some local growers, this cherry variety is even more flavorful than the highly esteemed Sungold. Moreover it's reputed to be more crack-resistant than Sungold.

My plant ripened fruit on about the same schedule as Matina. And it was more crack-resistant than Sungold, though our mid-September rains did cause some splitting. Flavor-wise, I didn't find it as good as Sungold, though I'm remembering Sungold from a much warmer year.

Early Girl -- Though our old standby for canning didn't ripen much fruit before mid-August, since then it has been our most productive variety. Fruits are normal sized and good flavored, but too many won't have time to ripen before cold weather arrives. We've canned just a little over half what we'd canned at the same time last year.

Momotaro -- This one remains our best-tasting tomato. However, it has been late to ripen and numbers are way down.

Stupice -- Not surprisingly, Stupice, an ultra-early variety, was earliest. I picked the first one on July 10. Last year, the first one was ready June 30.

This year's plants didn't have time to size up properly before they were bearing fruit. As a result, they made fewer and smaller tomatoes. The good flavor of this variety wasn't affected, but overall, not an impressive performance.

Brandywine -- I grew Territorial Seed Co.'s strain of this late-season heirloom. Surprisingly, I've harvested a few fine-flavored fruits from our three plants. Had the summer been normal, this variety might have really surprised us. Production was simply too scant, though, for it to rate better than a high D.

Eva Purple Ball -- We grew three Eva Purple Ball plants, too, and they've yielded about the same number of fruits as the Brandywines. Flavor is on a par with Brandywine, just a notch below Momotaro. This variety set more fruits than Brandywine; they just didn't all have time to ripen.

Paul Robeson -- A gardener who regards this variety highly gave me a few seeds, so I grew a plant. Though it produced large fruits, they rotted almost as fast as they ripened, so I still don't know how they taste.