Windclimber,
I�m east of you in Iowa & I agree with your assessment. Other than the cherries & Mountain Princess I have noticed my major taste producers not living up this year. I plant Celebrity to cover adverse weather taking tolls, but though the 2 plants still look good, the taste is not there. Even tomatoes I have purchased at our local farmers market are usually as much of a treat as my own, but this year they are all bland. Yes, it does benefit to harvest after color break
to avoid shortcomings sunscald, & bug and animal pilferage.

Would like to trade Black Krim seeds for matt's will cherry seeds.

plantloverla - it is rude to hijack someone's thread like that. Go to the Exchanges forum to post.

windclimber - I'm just so glad to get ANY tomatoes right now that I'll settle for ANY flavor. But yes, picking at color break helps IMO. Otherwise they are cooking in their skins - literally.

Dave

simmera...Dave.......Our dog,Harvey,who himself is a tomato lover looked at me like "wa was that" after I gave him half the Sungold I spit out yesterday.....I have had a paint sprayer net around a big Italian Hierloom fruit as a rouge squirrel has been finding his way into the covered garden area...it broke color a few days ago and went to pick it to find the rodent had tried to claw thru, then find a big fruit worm feastng inside, w/ the back side all rotted . It had a little taste but this is a challenging summer to say the least........

wind,

dont forget the tomato tasting this weekend

Here is a link that might be useful: kctt-tomato-tasting

the solution to extreme heat is mulching plus lots of dihydrogen monoxide

Mulching heavily should be every gardeners practice.....I use straw as it has insulation qualities I prefer for keeping the root zone cool and moist....dihydogen monoxcide to combat heat stress........please enlighten me.
Tom

Tom, It's a fancy name for water, if I remember right.

I threw down straw and plants look happy. I'm less worried about soil drying out in the next heat wave, or the sun baking the roots. It looks like it will have the added benefit of reflecting light up to the leaves.

My tomatoes are finally ripening here in the middle of Missouri, and it looks as if the heat will finally fade a bit after this weekend. I'm at work in town and we got a fair amount of rain today....hope my place north and west of town didn't get skipped as it often does. For a while, I was mainly getting cherries and German Eggs, but now all my full sized fruits are ripening all at once. There is little fruit on most of the plants because none set during the extreme heat. I must say that what has and is ripening tastes pretty good to me. I've had a couple of excellent Terhunes, and though I don't normally like yellows all that much, the few Golden Queens I've had tasted good to me. Maybe I'm just reacting to the small amount of fruit I'm getting, but the taste seems up to par, and I wish the yield was, too!

I wish I could make it to the KC tasting. DW made a tomato tart last weekend when we first had enough slicers to do the recipe, and it was amazingly good. Recipe was from Southern Living and used puff pastry for the crust. We had Terhune, NAR, Paul Robeson and Golden Queen slicers, though the PR were really small, and then she topped it off with some chunks of Black Cherry, Juliet, German Egg and Garden Peach, so it was very colorful.

I just talked myself into stopping at the store after work for some puff pastry and Feta cheese and whatever else was in that recipe. It might use up almost all our remaining tomatoes, except for the cherries and the very productive German Eggs.

Chuck