We have had three frosts here on the island. Two nights ago it got down to 26 degrees for a couple of hours. I felt bad that I had not been up to digging through the prodigious foliage of the Rumi Banjan tomato plants as there are quite a few full size tomatoes in there which are still hard and green. The plants had survived the lighter frosts but I was sure that this cold would be their death knell.
Apparently, the Siberian Gallina and Afghani Rumi Banjan are even hardier than I thought. The topmost leaves are a bit limp, but if not for that, you would just think the other tomato varieties around them suffered from some dread disease.
The Siberian Gallina was our favorite snacking tomato. A yellow skinned cherry, I had been sitting on a small pack of seeds for a couple of years, a gift from someone who had made a seed gathering trip to Siberia specifically looking for cold hardy/short summer varieties. Parts of Siberia have a climate very close to Minnesota, being a continental climate (as opposed to coastal) and subject to wild temperature swings and extremes of water availability. The foliage is far more sparse than that of the Afghan Rumi Banjan, and while the plants are not as vigorous as the Rumi (which seems to enjoy the cold weather) they are not dead either and still ripening dozens of tomatoes every day. If there is any downside to these, it is that I have saved no where near as much seed because they get eaten about as fast as they get picked. Plenty for our purposes, but not a ton to get to other people. Glad I finally grew them as they are a real treat.
As you can see from the top photo on the page, the odd ripening of the Rumi Banjan to yellow when cold has continued. With my summer tomatoes being a sunburst orange I had a couple of tomatophiles tell me that what I had was not the Rumi Banjan because it is supposed to be a yellow tomato. <shrug> For me it is, so long as when it is ripening the temps are cool to cold. Warm to hot, they are a different color. No idea why, and I have never had another tomato effected by temps when it came to final color. We still love them both, and look forward to picking many more as the extended forecast has no frost or freezing for more than a week.
