Costoluto Genovese - love/hate?

[Barb_FL]

Thanks for the update. I'm glad you figured it out with the bird pecks and CG. You still are getting a lot of all kinds of tomatoes. Even in pictures with the leaves really bad, the plant stems are so nice and green.

[ponyexpress]

I had good luck with them this year. Almost no BER. The only thing I don't like about them is they're on the small side and they have a tendency to merge blossoms so you can get some weird tomatoes. Many of my other varieties had BER issues this year.

I roast the tomatoes with onions/garlic and feed them through the Kitchen Aid food strainer attachment on my mixer.

[JRinPA]

Even that bunch I brought over from the comm garden were not as good as they looked. That last pic. It was two days between picking and milling, and in that two days off the vine sitting on the carport and covered with AG19, 3 of those 7 were too far gone.

I grouped the bad ones on the left of the center tray and managed to salvage some lobes from them but lost some CGs I thought were fine.

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Ended up losing 3 of 7 before milling.

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BER is also contributing the collapses on these CG - glad that was brought up because I forgot about that. As a rule I don't get much BER on my tomatoes except a smattering on early trusses. When BER was mentioned early in the thread, I wasn't seeing that as an issue. This last picking I tried to look over the tomatoes well before touching them, and did see some bottom black spots. I don't know that it is true BER, or just rot starting at the bottom. I think of BER as something that starts when the tomato is still green, and I will usually trash that tomato early so as not to waste the plant's energy developing it further. But these CG in the garden have grown without any supervision.

I just get a much smaller loss rate on the little round tomatoes.

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I found a number of CGs in the garden with bottom rot, whether it is true BER, I can't say. This one slipped by and made it into the kitchen only to be trashed after the picture.

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Here is an example of the different rates of decay. This Sweet Ozark Orange had soft spots when I picked that day but after the same two day delay on the carport it was still hanging on. It was firm underneath. I sliced off all those bad surfaces and the remainder seemed fine so it was about 50% salvage. My sauce gets pressure canned so I don't sweat the small stuff .

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I want to try it again but the ribbed CG may just not be the tomato for me. The threshold is 8+8+12 qt pots an inch from the top - so about 25 qts of cold squeezed juice is what I need to start each batch. It takes some time to build up to that many and it hurts to have that much waste from a tomato variety when the others are better able to cope with processing delays.

[JRinPA]

I had good luck with them this year. Almost no BER. The only thing I don't like about them is they're on the small side and they have a tendency to merge blossoms so you can get some weird tomatoes. Many of my other varieties had BER issues this year.

I roast the tomatoes with onions/garlic and feed them through the Kitchen Aid food strainer attachment on my mixer.

I have to do some roasted sauce yet as well. I used to freeze it afterward but the last few times I have milled and canned in pints. I want to say it is Suze's recipe/method posted about 10 years back. It has hot peppers as well and is my sausage sandwich sauce. CG in good shape would be a real nice tomato for roasted sauce, I'll wager.

[Whwoz]

@JRinPA , what is AG19 for the benefit of this Aussie please. I am wondering if you might inadvertently trapping too much humidity around the tomatoes for their liking.

[JRinPA]

AG19 is 0.5 oz per sq yard non woven polypropylene. Very breathable row cover with 85 or 90% light transmission that protects about 2-4F against frost or something like that. Won't trap water. In a tray on the carpot, it does a good job of keeping the picked tomatoes fresh and shaded, and keeping the flies off and fruit flies from starting up. The tomatoes plants are not covered at this time, though some years I do use row cover for the first month in the ground.

AG19 row cover is made in Brazil, but I'm not sure if it is still being marketed in the US as Agribon. The last time I bought it they had taken away the lettering "AGRIBON" that ran down the centerline of the sheet, leaving the finished product a generic, solid white. The next season, the retailer I purchase from began carrying DeWitt brand instead, again with no lettering, and the exact same specs.

[worth1]

Great tomato or not I recommend growing a couple of plants just for the use in a salad.
Pick them at blush and let ripen in the house.
People eat with their eyes as much as anything and this one is a real show stopper.

[JRinPA]

I took some tomatoes that made it through in good shape to a picnic the other day. CG and some round ones. They got sliced and put in the chow line. I heard lots of comments about the pretty tomatoes.

[JRinPA]

Oh boy... I got a cup of these started again...giving them another go this season. We'll see, I have the idea to use them for sauce, straight sauce easy to make, when they are ripe and crying to be picked.

They will be in the back yard though, at least I think. Maybe I wrap the cages in old AG19 to keep the birds off them.

They are undeniably thick for sauce, doesn't take much cooking down. If I can steam can them with 2-3 qts, rather than a full on boiling water bath heating 12 qts of water, I think it would work.

I could just pressure can but that adds at least an extra 1/2 hour and shouldn't be needed for straight tomato sauce. I did some steam canning last year and still alive to type about it.

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

the gotch brought one along with him when he stopped by, and when he took it out of
the bag, we discovered the tops of the ridges were all bruised. gotch looked pretty surprised (bolds/italics mine).



keith

That's because The Gotch doesn't like delivering inferior product...especially to Yoopers of Italian descent...

We grew it two (2) years, and never had any problem with rot. However, the Costolutos (ribs) coupled with a tendency for cat-facing made it a...um...time-consuming challenge for processing.

The Gotch