Tomato Folk,
Thanks much to Cecilia for all her hard work and for bringing all her kin; I had no idea she was one of 7. Cecilia's had folks sign in and she said we had 42 people. That beat's last years count which was 36 people attending. It made it fun to have so many folks from so many places. (HI, NJ, PA, VA and MD).
The number of tomato varieties was down to somewhere around 50 varieties which was partly because we started a week earlier while the tomatoes started a week later. NO ONE TALKED TO THE TOMATOES! They were all in the dressing room discussing this before the show. How rude they said ;-)
Also we were missing Trudi who contributes so many and Dunkel (Doug) from WV, who was with us 2 years ago and grew about 60 plants of many different WV varieties but didn't like to eat them. (huh?)
I counted the empty beer bottles from my homebrew that I was "recycling" last night and 29 were empty. That's impressive! I didn't know that folks would care much except for the novelty of the idea.
As far as how the competition went, I was hoping to test the quality of the "Emily" tomato in this competition and as you can see from Cecilia's results "Emily" came in 4th place. Don't let this fool you because it was the highest ranking Large Pink beefsteak among the winners.
Over the past 3 years we have always found that cherries have come in way ahead. This suprised some folks that are part of other gatherings. Perhaps it is a Maryland weather or soil issue? Perhaps, statistically 3 years is too small of a sample? Black Cherry and Sungold are always up top and other cherries are in the top ten that include Dr. Carolyn Pink and White Current.
This puts "Emily" on top of a whole class of tomatoes that includes, red and pink, large hearts and beefsteaks. Of course this only one competition and I doubt that it will be repeated next year. If it does and this tomato continues to produce with the same size and vigor, I would say that this a variety worth keeping. I have been debating this question since it seems like "Just another" large pink beefsteak to add to so many others that are already so good. Hopefully it will stand the test of time.
The parents of this variety are Prue and Marianna' Peace. These are good parents. On that note, one of the winners from last year that was also a cross from similar parents but the F3s segregated so much this year that it was not the same at all from last year. Too bad really but some of those lines still seem interesting and there's always next year :-)
The "Penny" method of judging has one distinct weakness. That is that it favors early entries in popular locations. We could dampen these effects by having enterants interlace their entries with other competetors on other tables.
I may add that there was general agreement from the regulars that his was the most fun we had at a MAGTAG event so far. It seems that many thing were in our favor this year. The weather was perfect.
Hope to see you all next year.
Greg
|