📌 Quick Summary: August Harvests & Greenhouse Mysteries
- 🍄 Foraging & Forests: Late summer isn’t just about tomatoes! Heavy rains bring massive flushes of wild mushrooms (Porcini, Chanterelles, Aspen boletes) and unexpected forest finds, like shed moose antlers.
- 🏷️ The “Shape-Shifting” Tomato: Have you ever grown a famously pointed tomato variety, only for it to grow flat like a pancake? Growers discuss the classic dilemma: was it a heat mutation, or did someone just get their seed cups mixed up again?
- 🥀 The “Dying Swan” Drama: Some varieties (like the ‘Tyulpan’ / Tulip tomato) look incredibly weak and leggy as seedlings, constantly flopping over under their own weight. But don’t throw them out! They often produce the most beautiful and delicious fruit of the season.
- ⚠️ Tired Greenhouse Soil: If you grow tomatoes in the exact same greenhouse beds for 10 years without changing the soil, the plants will inevitably start getting sick. Stems dying back from the base is a classic sign of soil-borne pathogens taking over. Read the Editor’s Note below to learn how to fix this!
Just popped into the greenhouse and snapped a few pics of the tomatoes. Harvesting some for fresh eating and saving seeds.Here is the Kiyevlyanka tomato:
And here is Dulsineya (seeds from Svetik):
gala7496 wrote: The wild mushrooms are finally popping! Also found some shed baby moose antlers.
What an awesome haul! And that massive Porcini on top of the basket is an absolute beauty!
Aleksan9ra wrote: And that massive Porcini on top of the basket is an absolute beauty!
Definitely making fresh mushroom soup today! Here is the rest of the haul:
Porcini, Aspen boletes, and Chanterelles!
gala7496 wrote: Here is the Kiyevlyanka tomato…
Gorgeous, and your greenhouse is so neat and tidy! 😘 My Kiyevlyanka is throwing completely different shapes. The fruits are way bigger this year, probably from the heat wave.
I’ll wait and see how they color up. If they ripen pink, it’s Kiyevlyanka. If not, it means I got my seed cups mixed up again! 🤦♀️ Case in point: a cup labeled “Konus” (Cone) gave me weird, flat pancake-shaped beefsteaks… definitely not a cone. So don’t use my garden as a reference this year! 🤭
Galiy wrote: I’ll wait and see how they color up. If they ripen pink, it’s Kiyevlyanka…
Galya, your tomatoes look great too, nice big clusters! I started my seeds in late Feb. Moved the seedlings to the greenhouse in April and finally planted them in the beds in early May. Had to keep them under frost cloth for ages because of a cold snap. Honestly, maybe I should just plant out later next year.
gala7496 wrote: Had to keep them under frost cloth for ages because of a cold snap.
Galya, it’s just the kind of summer we are having. My outdoor plants are thriving because they’re in “virgin” soil (nothing but grass grew there for the last 5 years).
But my greenhouse tomatoes are struggling hard. The greenhouse has been sitting in the exact same spot for 10 years. I was hoping my son would move it to a new location, but it didn’t work out. I spaced them way out for airflow, but they still got sick. The main stems are just drying up and dying back from the base. Probably too late to do anything about it now.
It’s raining again here. Enough already! Btw, my Tyulpan (Tulip) tomato finally ripened. It was hands down the most pathetic seedling in the bunch. Looked like a dying swan! 🤭 But man, the look and taste of the fruit are top tier! 🙏 My neighbor had to come over yesterday just to help me tie it up again. It keeps snapping its supports and flopping over. These are all growing outside, by the way.
👨🔬 Editor’s Botanical Note: The 10-Year Greenhouse Curse
In the discussion above, Galiy mentions a very common and frustrating problem: tomatoes grown outdoors on fresh soil are thriving, while plants inside a 10-year-old greenhouse are sick, with their main stems drying up from the base.
This is a textbook case of Soil Exhaustion (Tired Soil) combined with a massive buildup of soil-borne pathogens.
When you grow plants from the nightshade family (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants) in the exact same enclosed space for a decade without crop rotation, soil fungi like Fusarium and Verticillium wilt accumulate to critical levels. These fungi attack the vascular system of the plant, blocking water uptake, which perfectly explains why the main stems are drying out while the rest of the plant struggles to survive.
How to fix a “tired” greenhouse:
Since moving a heavy glass or polycarbonate greenhouse is often impossible, growers have a few options:
- Topsoil Replacement: Remove the top 8-10 inches (20-25 cm) of soil and replace it with fresh, disease-free compost and topsoil.
- Heavy Cover Cropping: Sow White Mustard or Winter Rye heavily in the fall. Mustard acts as a natural biofumigant, actively suppressing fungal pathogens in the soil when chopped and tilled in.
- Grafting: Graft your favorite heirloom tomato varieties onto disease-resistant commercial rootstocks. The rootstock will simply ignore the soil pathogens, allowing the plant to thrive in “tired” dirt!
