The good news is, I have been getting quite a few ripe tomatoes the past couple weeks. The not-so-good news is, they are suffering from a condition I haven't encountered before: yellow shoulders. So, this year I don't have blossom end rot, but I have yellow shoulders.
You can see it really well in these pictures:
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| 9/18 |
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| 9/18 |
From what I've read, yellow shoulders can be caused by heat and/or soil conditions. Given the weather we've had this year, heat could certainly be the culprit. Since I've never grown tomatoes on this property before, however, it could easily be that the soil has a nutrient imbalance. It apparently affects heirlooms more than hybrids, too, and all of my tomatoes are heirlooms.
I'm not a very scientific gardener, so for now, I'm probably not going to put much effort into figuring out the cause. I am picking enough tomatoes for our use, and the yellow shoulders just mean I have to trim off more than usual. Also, I might be hallucinating, but it seems to me that it isn't happening as bad on the tomatoes I've picked more recently.
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| 9/23 |
If it happens again next year, I'll have a little more data, and a lot more incentive, to figure out the reason.
Well, I've not seen that before - it certainly is unusual. Tomatoes come in so many colours and striations; if you hadn't said anything, I would have just thought that this was normal colouration for a specific variety.
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