Paper balls within tomato roots

[yardiron]

I pulled up the rest of my tomato plants today, after a week of nights well below freezing they were officially done. I had been covering them with plastic but at 22°F even the newer foliage was done for the year.
I picked about 50 or so medium to small tomatoes that had matured since I stripped the plants a month ago at first frost. ( I've picked three times since that). For some reason this year these plants seemed to deal with the first few frosts with no real issues.

In pulling up all 20+ plants I found three had tennis ball sized paper balls of some sort among the roots that got pulled apart as I uprooted each plant.
I didn't have any bug issues this year, maybe a few stink bugs here and there but not like years past. I did find some white grubs when I tilled up the garden but I figured since I only saw a few I hadn't put any pesticide down.
The stems of several plants were bumpy, Like a candle with wax running down the sides that hardened.

The years growth overall was very late, I didn't get tomatoes till late August despite only being a week or two late getting them in the ground. The weather was cool for longer in the spring than usual and this year we cooled off faster than in the past 9 or 10 years.
We had a pretty severe lack of rain this year too but I water regularly. We had a few heat waves but only one lasted any length of time back in July.

Here's one of the root balls I pulled up, this is from a Better Boy plant, which produced very little compared to the others. (Better Boy plants this year were poor producers, the first batch I planted died off, the second got eaten by ground hogs so i finally put in some late sprouting plants that were still in the hot box and although they got going late seemed to catch up but never got to full size, acting more like determinate plants than Better Boys.
Three of them seemed to re-energize once the weather started to cool and I got a few baskets of smallish tomatoes from them.
All of my tomatoes this year were smaller than I usually see but its also the first year I tried Garden Monster seeds (they were the only VFN seeds I could find back in Feb.

I first thought these were some sort of nest but remembered I had used those jiffy starter pellets this year after not being able to find starter soil or peat moss anywhere.

The roots in general were better anchored than most overall, with roots spreading as much as 4 feet away from the plant on some. They were not easy to pull up and I suppose I left a lot of the roots still in the ground. Most of the plants grew to about 8ft tall and over and back down the cages they were in. Next year I'll have to double the height of the cages I suppose as I probably lost a lot of production as vines folded over the top. Many of those vines get pinched off as they fold over the wire cages. Maybe adding a larger ring to the top would help as well?
When they fold over and keep producing they get hard to pick or find the tomatoes within the foliage and a few often get missed, not found till their way over ripe or rotten.

Although I consider the overall year a success, as it gave me far more tomatoes than I had first anticipated by the late start, and about 30 gallons of sauce and paste put up for future use, and about 30 qts of tomato juice frozen as well.
Taste wise this years tomatoes were more acidic than any I've grown in the past with weaker overall taste. The few Better Boy tomatoes I got had the best taste.
The Garden Monsters are hard to peel, somewhat tart and slow to ripen but were disease free all year. There were still blossoms on the newest growth when I pulled them from the ground today. Some of the plants at the one end of the row, which get the most sun, even shot vines out across all the other cages the length of the row. It took me several hours to pull up all the vines, stakes, and untie all the cages for winter and another hour to run them all through the shredder to dispose of them.

 

[Anniekay]

Dig you put paper in as compost?

 

[yardiron]

Its the remnants of the Jiffy pods the seeds were started in. What remains is a paper like ball that resembles some sort of next. The stuff looks nothing like it did when planted. Most plants likely lost the seed pod casing but a few survived and came out of the ground looking like some sort of strange nest.

At first I had assumed that all the original seedlings had died out, a few must of gotten mixed in with the second batch of Better Boy plants that got planted along side the under performing first lot of plants back in June.

 

[yardiron]

Well, its the middle of Dec. and I just finished off the last two fresh tomatoes which were picked green almost a month ago.

With the odd growing season, the plant did somehow seem to produce more than the year before, although taste wise I think the Better Boy plants I grew last year tasted better and got almost double the size.

Having had bad years for Better Boy hybrids in the past, I don't think it'll stop me from planting them again this year, but I'm on the fence about whether or not to bother with the Garden Monsters. The largest of the Garden Monsters was maybe 1lb, but it wasn't the norm. Most were the size of a Tennis ball at best.

None of the surviving Better boy plants gave me anything larger than a plum, and the few I got from the one plant that made it from this years seeds might have given me 30 tomatoes tops. The Garden Monsters were numerous and despite having automatic watering and plenty of fertilizer, they didn't start to produce steady till the season was already nearing the end.

With the irratic weather we've had this year, I may well have gotten away with leaving the strongest Garden Monster plants in till they flat out froze, when I took them out, they had some frost burn from a few cold nights but they were still growing and producing flowers even in the cool fall weather. The plants doubled from Sept. 30 to when I pulled them up.
It also took a long bar and a shove to uproot these this year. My okra was the same way. I had use a 6ft jimmy bar with he plant folded over it, then lifting on the bar to uproot all the plants. I've never seen roots that strong or deep before. The Okra looked like small trees, even though it did most of its growing after August. There were still blossoms on the plants when I pulled them up last Friday.


This was the first year I ever used those peat pods to start my plants.
It was also the first year for me growing Garden Monsters.
I usually germinate my seeds in shallow soil mixed with some peat moss but someone gave me about 250 of those pods and several kits and trays so I went with it, and even started them earlier than usual.
Of all the tomatoes, the better boy plants were weak from the start, and only a few germinated, but the garden monsters were near 100%.

Now I'm debating on whether to use the pods again or not. although it kept the plants separate better it wasted a lot of pods that never sprouted seeds.
I have some concerns as to whether the pod trays stayed warm enough for germination for the Better Boy seeds. The second shot at having some BB plants came from year old seeds just put straight into quad trays and left to germinate and grow in the sun on the porch already well into May. Nearly all of those seeds grew but they still didn't produce as well as they did the year before, in either soil in either garden.

I want to get back to growing the huge tomatoes i always had in the past.

Right now, if the weather dries out a bit, I want to chop up all this years leaves and grind them into the garden to rot over the winter. If nothing else it ads organic material for water retention.

I also have a few yards left of mushroom soil that I didn't use back in April that I want to ad to raise the level of the whole garden up a bit again.
It seems to lose a lot every season for some reason. I added over a foot of height last spring and its down below where it was before I added two yards of new soil. That's even with all the leave and grass mulch from this seasons growing as well. With as much material as I add through the season as mulch I'd think it would gain height not lose it. It was also a dry year so it didn't wash away either.