The DRAMA Queen

WILT from the DRAMA QUEEN

Every garden has one. So does mine. I am not immune. The top portion of this tomato plant featured to your immediate right came to my garden this year with the title of "Sandwich Slicer." I am of the opinion that the name of it should promptly be changed immediately to DRAMA QUEEN. What tomato plant doesn't enjoy about 12-hours of direct heat and sunshine? This one, apparently.

Look at that thing! Just the sight of it will send a signal that it needs a good, long drink of cool, clean, water! Except, it got one this past Sunday. An exceptionally long drink of life-sustaining water from a hose set on a slow trickle. The plant, and the soil around it, was positively drenched with water following that 30-minutes of watery attention.

Other plants in the 2024 Tomato Garden look positively wonderful after receiving similar watery attention this past weekend. I took every effort to ensure that each tomato plant was treated to a low trickle of water over a long period of time. Every plant was treated with that slow trickle treatment for 30-minutes or longer. Plants in every vegetable garden do best with heavy, infrequent watering schedules. They don't need a drink every single day. They do best with that slow drip or trickle attention once or twice a week.

"Help Me! I'm Dying!"

Yet, there's always one malcontent in every vegetable garden collection. Two years ago it was roma tomato variety called Korean Long. Which is a very fancy name for one very average roma tomato. The Korean Long received more than enough water. Yet, as soon as our famous summertime temperatures broke the century mark, it started to put on a show just like the one you see out of this plant in the 2024 tomato garden.

Worse yet, I'm not even sure if "Sandwich Slicer" is the right name to apply to this garden drama queen. Google tells me the variety came to me by way of Burpee Seeds. Which isn't surprising. Burpee is a seedhouse that produces seeds for a lot of different tomato varieties. Yet, a search for "Sandwich Slicer" on the Burpee website defaults to another variety called the Steak Sandwich Hybrid. Which is another large slicing variety. Are they the same? Good question! According to Burpee Seeds, they must be. But, who knows?

The Steak Sandwich Hybrid is not a horrible tomato variety. I actually trialed it some ten years ago after Burpee made a big fuss about this new offering in the 2014 catalog they issued that year. I do recall the seed price wasn't cheap. No "new" variety of tomato seed is. But, if I was going to waste another dollar or two on an interesting variety, it was going to be for something like "Steak Sandwich." That's good marketing. Almost as good as sticking a very average roma tomato with the name of Korean Long.

Drama Queen Production

By the way, the moment the sun goes down this thing perks right back up again and looks. well, normal. It looks the part of a healthy, happy tomato plant in the 2024 garden. Because it is. Gone is the viscious, drama queen like, wilt. Gone are the signs of some kind of disease-causing wilt. Thanks to the unique weather patterns in the six-county Sacramento Delta region, cool air flows right in from the Pacific Ocean following a blistering hot summer day. This is why tomato plants do so well in this region, and why much of the farmland in the region is dedicated to the growth of processing tomatoes. Like the roma. Plus others.

Need proof? Look no further than Yolo County, just west of my home in Sacramento County. More than 35,000 acres of cropland there was dedicated to King Tomato in 2022. That resulted in about 1.7 MILLION TONS of tomatoes, worth a cool $183 million and change. Most of that coin was realized from the common processing tomato known as the Roma, but then again, some heirloom varieties are also grown there on a commercial basis. But the processing tomato is king in Yolo County. It is the number one crop, by far.

The wilt may look bad, but it isn't hurting production. Not on this plant. At least, not hurting production so far. The "Sandwich Slicer," or DRAMA QUEEN if you will, is loaded with fat, green tomatoes. Plus, our tomato production season is just getting started. The month of June isn't up yet. There's another 3-4 months of solid tomato plant production yet to come. The Drama Queen has tomatoes all over it. Despite the wilt, it looks like it will be a good producer. Providing is doesn't UP AND DIE on me. Which it looks like it just might do. Until the sun does down. Then, everything is right in the Drama Queen's world again.