If you aren’t familiar with the gardening conditions in Austin, let me tell you, they’re pretty terrible. Tomatoes in particular have a terrible time of it. Austin hits fatal extremes of heat and cold. You have to plant tomatoes after the danger of frost, but early enough that they fruit before the heat sets in. For years I hadn’t seen anyone grow tomatoes successfully. Then I saw the tomato garden of one of Julia’s friends and it blew my mind. Plants fifteen feet high, loaded down with fruit. Since then I’ve been trying to replicate his success.

The last couple of years I’ve done pretty good, harvesting enough to fulfill the household tomato-needs while also making dried tomatoes for use in pesto dishes later in the year, and also making a couple batches of green tomato pickles (a state fair blue-ribbon winner!).

Here’s the recipe for tomato success in Austin:

• start the seeds around Christmas, inside and under lights. Plant them when the danger of frost seems past, around the end of February or early March (pro-tip: start more seedlings than you need, it’s cheap after all, then keep the extra seedlings in reserve in case frost kills the first batch)
• use the most compost possible. The guy with the giant tomato crop used nearly 100% horse manure. In my case I use all the household compost, and also bury fish heads and whole carp in the raised beds throughout the winter.
• a drip line will make your life way easier
• once the plants are established, cover the dirt on the bed with a layer of wood mulch to limit evaportation. This can be turned in when the next batch of compost is added
• use known heat-adaptive varieties, and save the seeds of the most successful plants

For the last couple of years I’ve been using Iraqi varieties of tomatoes, since you would think that anything that can grow in Iraq can also grow in Texas. And this has proven successful for me.

This year I thought I would try something different, I ordered a bunch of heirloom tomatoes which were rumored to be good in the heat, and tried to plant them all at once. The wrinkle to this plan? For various reasons I didn’t get around to planting the seeds until the end of January, nearly a month too late. The result was an inadvertent trial by fire for these poor plants. So I thought I would share with you the results of this experiment into climate extremes. I’ll probably repeat the experiment next year, but with better planting timing, but here’s the preliminary results.

Tomato Varieties: Success and fails

Because I was too lazy to write out the full names of the varieties when I planted them inside and also when I planted them in the garden, I labeled them with a grid-system notation based on their location on the planting trays, and then I placed them in the garden more or less randomly at the beginning of March. This gave me a rudimentary double-blind setup for this experiment. I’ve only just today tabulated the results. Included are the variety name, description of the performance, and position in the garden. Organized roughly in order of how well they did.

• African Togo – Success. A good crop, enough to fill a couple little bowls. Back row, a poor location for growth traditionally, which makes this impressive.
• Criolla Quetzatepeque – Success. A good supply of small and warty fruits. As you might imagine, this variety was responsible for me deciding to use a notation system instead of writing out the entire name on a piece of painter’s tape. Front and center, one of the best locations.
• Raspberry Mochi – Moderate. Several large tomatoes, but they all split after a big rain. Front row.
• Florida Special – Moderate, several medium-sized ripe fruit produced. Plant currently dying. Front row.
• Abu Rawan – Moderate, several medium-sized came ripe. In previous years, this was one of the best producers. Front row, toward the edge.
• Nueva Vizcaya Nipple – Moderate. Two medium but unripe fruits. Front and center.
• Al Kuffa – Fail, no fruit, it barely grew, but it’s still blooming. This was a shock, because this had been one of the success varieties the past two years. In the back row.
• Iraqi Heart – Fail, very stunted. An Iraqi variety I hadn’t experimented with before. Back row.
• Kara Market – Fail, No fruit. Scrawny but blooming. Back row.
• Kamatis Tagalog – Fail. No fruit, but bushy and still going. Actually, there may have been some fruit, but I could have confused it with the nearly identical-looking criolla quetzaltepeque right next to it. Front row.
• Marbled Mystery – Fail. Four tiny little nubs of fruit on a dying vine. Back row in the corner, really the worst location.
• Bolivian Tomato Fruit Grape – Fail. Got about six good-looking yellow cherry tomatoes. Then the whole vine died. I’ve already pulled it out. Back row in the left corner, probably the second worst position.

Addendum for the 2025 Experiments

In 2025 there were mistakes made with the tomato plantings, and there were mistakes from 2024 which were avoided. I’ll keep this summary short, but keep in mind that I do have extensive documentation with shorthand notation to preserve the double blind, and a rapidly growing Google Sheet.

This year I got the seeds planted at a reasonable time, and I also got them into the ground a lot earlier than in 2024. However, because I was growing the seeds in a low-quality Hill Country Fare potting soil which was mostly twigs and hardly any actual soil, the seeds took a month longer to sprout than normal, and many didn’t sprout at all. The tomatoes which did eventually sprout were straggly and sickly. But once they got into the ground and into my highly composted soil, they quickly took off, looking much better than the tomatoes of previous years. I can barely walk into the garden area they’re so overgrown.

And maybe it’s the comparably wet and cool summer we’re experiencing (it’s hardly above 95 degrees at all!), but the tomatoes are producing and going strong and showing little inclination toward shriveling up and dying.

So, the final result, the tomato varietals which have more or less routinely succeeded under the horrible growing conditions in Texas:

• Raspberry Mochi
• Criolla Quetzaltepeque
• Nueva Vizcaya Nipple
• Basrawya

The runners up, the varietals with some asterixes after their results:

• Al Kuffa (I swear it’s worked well in previous years)
• Abu Rawan (it probably just drew a bad card on the seedling stage)
• African Togo (a notation error may have caused it to have a lower score this year)

If you have tried any of these tomato types in the Texas area, let me know what results you’ve seen in the comments!

The post The Best Tomato Varieties for Austin – Controlled Experiment appeared first on Matthew Bey.

And when I told my friend AwesomeJoolie about the Best Summer Ever project, she suggested that it needed to be a contest. So I added points. And I’ve promised prizes. Here’s the complete list of activities:

• Frozen yogurt – 10pt
• Neighborhood pool – 10pt
• Splash pads – 5pt
• Secret beach – 5pt
• Snorkeling – 10pt
• Barton springs – 10pt
• Barking springs – 10pt
• Play hooky – 15pt
• Frozen margaritas on a Tex Mex patio – 10pt
• Iced drink and a dog on a coffee shop patio – 5pt
• Boating – 5pt
• Paramount summer film series – 5pt
• A stupid blockbuster in the theater – 5pt
• Fruit served loca style – 10pt
• Baseball game – 5pt
• Fireworks – 5pt
• Tubing – 15pt
• Party large on a party barge – 15pt
• Micheladas – 5pt
• Beach fishing trip – 20pt
• Congress Ave. bats – 5pt
• Bracken Cave bats – 15pt
• Purple martin roost – 10pt

And there’s a couple of stretch goals to rack up extra points:

• Single weekend swarm hat-trick (both bat swarms and purple martins) – 20pt
• Check off every activity on the list – 50pt

Now it’s been pointed out to me that many of these items seem biased toward me personally, which is fair because I wrote the list initially to make sure that I personally had a fun summer. However, and I cannot stress this enough, I am not in the lead with points currently. And I probably won’t win the summer.

Want to have the Best Summer Ever? Want to compete for fabulous prizes? (the prizes are yet to be determined, but they will almost certainly have zero cash value)

Download a printable PDF of the list and the scoring. If you want to be entered into the contest, you will need to post to Instagram, using the hashtag #bestsummereveratx. Tally up your scores on Labor Day, and may the best summer win!

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The problem is the exact time and place of the roost varies year to year. Usually it doesn’t vary by much. One summer they roosted in the live oak next to the Wells Fargo at Highland Mall, and the next they made a home in the crepe myrtle at the Jack in the Box a block to the north.

The problem came two years ago when the purple martin swarm went missing.

The second week of July came and went, and they weren’t in any of the usual places. After the third week, the local Audubon Society hinted that they had located the roost using their army of bird watchers, but they didn’t release the location because they had not yet received permissions from the land owners. The Audubon Society, bless their elderly nerd hearts, think they own all the purple martins.

So I crawled the web and social media, looking for clues, and I found a tweet from a radar enthusiast, Waystation1067, who posted a GIF of NEXRAD data showing the purple martin roost dispersing in the morning, a fuzzy expanding ring in the weather radar. This is how purple martins are usually located. The cloud of birds is literally as large as an actual cloud.

I watched that GIF over and over, trying to pinpoint the spot, and then at sunset I took my dog and drove around Pflugerville and Round Rock until I found the Pier One Imports parking lot filled with the missing purple martins.

In 2019, I decided that I could rely neither on Waystation1067, nor the Travis Audubon Society. I would find the purple martins all by myself!

. . . by using the multi-million dollar taxpayer funded weather radar infrastructure and publicly available data.

It took me until 2am one Saturday night to puzzle out the process (yes, I am the sort of nerd who thinks that’s a really great way to spend a Saturday night). There’s a lot of information on this topic at NOAA.gov, most of which is written for a technically sophisticated audience. To save myself the time of re-researching everything, and to give you a step up in the process, here’s my layman’s interpretation of what I learned.

When you see a weather map on the news or on your phone’s weather app, that comes from the US government’s NEXRAD radar stations. In the Austin area there’s two about equidistant from us. There’s one near the airport in San Marcos, and there’s another one on the north side of Granger Lake, right on the edge of the public hunting lands (I’ve hunted near the radar installation many times). They look like giant volleyballs in person. On the weather radar you can see the random chaff and scatter radiating out from their locations.

The radar you see on your phone comes from a realtime API feed which I cannot begin to fathom just yet. But that’s fine, because all of that is NEXRAD level 3, which is for chumps. To find purple martins, you need the NEXRAD level 2, which has the sort of resolution you need to pinpoint the epicenter of a bird flock down to a quarter mile. (Presumably NEXRAD level 1 is what they use to read our minds and keep us believing that the dollar bill has value.)

Each radar station has its own call sign, and the call sign often corresponds to the NOAA weather district it services. So the radar in San Marcos is KEWX, serving the Austin/San Antonio weather office, and Granger is KGRK, which, I dunno, is just three random letters with a K in front. This is going to be important, because the radar data will be organized by these call signs.

The best way I found to access the weather data was through a Google Cloud public dataset storage bucket (update for 2024, my buddy who has previously been identified as “Peter Gabriel” has found an Amazon AWS storage site that appears to have more up to date NEXRAD II data). The data is organized by date and then by radar callsign and then by hour. The data tends to be a couple of days behind, but once you figure out which hour the purple martins wake up and scatter through the sky to feed, all you have to do is click and download.

Okay, you’ve got the data, but what about turning that data into a pretty radar image and animated GIF, suitable for posting on a social media venue? I spent a little while perusing the data files, hoping to find a quick and easy JPG archive, but no, this is all in a custom binary format. The options recommended by NOAA seemed pretty challenging, but some digging brought me to the shockingly vaguely named application called Integrated Data Viewer (IDV).

From there it was a fairly easy process of importing data and fiddling with settings and radar angles and reflection quotients and whatnot until I found a recognizable bird flock. And from there, I was able to located and visit the purple martin roost a little before the Audubon Society gave their official permission.

An interesting side observation, in the weeks preceding the flock coalescing in Pflugerville, it looked like a number of smaller flocks were active in neighboring communities like Johnson City. This year, if I have the time, it might be fun to visually confirm the existence of these sub-flocks in person.

If you have any questions about weather radar, I probably can’t help you, it was a minor miracle, and only with the help of scads of documentation that I got as far as I did. But hey, ask away! The purple martin swarm is only a few weeks away, so I hope you’re getting as excited about it as I am!

EDIT 7/2021:

I made a screencast with some terrible audio that shows the step by step process of importing data into the Integrated Data Viewer and using it to locate the purple martins. I was able to see them at the Capital Plaza shopping center in Austin weeks before anyone else seemed to know that they’d moved away from Round Rock!

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