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Orchard Updates & Garden Knowledge – Lumpy Tomatoes

🌱  Summer Gardens & Summer Tomatoes🐛<!–

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Sweet Summer Corn Salad
Tomatoes, Pasta, Zucchini, and Corn! They all blend together for this light and quick to make summer dish.

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We see volunteers from all sorts of organizations! This past March, we had 25 volunteers associated with the Michigan State Alumni Association, come out to help us start seeds! March is pretty early in the season but it is important to plant a lot of seeds to ensure we have enough plants to go around between all of our gardening projects. Our seeds were donated by Botanical Interests, our Jovial Grow Garage was set up in large part with the community at Weaver Creek Park, and then this weekend in March, we were able to get 15 trays of seeds going with labels and all! That is over 840 seedlings planted! Massive shout out to Debora for continuing the trend throughout the year and eventually, during multiple weeks of events, helping start over 1,000 plants.
 

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Suscald
Where & What?
Sunscald is essentially like a sunburn for plants and fruit; this can be more common in Colorado than other areas of the country, due to the intensity of solar radiation and our elevation, mixed with the generally dry and hot summer weather.

Sunscald can occur on fruit and leaves; it looks like a large tan colored area of leathery growth. The area will look a little bleached. This is most common on sensitive fruits (like peppers and tomatoes) which receive direct sunlight for long portions of the day.

When?
Now, during the heat of summer and while fruit is forming.

What can be done?
Keep the sunscreen bottled up, it will not help your plants. Sunscald is usually a result of the plant not getting enough water during a specific period (or the roots not taking up enough water to compensate!). All your plants need is a bit of water; on occasion the fruit may need shade especially if the upper leaves of a specific plant which had been shading new fruit were pruned away.

Additional Information from trusted education based resources.

https://extension.sdstate.edu/leaf-scorch-and-sunscald-garden
 
https://extension.umd.edu/resource/sunscald-vegetables

Blossom End Rot
Where & What?
Blossom End Rot (BER) most frequently occurs on squash and tomatoes but can be seen on peppers and eggplant, and a little less frequently on watermelon. This is most often seen after a wet early season but dry summer and will often be present on the first crops of the season.

As the name implies, the blossom/flowering end of a fruit will begin to rot and decay for no apparent reason. It results in half beautiful and half rotten vegetable. One technical reason for BER is a low Calcium uptake by the plant; often this is due to unhealthy roots rather than a lack of Calcium in the soil, and can be a direct result of over or under watering earlier in the year.

What can be done?
Maintain a consistent watering regimen, moisture imbalances can aggravate BER symptoms. Avoid over-fertilizing especially with with large quantities of fast released Nitrogen. Nitrogen can result in plants producing lots of dark green foliage, and lead to plants which are unable to move sufficient Calcium into the fruit.

Additional Information from trusted education based resources.

https://pender.ces.ncsu.edu/2020/03/why-are-my-squash-rotting/
 
https://planttalk.colostate.edu/topics/insects-diseases/1471-blossom-end-rot/
 
https://extension.usu.edu/pests/ipm/notes_ag/veg-blossom-end-rot

The photo above shows typical “Cat Facing” on a tomato. Cat Facing is when the skin and flesh of a tomato cracks and warps due to large temperature and moisture fluctuations during early stages of development; this can also sometimes occur due to feeding from insects early in a tomato’s development. For management and to help prevent this from occurring, maintain consistent and regular watering, allows seedlings to adapt to outdoor temperatures after started in a greenhouse and before planting outdoors and maintain a consistent (and not overly abundant) fertilizing regimen; learn more here: https://vric.ucdavis.edu/veg_info/catface.htm and here: https://extension.umd.edu/resource/catfacing-tomatoes/.

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