Let's talk about 2016 Tomato Growing Season

[ducks4you]

I know it's the Holidays, but I am hoping to get some answers. I have amended soil in my garden beds and I had the very worst tomato growing season in the 20 odd years of growing tomatoes, worse than any year even less than when I grew tomatoes along an east fence in a small, south, 1/4 acre backyard. They just wouldn't turn red, and I don't know why. Every Fall I try to do a last minute grab of green tomatoes and bring them in the kitchen to turn red, can or eat. I ended up with 11 quarts from this, but I should have had so much more of a harvest this year.
If you have ANY insight or thoughts I'd like them, because I don't want a repeat of this failed season, that INCLUDED my pepper harvest. Thanks!!!

 

[Ridgerunner]

How did you amend it? Did you do a soils analysis? You might want to get one now to see what you are working with.

What was your growing season like in Illinois? Was it cooler and/or wetter than normal? Peppers and tomatoes need a certain amount of heat (maybe sun?) to ripen. When I was in Denmark the only way I could get tomatoes to ripen was by planting them in a greenhouse.

My tomato and pepper harvests were not great either. They weren't horrible but were certainly sub-par. I think it was because it was cooler here than normal during the peak of what should have been harvest season.

I do the same thing you do, just before a heavy frost or freeze I bring in green tomatoes to ripen. I usually get a lot of tomatoes from that. They make good sauce.

 

[digitS']

Ducks', take a look at this time-line for fruit development (Internet Archive, TomatoSite)

It show a Big Beef plant and I have had this variety each year for quite a long time. Big Beef is usually listed as a 72 day variety. The days-to-maturity is "presumably" from setting out your plant. It doesn't work that way. Lois Hole (an Edmonton AB politician, greenhouse person and gardening author) wrote the best explanation of these days-to-maturity by saying that they were in "ideal" conditions. BTW - a gardener and gardening author and politician, as well? Sure. But, it helps to be Canadian .

Notice that it takes about 50 days between the opening of the flowers and any sort of ripeness to the fruit. I think that this is about right for Big Beef. I remove flowers when the plants go into the garden. They are about 12 weeks old by late May and have about a 3 week season for ripe fruit.

This year was not a very good one in the tomato patch. The plants were pretty much okay but there were whiplash temperatures in June, from record temperatures in the 90's early and late and near frost in the middle of the month. The beefsteak varieties had quite a lot of deformed fruit.

It wasn't quite as bad as some years ago when we had 2 windstorms early in the season. After being banged up by the wind, the plants were attacked by flea beetles and I didn't notice the pests, at first. Damaged plants! One plant died! That was a terrible year for production.

So, temperature extremes can cause fruit problems -- catfacing from too cold of temperatures during flowering to yellow shoulders from too high of temperatures during fruit development. Some 2016 fruit had both problems!

There may be a couple of 80 day varieties out there each year. Really, they are always a source of frustration. Those final days of the growing season are usually less than ideal and ripening is delayed, delayed. Often, only one fruit will ripen in the garden and the others have to be brought indoors with the advent of cold, fall weather.

Were the variety choices appropriate for your growing season? Were your tomato plants started and set out early enough? Were they in rough shape at that time or get beaten up once outdoors?

Steve

 

[aftermidnight]

I had the worst tomato season I've ever had in 2016, in 2015 I had the best tomato season ever, for me it was all to do with the weather, can't do much about that. I just plant what I like and hope for the best .

Annette

 

[Beekissed]

Same here...worst tomato season in my~and my mother's~memory...and that goes back a long way. We had never had blight in any garden we've ever had...but had it this year. Had it on the maters, taters, apple trees and even the half runner beans! We even had our incredibly healthy clematis we've had for 20 yrs get a fungal blight this year...never got one before.

I don't think it was anything we did or didn't do, just the weird weather patterns and the fact that there's just more fungal infections in our plant life right now~global warming? When I look at our forests in this state, I see whole hillsides with green lichen growth on all the trees, no matter what kind of tree, and even growing on the rocks.

 

[digitS']

I've been back to this thread repeatedly. Why? I can check New Posts or Recent Posts or Activity and know that there weren't additional posts this afternoon .

I like growing fruit.

Leaves I eat until I'm almost green. It's fun finding what is below the soil surface, digging for roots. But, I like growing fruit .

My cucumbers are often real nice. Sometimes, they are real limited. The vines are short and they are late. Frost arrives and they are gone! It doesn't happen this way often. We know that they like water but the cool, cloudy growing seasons are the ones when cucumbers don't behave well.

My watermelon all died in 2016. The other two varieties of melon reversed their ripening schedule! It just means that the Galia variety had more problems this year than the cantaloupe. At least, I had lots of melons and they sure didn't die!

I wish my pepper patch was more consistent but ... it's never all that wonderful. The plants don't die. They just don't grow very much. Really, I think it's the daily swings of temperature here. Everything produces, it's just that only a few varieties do okay, year after year. Okay means that I can trust them.

Eggplant is certainly no better than peppers. The pumpkins and squash ... Beans are delicious, peas too! I like growing fruit .

Shoot. I tried to grow Physalis - Chinese lanterns. June 2016 almost killed them! Not kidding, they almost went the way of the watermelon! All but stopped growing! By first frost, I think that the average height of th Physalis plants was about 5". Lanterns? You would have to hold a candle for them! I don't think they had bloom 1 ...

Tomatoes? Usually, the beefsteaks don't do all that well. There were quite a lot of the quick-maturing cherries. Intermediates did fine. I like having big tomatoes but some of the little guys are pretty special.

Anything that takes 5 days to happen rather than 7 days, have less of a chance for the interference of bad luck. If fruits can mature in 40 days instead of 50 or 80 or ... you get the idea.

Leafy greens are quick and safe. It's best to eat your plants at that stage but with tomatoes, I like fruit.

Steve

 

[ducks4you]

What puzzles me is that I've talked to other people who live nearby and some of them had a bumper crop of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. Yes, I have never had my soil tested, but my soil isn't much different this year than last year. I always have many volunteers in lots of places, places where I dropped fruit feeding to my chickens, or dropped and forgot. ALLLLLLLLLL of my tomato plants this year were VERY late in growing fruit and turning red. My beds are highly amended with horse & chicken manure bedding, well rotted, but the other places have not been amended at ALL.
I would like to figure out how this happened. We in IL live in a converted swamp and we have wet years. THIS was a very wet year. Still, WHAT did those other folks do to get their good crop?
I thought if we discuss this, we might be able to figure it out.

 

[so lucky]

I don't have an answer for you, but I suspect it is more the weather than anything else. I had a very disappointing garden this year, as well. The Marconi peppers that were so huge and sweet in 2015 were small, few and pretty tasteless this year. Tomatoes? I bet I didn't get a gallon of good tomatoes from 8 plants. They were split, cat-faced and not very good. Scrawny plants, so not an abundance of nitrogen that would cause too much green growth and not enough fruit. Just stunted in all ways.
Sweet potatoes were small, twisted and had a blackish coating. Some were nibbled on by voles.
I watered the garden once or twice; it stayed wet. Snails and salamanders loved it. Lots of organic material from years of mulching with straw and chicken litter. It would have been perfect, maybe, if the garden had been on higher ground.
I don't know if I have the energy to raise the garden up in mounded beds next year. Meh! We'll see if I am more mobile by then.

 

[so lucky]

Just as a rough temperature observation, I didn't feel it necessary to put a fan on my chickens this summer, at all. I kept waiting for it to get unbearably hot for them, and apparently it didn't.
I wonder, @ducks4you , would it be possible to get a report of the summer temps comparing 2016 to 2015 and 14? Average day and night temps?
I'm thinking temps and soil moisture had a lot to do with the problems.

 

[digitS']

Comparing one Selected WS location to another: Growing Degree Days . That isn't one year to the next but shows 2016 against the average. If you search your local WS site for GDD , you might find it. Shoot, there is the Internet Archives I've linked above. I remember having done that for previous years and times ... also, agriculture sites keep track of these things, important for crop insurance, etc.

Domestic tomatoes have been greatly modified but the wild tomatoes are in one of the driest places on Earth!

Yes, it is near the equator and near the Pacific but the Andes Mountains shield that area from rainfall.

My best-looking plants, as usual, grew close to the sunflowers - not "amongst" but close to. The sunflowers gave them some protection from the prevailing winds. However, prevailing winds are from the southwest so those taller plants also shaded the tomatoes somewhat. Those tomatoes were the last to ripen.

Steve