tomato advice

[pippomky75]

So I have this dream... I am a canner and put up produce for the year, but I never seem to get enough tomatoes at any one time to fill one pint. Everyone has that gardener in their life that grows more tomatoes than they know what to do with. I want to be that gardener.

I have had my garden for two years. The first year I managed to kill every tomato plant I came in contact with. This year I was able to get three roma plants that each give me 1-2 tiny ripe fruits a week. I have left these three fellas right in the greenhouse for fear they would croak when I transplant.

So how do folks manage these "mega harvests" of tomatoes? Hundred of plants? Fertilizer? a certain strain? Pruning? Perform an ancient tomato dance? I want to know your secrets. From seed selection, to planting, to harvest what are your best tomato tips?

 

[baymule]

My ancient tomato dance;

#1-You must be properly dressed

Wear a floppy garden hat
Dirty falling apart garden shoes are a must
Torn T-shirt with stains
Worst blue jeans you own

#2 You have to play the right music-LOUD

Dancing Queen
We Will Rock You - by Queen
Saturday Night Fever - BeeGees
American Woman
Superstition - Stevie Wonder

Build a fire in the middle of the garden after dark
Dance fiendishly around the fire, playing music and whoop-whooping

Sacrifice a store bought tomato to the Garden Goddess. stab it with a steak knife and throw it in the fire.

That ought to do it!

 

[baymule]

I got this idea from @Ridgerunner. I used cow panels, 2 of them long makes 32 feet. Make it a double row and you got 64 feet of tomatoes. They are spaced 18" to 20" apart-just enough to scoot my butt between them. The 6"x6" holes are easy to reach through to pick tomatoes.

I prepared the soil with lots of sheep manure. Then I laid cardboard down to help with weed control. I cut holes in the cardboard with my machete, dug a hole for the seedling and put in a table spoon or three, each, of Epsom salts and bone meal. I stir it in the dirt, then plant the tomato seedling. From them on out, just water.

I also make chicken poop tea with fresh poop and a half bucket of water. I let it set a few days, then pour a cup or two in a one gallon watering can, top with water and water the plants with it.

My very favorite tomato is Cherokee Purple. I plant it every year. Good fresh, canned or dehydrated. For the 2017 garden I also planted Rosso Sicilian tomato for sauce and paste. It did well and I was pleased with it. I made sauce and spaghetti sauce.

https://www.rareseeds.com/rosso-sicilian-tomato/

@Carol Dee's favorite is Mortgage Lifter (Carol I have seed for you) I grew it for 2017 and I like it, but I still like Cherokee Purple better.

 

[Carol Dee]

Thanks @baymule did you save some Cherokee purple seed too? I am willing to try a few and see why you love tem more

 

[Smart Red]

What bay said should work. I do much the same. I add chicken coop cleanings in the fall, plant through brown grocery bags (in place of Bay's cardboard) and cover with straw around my started tomatoes. Keep consistant moisture -- the mulch of bags or cardboard help with water retention -- and that's about it.

 

[Beekissed]

Plant what does well in your area, so ask about to see what people in your area are having success with. Tomatoes like plenty of water, so mulching to preserve water to the roots helps.

Check out vids on YT...LOTS of great videos on how to grow tomatoes successfully in just about any way possible.

Here we don't have great soil, so we plant volume to get volume. I plant a small variety of tomatoes, mostly those that have always done well for us, and I make sure to prune them and trellis them so they have air and light.

I use cattle panels for my tomatoes also but differently than Baymule and Ridgerunner does....I space them in regular rows and just weave each vine through the squares as it grows.

Some years we do well, some years we do not....but each year we get enough to can up sauce, soup, salsa, etc. A few pics of batches of this and that.

These are yellow stripeys, which grow well for us here and are a sweet, indeterminate tomato variety...as you can see, the tomatoes are pretty large, being of the beefsteak variety. My favorite is the Brandywine, also a beefsteak, indeterminate, heirloom variety and which does very well for us here.

Brandywines can get massive and their flavor is unparalleled in my book...

You'll get more tomato info than you can probably handle from all the fine gardeners on here, so buckle down! We all have our favorites and many really do some experimenting each year with new varieties, so they will be able to tell you about a wide range of tomatoes and maybe even some that do well in your area and soils.

 

[digitS']

pippomky75, transplanting tomato plants is not very risky to their health. If they are in an inappropriate location, not moving them to a better location may be a serious mistake. Prepare the soil well, set the plants somewhat deeper than how they were growing before, and water them thoroughly.

However, first you should select varieties appropriate to your climate. I start a lot of Early Girl tomatoes each year. Sunset magazine once claimed that Early Girl was the most popular US variety - east, west, north, and south. That may still be true. It matures its fruit quickly on vines with resistant to several fungal diseases. It can be a fail-safe while you grow heirlooms that may not have that resistance, earliness and high production. There are other hybrids that can fill this role in your garden.

Quick maturity means that there is less time for things to go wrong. I need varieties with fruit that don't crack easily because irrigation is necessary but it comes from overhead sprinklers. Thessaloniki is an heirloom that I grow that holds up well. Porter is another one. Hybrid cherries are about my favorites. BTW, resistance to splitting doesn't necessarily mean tough skin. Flexible tomato skins should not require peeling or spitting ... And, probably no one has the right location for ALL tomato varieties. Check with local gardeners and your Cooperative Extension people to learn what they recommend.

Preparing the soil: a gardener once told me that she has always followed her father's advice. Each plant needs one 50# bag of composted cow manure. In poor soil, it sounds about right but I don't know that composted cow manure comes in 50# bags. Generally, tomatoes respond well to fertile soil but I'm more inclined to use composted chicken manure or an organic fertilizer with a higher N value just so I don't have so much to carry around out there. Additions of organic material and having fertile ground means deeper cultivation is possible and tomatoes can be big plants and make use of deeply prepared soil.

With the well prepared soil and because tomatoes seem okay with an arid climate, I can site my plants a little further from the sprinklers than some other garden plants. The stems of the plants will grow roots. It helps if some of the stem of the young transplants are set deep enough that additional roots grow to support the plants with water and nutrients.

Trellises and cages help above ground but "the sprawl" has been found by researchers to allow the highest production. A problem with sprawling is that fruit shouldn't really be in contact with the soil. Lots of bad things can happen to it.

One more note on fertilizing: tomato leaves are fairly good at holding foliar fertilizers. Mid-season, it helps me to go through with a sprinkler can of fish emulsion.

Best of Luck!

Steve

 

[digitS']

Criminently!

I just saw that there is all sorts of good advice ..

. above my post!

Steve

 

[pippomky75]

My ancient tomato dance;

#1-You must be properly dressed

Wear a floppy garden hat
Dirty falling apart garden shoes are a must
Torn T-shirt with stains
Worst blue jeans you own

#2 You have to play the right music-LOUD

Dancing Queen
We Will Rock You - by Queen
Saturday Night Fever - BeeGees
American Woman
Superstition - Stevie Wonder

Build a fire in the middle of the garden after dark
Dance fiendishly around the fire, playing music and whoop-whooping

Sacrifice a store bought tomato to the Garden Goddess. stab it with a steak knife and throw it in the fire.

That ought to do it!

That sounds legit. I'm in. You are too funny!

 

[flowerbug]

answer questions please:

what have you tried? what varieties? how many? how were they grown? soil and fertilizers used? regular irrigation? troubles with pests or diseases?

ok, here is what we do, we grow primarily beefsteak tomatoes in clay with a little sand. i wanted to try other varieties but the one year we did we had poor results and have been overruled since then on trying anything new.

our results have been between 15 - 30lbs of tomatoes, with 20 - 30 being normal. 3lbs seems to be a quart when processed.

i don't fertilize heavily. often if it is the first season i'm using an area (reclaimed from perennial flower beds or having been covered/mulched) i may not add any fertilizer at all. my fertilizer of choice when i do use it is a quart or two (per plant) of worms/worm castings/worm pee/worm poo (put right down in the hole). if i have time i may top dress/mulch with chopped alfalfa/birdsfoot trefoil and that is pretty much it.

irrigation, on heavy clay with some sand. first of all i plant the plants very deeply. i.e. i bury the starts (which are almost a foot tall by the time they get planted out) where only the top four or six leaves are showing. which means the stem and roots may be 8 inches below the surface.

i try to keep the watering going every two to three days when it is dry. rainfall is sometimes enough that i don't have to water much. each season is different.

sunlight, we have full sun. but a noticeable lack of sunshine during June has been happening sometimes and that can affect production. we won't begin harvest until the middle of August or later most of the time. a few earlies may show up but often they are affected by BER if the water hasn't been enough and the heat has been high.

there has been some troubles setting fruits if it gets really hot and dry. i'll go out and hose a plant down good when watering to get the flowers shaken and to cool things off.

we get late blights. our location gets foggy in the evenings. i never spray for anything. bugs or diseases. nothing i've tried besides spraying makes much difference. picking off diseased leaves or mulching. eventually the plants suffer. still we get results so i don't much mind.

i do pick off worms by hand. i go out in the morning and check for damage and then try to track the droppings to the worms. this past year there was only one worm found and it wasn't even on a plant. we thought that was strange... some years i've picked off a dozen or so.

we have planted between 16 - 40 plants. i'm not able to eat tomatoes much any more so that has been reduced the past few years to the low end. after one season of doing almost 300 quarts of tomatoes and then having to give most of them away because we didn't eat them was the last time we did that kind of crazy.

with our clay, we talk to the neighbors from time to time and also when i was working at the local small town library i'd talk to the gardeners and without fail, if they had sandy soil they struggled to get much of a harvest as compared to us where we have only really had one bad year (due to buckeye rot disease which came along with the starts themselves) and we still managed about 15lbs per plant.

this past year we did at the low end of that range again (15 - 20lbs per plant), due to me not noticing how dry things were getting and trusting that Mom was watering enough but she doesn't ever really give plants a good watering.

tomatoes do need a good amount of moisture if you are growing the larger kinds and want a lot of production.

things that i've heard about them but never done to fight BER, is to lime the soil well to keep the calcium levels up, but instead i just try to keep them happy with enough water instead.

if i were stuck in an arid climate with plenty of space i'd try to stick to minimal irrigation and try to dry farm varieties that can handle it. early varieties to take advantage of the cooler temperatures in the early season. planting the starts deeply enough so the roots have some protection and more chance to gather moisture.

also note that some tomatoes are determinant and will only give a relatively bunched production while others will keep growing and flowering as long as conditions don't do them in. beefsteaks keep on going for us. some years we pick the last fruits set right before the last frost gets them. the fruits aren't often the best quality, but for canning they are ok enough.

IMO it all comes out brown anyways...