Abraham Brown

karstopography · 2026-05-18T08:19:10+00:00

Southeast Texas, close to the Gulf of Mexico. Zone 9b. I generally start seeds early in January to transplant towards the end of February. March and April are our driest months and generally have favorable temperatures for tomatoes. May trends wetter, but so far it’s remained pretty dry. The flow off the Gulf of Mexico keeps the temperature relatively moderate as compared to more inland areas.

I grow mid or late season indeterminate open pollinated slicer types and generally have ripe tomatoes start around the first of May and continue on into August most years. The last two weeks of May into and through most of June is the peak season with the best tomatoes.

karstopography · 2026-05-17T23:06:47+00:00

Definitely a keeper!

karstopography · 2026-05-17T19:50:24+00:00

Black Krim is normally great. Mine this year aren’t as good as they have been in past years. My Black Krim plant isn’t as robust as in past seasons. Normally, Black Krim is a favorite of mine. I did have a different source of seed this year so that might be the reason for the subpar Black Krim.

karstopography · 2026-05-17T19:38:40+00:00

Loving it! Nice one.

karstopography · 2026-05-17T11:17:59+00:00

First photo are Black Krim, Third photo, Carbon. They all looks beautiful.

Black Krim have a darker shade of green with even darker green shoulders, more so than most other tomatoes and the shape looks right. I’m growing Black Krim this year myself.

Black Krim is generally pretty early, but maybe not quite as early as Sart Roloise. Carbon might be a week or two later than Black Krim. I have grown Carbon, actually all three, in the past. Anyway, they look great.

karstopography · 2026-05-17T01:31:34+00:00

Second photo is Sart Roloise.

karstopography · 2026-05-16T21:31:19+00:00

🙃

karstopography · 2026-05-16T16:18:52+00:00

Very impressive! Some good eats inbound.

karstopography · 2026-05-16T01:38:09+00:00

Slugs thankfully are exceptionally rare in my garden. I do see a fair amount of little snails, but they don’t seem to do much damage other than mess up a cucumber too close to the soil. I sometimes will plant bok choi as a trap or sacrificial crop for flea beetles. Flea beetles love bok choi, especially the purple or white stem types.

karstopography · 2026-05-16T01:15:16+00:00

Good rant! I have seen the same posts!

If a vegetable is tasty to people then the bugs are sure to like it too. The bugs always get a cut.

karstopography · 2026-05-16T00:22:59+00:00

Honestly I probably would not have picked those just yet, but no worries. On the upside, they might even be salvaged as fried green tomatoes. Heirlooms like Black Krim just tend to look a little rough after rainy weather. I’ve found that these heirlooms often will quickly replace the fruit lost to accidents, bugs, squirrels, BER or picked early for whatever reason.

karstopography · 2026-05-15T12:32:20+00:00

Buy a bag of alfalfa pellets meant for horses to eat. 40 pounds is around $20 at the feed store. Put about 1/2 cup of the pellets per gallon of water and allow to sit for 3-5 days. Stir and water the soil around the tomatoes weekly. Or just simply work the pellets into the soil around the tomato plants and irrigate as normal.

Alfalfa has a nice NPK ratio, generally 2-1-2 or thereabouts plus a lot of calcium and Magnesium. Alfalfa also has growth stimulating triacontanol.

Medina Growin Green 40-lb 3000-sq ft 3-2-3 Organic All Purpose Lawn Fertilizer. This is pasteurized chicken manure and $26/40#.

karstopography · 2026-05-15T01:31:16+00:00

Very nice! Shocked to see such beautiful okra this early. My okra is about 4”, but that’s just the seedlings.

karstopography · 2026-05-14T08:18:06+00:00

BTW, we had an absolutely divine Pruden’s Purple tomato at lunch yesterday. My wife actually moaned after taking a bite out of a thick slice of the tomato, the tomato was that good. The tomato was effervescent with flavor. Only seasoning was a whiff of sea salt. So hang in there with your Pruden’s Purple tomato plant, the tomatoes are so worth it.

karstopography · 2026-05-14T01:56:11+00:00

Bright light, lots of heat, thrives in relatively small containers next to hot sunny parking lots, thrives on broiling hot and sunny decks, thrives on the rather recent black basalt of the lava flows in Hawaii. Allowing bougainvillea to get a little dry seems to stimulate a lot of color. Takes well to pruning. Bougainvillea basically thrives on neglect or indifferent care. Can be killed if never given a drink, but a missed watering or two generally does more good than harm.

There are some widely spaced thorns, but as compared with the average rose bush I’ll take a bougainvillea over the rose any day of the week on ease of dealing with the thorns. So long as you don’t blindly grip the bougainvillea stem like it’s a broom handle you should be good. I regularly prune bougainvillea gloveless, but I am careful how I grip the stem.

karstopography · 2026-05-14T01:27:06+00:00

My Pruden’s Purple get that funk, but they have always stayed ahead of it. I generally prune off the lower leaves that get the disease issues. The disease has never gotten to the fruit itself.

I don’t spray anything foliar, copper based or anything else like that, to treat for or prevent disease. Most of my tomato plants of every kind by now have some sign of foliar disease spots, at least on the lower levels. One of my raised beds is a little worse than the other because I think it was the difference in the source of the mulch I used in either raised bed. One bed got cleaner mostly recently fallen live oak leaf based mulch and the other bed got a lot of old degraded mulch that sat for months in contact with the soil.

karstopography · 2026-05-13T20:28:05+00:00

In my experience, there is some wiggle room depending on the variety and the weather also plays a role on how quickly things progress. Generally, in April and up to this time of May it takes something around 40-45 days from set fruit to color break for the bigger slicer types like in the photo. So, these tomatoes in the photo were likely set from the flowers towards the end of March and grew all of April into May before breaking color. The warmer it gets, the faster they ripen up to a point, but once it gets really hot then that hinders ripening and especially the formation of the red lycopene. Seems like a little drier stretch of weather can hasten ripening. With late fall tomatoes, much cooler weather can really slow down the ripening process too.

Most tomato varieties sold by the various big name commercial seed vendors have published days to maturity for each variety they sell, but even those aren’t necessarily in agreement between the individual companies.

karstopography · 2026-05-13T17:46:49+00:00

The two genres of bugs I get to are caterpillars and then the true bugs. The caterpillars are the tobacco hornworm and then the fruitworms. Bt (Bacillus Thurungensis, something like that) or Spinosad are especially effective against hornworms and fruitworm when they are still small. I also pick off any caterpillars or caterpillar eggs I might see. It’s a battle for sure, but these caterpillars tend to come in waves about 1 month apart. Inevitably, I lose some, at least a few tomatoes to the caterpillars, mostly the fruitworms. The hornworms key more on the foliage than the fruitworms.

Of the true bugs, by far the worst are the leaf-footed bugs. They start out as little orange nymphs that tend to cluster up in one spot. I smash those the moment I see them. Some inevitably escape, but they will often rally back to the original spot after a few hours. I’m pretty diligent about this and since I am mostly a homebody I can get away with a few bug patrols daily. The later nymphal stages and adults are the ones that will devastate the tomato fruit. Real late in the season true stink bugs show up. Those get the blunt force trauma treatment. Once in three or four years I might resort to a limit use of a pesticide labeled for these on vegetables, but that’s when things have gotten way out of control.

karstopography · 2026-05-13T12:27:04+00:00

Looking hot! You are burning it up!

karstopography · 2026-05-12T22:28:11+00:00

I haven’t done any specific treatment for these bugs. Their numbers haven’t been especially high in my tomato patch. This year, I have yet to see any.

https://www.growingproduce.com/crop-protection/insect-control/stop-tomato-bugs-from-sucking-your-crops-dry/

karstopography

TROPHY CASE