I haven't seen any concentric cracking or radial cracking yet, but fully expect I'll see some soon. There's just been too much rainfall in a relatively short period of time for the tomatoes to not crack. I expect to see a lot of weather checking on the fruit as well. I haven't stepped foot in my garden in two days, so every tomato out there may be cracking at this point and maybe I just don't know it. With roughly 20" of rain in the last 30 days (and about 14.4" of that in May), the real shock is that the fruit's not cracking. After the rain stops falling this morning, I'll go out and see what I find.

Brandywine is prone to crack pretty badly anyway, so I am not surprised that yours are cracking but I hate to hear that it is happening. I had a huge Brandywine harvest last year but don't think this year will be the same. I'll probably look back at the end of the year and regret that I "wasted" garden space on several Brandywine plants. Maybe we'll get lucky and summer will be drier than spring has been and our Brandywines will manage to set some fruit that won't crack.

In an excessively wet and prolonged rainy period, it is hard to avoid some sort of cracking, though some varieties are more prone to it than others. You can do everything right in terms of what the tomatoes need, but then if Mother Nature decides to dump 6 or 8 or 12" on your garden in one day, there's nothing you can do about that, and we're all in the same boat this year.

With concentric cracking, I leave those tomatoes on the plant until/if they start growing mold in the cracks. Often, with concentric cracking, the plants form scar tissue and heal over and the fruit can be harvested and eaten eventually. I don't know if that would happen with concentric cracking under the current conditions because there's not enough dry days for the skin to scar over and heal, and with rain falling several days a week, it seems more likely the cracks will just widen and then start growing mold. With radial cracking, my experience has been that the fruit won't heal at all and I might as well remove the fruit when I see the cracks.

In an odd way, it is better to be perpetually wet in terms of cracking as opposed to swinging back and forth from dry to very wet to dry again, so what would help most would be some consistency. Often, tomato fruit crack as they near maturity and the epidermis loses its ability to expand rapidly, so heavy rain following prolonged dry weather can be harder on tomatoes than continually heavy rain, up to a point. With continually heavy rain, the tomato skin seems able to keep stretching more, more and more, until it just reaches a point, genetically, where it cannot do it any more.

In the kind of weather we're seeing now, I don't know if there are any tomatoes that won't crack. Even varieties that are known to be fairly crack-resistant likely will crack over the next few weeks because there's just too much rain falling constantly.

Brandywine is a heart-breaker, but it is worth the heartbreak to have a chance to eat a few Brandywines during the tomato season.

Here's a tip which might help avoid foliage disease. I grow my own family heirloom, Tomato Rocky, which is, if possible, more difficult than Brandywine, in our climate. Some years I've harvested perhaps a tomato per plant. Fortunately, Tomato Rocky's main problem is not so much fruit set as foliar disease. Last year I agonized over planting this variety, as my space and time are limited. But I finally decided to "go for it," putting four or five plants, right in the front of my main garden. I mulched heavily, right from day one. They did great (for Tomato Rocky), producing a respectable and delicious harvest. This year I put in five and mulched before any precipitation (I think within 15 minutes) could hit them. So far, so good. They're looking happy and growing better than any other variety in the garden. You might try this with Brandywine if you haven't already done so.

George

I think mulching helps by keeping the soil moist in typical conditions, and maybe it partially explains why I don't have any fruit cracking yet. However, we have had almost 30" of rainfall here already this year (more than we've had in some entire years), and my experience with that sort of heavy rainfall in such a small time frame is that cracking and splitting is bound to occur. It is just a matter of when, not if. Yesterday I did go out into the garden and check the plants that had a heavy fruit load, and not a single fruit was cracking, which shocked me. I even picked and ate some cherry tomatoes and they weren't splitting yet and their flavor, while a little milder than usual, wasn't as bland and watered down as I had feared it would be. Maybe the raised beds are working better than I thought they would work, but I still think cracking will occur sometime soon. Expecting a rainy year this year, I did plant some varieties that generally do not crack, so maybe they will produce crack-free fruit even if most of plants do produce a lot of cracking fruit.

With onions in raised beds rotting, and flowers not in raised beds rotting and dying, I'm beyond the point of hoping tomatoes won't crack. I'm just hoping the plants survive and produce something.