How are Things in the Tomato Patch?

[Hattie the Hen]

............... it has been pretty dang hot here lately, even the peppers are showing signs of dropping!!

Everything looks great, though, even if there's not a hint of a blush. Not even my Early Girls, which went in almost 6 weeks before the heirlooms, are showing any sign of redness. The early hybrids are *yellow*, but not red. Not yet!

I swear, I don't know which is worse, waiting for tomatoes to ripen or for my young pullets to give me that first egg!!! Whitewater

Hi there,

I think it may have been too hot for them & the flowers shrivel in the heat. I had to shade mine for about a week or so ago as they just weren't making progress ; they were just trying to stay alive. I was watering them 3 times a day.....mind you I am growing them in pots & the temperature here was in the late 80'sF. I draped my lightest row-cover material on tall bambool poles well above the pots (so they could get as much air movemany as possible). I even sprayed this a little to cool the air. The blossom drop problem stopped on all the newly emerging flowers & I got a wonderful set of fruit! You could use some fine netting or even a very thin sheet or cheap thin gauze material.

Hope this helps & it works......

:tools Hattie :tools

 

[obsessed]

Wow your matters have set a ton of fruit. Jealousy sucks.

 

[Northernrose]

I have mine in 1/2 wine barrels because I didn't have time to get a garden started this year.

Sweet 100= loads of fruit and I'm eating handfuls every day (no shocker there )
Yellow cherry (Bonnie's plants/Home depot)= tons of fruit NO TASTE

Started late:
Black Krim=very few greens
Arkansas Traveler= quite a few greens and more setting
Black cherry= lots of greens and still more setting

Started very late: Good looking plants, but haven't set due to the heat
Pineapple= none
Mr Stripey= none
Hillbilly= none

 

[Kim_NC]

I'm getting a lot of splitting, especially with the Cherokee Purple. The only almost-ripe tomato is so severely split, only half of it will be edible. It's pretty small, to boot.

We had a terrible time with that on Cherokee Purples last year. A friend of ours with about 50 plants of them did too. And the bigger they were, the more likely they split. *sigh*. I didn't grow them this year for that reason.

Anyway, we found that if we picked them early and ripened them on the porch we actually got unsplit, nice tomatoes.

 

[journey11]

I've got loads of big green tomatoes on and have been pacing the row waiting for them to turn ripe!

We've had 3 hot, humid, stormy days so far and it's supposed to go on like that all week. Perfect conditions for BLIGHT! And the garden is so muddy I can't really get in there and do anything.

I've had some tomato problems so far that I haven't had before. I've had a few tomatoes to ripen suddenly (getting my hopes up) only to turn out with a hard, spoiled area in the middle (mostly affects a seed chamber). Kinda dry and moldy looking. I've got to do some searching and find out what it might be. A couple others turned ripe quickly and turned out to have blossom end rot, which bummed me out. Rain is nice and rain is good, but we've had too much rain (again) this year. Only a few fruit have been affected, which is what happens when they set fruit during a rainy spell. The others are fine.

My sweet and wonderful neighbor has taken pity on me and brought me over a few of hers 3 times now. She started hers earlier than mine, while I held out for drier weather. She planted mostly heirlooms too and a few hybrids.

I've gotten 2 cherokee purple so far and a handful of sweet 100's. I have heard a lot of people on here say they weren't happy with their cherokee purples, but I thought they were wonderful...a good balance of acidic and sweet and so juicy! I'll plant them again.

 

[sparkles2307]

How big a pot would I need if I were going to keep a tomato plant indoors in the winter? I want to try letting it grow for a few years, but obviously in MN I would have to be putting it indoors in the winter and then back out in the summer....

 

[digitS']

Sparkles, some people make cuttings of their summer tomatoes so as to have indoor winter fruit. Here's an article in Mother Earth News (click here) about indoor growing. The author recommends cuttings and a 5 gallon pot, minimum.

In my tomato patch today . . . . . . I found 2 ripe Sungold cherry tomatoes. YAY!!

The Gary O Sena (Brandywine x Purple Cherokee) fruit that showed up first -- blew off the plant in the windstorm last week :/. I suppose that it wouldn't have been earlier than the Sungolds but it might have been the first beefsteak. Now, I'll just have to wait for whatever shows up.

Kimberley is a small tomato and no beefsteak but the plants have quite a few green fruits. Ildi, as usual, is covered with tiny green fruit which just seem impossible for the plant to grow to maturity but we will see. Ildi can really, really produce but fruit size can shrink down to very, very tiny.

Other than this, I don't see much sign of fruit. But other than several lost branches from the wind, the plants look good. I'll need to exercise more patience and look hard for Sungolds when I'm out there ).

Steve

 

[Hattie the Hen]

Hatty, we anxiously await that list on variety & progress. I'm very interested in what varieties are grown outside the US. I think that, for instance, our western BC/Washington/Oregon gardeners could learn a great deal by seeing how things do in your garden.

Steve

Right, I'm back again, notebook in hand.......!! This was the state of play re my tomatoes on Sunday 18th July 2010.

"Ailsa Craig"
One sturdy stem, 2ft tall -- one truss of tomatoes so far, three larger unripe tomatoes plus 3 smaller ones. It plant is already is already producing the next group of flowers.

"Shirley" [this is a disease-resistant variety]
3ft tall,very vigorous -- many heavy trusses of medium-sized fruit plus a lot more groups of flowers.

"Abraham Lincoln"
Smallish plants so far as they were purchased later than the others. About 18" tall & just started producing flowers last week.

"Supersweet 100"- F1 variety. I have a lot of these.
2ft 6"> 3ft tall producing many trusses of cherry toms. as well as masses of flowers. Doing exceptionly well.

"Sungold" - F1 variety. 3ft 6" tall covered with trusses of small green tomatoes & masses of flowers.

"Big Boy" Has gone crazy, trailing because I neglected to tie it up.Heavy with large fruit & flowers.

"Alicante" Doing very well, about 4ft tall & wide, many trusses of tomatoes & more flowers coming all the time.

"Moneymaker" I have several of these & all are about 3ft 6" high with a lot of fruit & flowers.

"Black Krim"I have only got 2 of these but both are doing well & are 3ft 6" tall with a few tomatoes on each plant but lots of flowers.

"Tumbling Red" I am not very keen on this variety which is a shame as I have 5 of them. They have very strong & almost wiry leaves which are very dense. There are so many leaves & they seem to form cages round the flowers & the pollination rate was so bad I decided to snip abot a third of the leaves off. This has improved the situation & I now hve fruit forming. I have never had this situation before with small tumbling varieties. I hope the taste is worth the considerable work -- it took forever.........!!

I do have a few un-named varieties because I had a young visitor who delighted in "helping" by pulling all the labels out to take home with him......................!!!!!!

Sorry it took me so long to come up with the list but it takes me ages with my one-fingered typing!


Hattie

 

[Mattemma]

I have mostly cherry tomato,because that is my dd's favorite.Some big types for dh.Growing well,but I am starting to get spots on the lower leaves of most plants.Picked them off and hope the tomatos do well.

 

[ducks4you]

I have all but 4 transplanted now--about 65 tomato plants in all. I can only tell which are Roma and which are not!!
It will be a nice surprise when the scads of green tomatoes ripen. It WILL be a good tomato harvest for me. I credit THAT to the good advice about composting that I got here! to all
To reiterate, I cleaned my horse stalls last winter and dumped them in my (16 x 40 ft) garden.
Everywhere I had about 5 inches of hay, straw, pine shavings, Equi-Fresh, manure and urine. 1/2 of it was tilled in last month before I transplanted my "grown from seed" and clearance Big Boy and Romas--there were 30 of those in the ground, all about 2-3 foot tall now.
In the other 1/2 of the garden I didn't till the compost under. Instead, I built raised beds over it and tilled up from my composted manure piles. They are between 3 inches deep to 8 inches deep.

(If you read any of my previous posts, my measurements were wrong. So I took a tape measure to my garden to find out it's real dimensions.)

TO ANYBODY having a bad gardening year, PLEASE just keep trying!! You can't do much about the weather, but through advice and through trial and error you can learn to grown your own.