Oh, by the way... I ate my first home-grown tomato yesterday. It was a cherry tomato from the plant in the front yard. I picked it, sliced it and ate it. So-o-o good.

If you remember, I'm the guy who has never liked tomatoes. I just wanted to grow them to see if I could do it. But after eating that tomato, I can't wait until the rest of them ripen. I'll be eating them as quick as they can grow.

It was perfect -- meaty but juicy, with a hearty taste. The whole experience made me understand why a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable.

If the full-sized tomatoes are as good as the miniature ones, I'll be eating my weight in tomatoes this summer -- and I might even plant some more for the fall season as well.

Any recommendations for good fall-season tomatoes?

Don't feel bad I caged mine this year too and I ended up putting stakes in with the cages to keep them from falling over

Bessie

I got mine staked up with 8 foot long 1 X 1's pounded 14 inches into the ground and I'm still worried that when the weather gets hot those stakes might not hold. Not that the plants are huge yet but I'm having trouble tying them to the stakes. Haven't been able to keep them trained to a single leader because if I don't go out and check them daily there are new pencil thick branches going every which way. What looked nice and tidy when the plants were just transplanted is starting to look like a situation just waiting to jump out of control. For all the growth I don't have that many new tomaters.

Question - How big a container do I need to grow a single staked indeterminate tomato plant and have the plant grow well?

Container sizes are confusing me. What are standard sizes for those plastic containers 1 quart and larger? Is there a standard way of measuring clay pots to tell what size (quart, gallon, 2 gallon, 5 gallon) they are or how much soil they will hold? Maybe there's a picture somewhere showing containers and pots in standard graduated sizes, no?

Hank

I had to cut my small cages off of tomato plants and put large cages around some of them, and some of them were too large for the cages, so I had to stand cattle panels up by them for support.

Hi Jeff!

Hey, it is ONLY June. Those tomato plants could be 10' tall by August! Just to clarify, I always cage my tomatoes, AND I stake the cages AND the plants. Here is how I do it, and there are many other ways to do it as well.

When I plant the tomato plant into the ground, I pound a 3' stake into the ground a couple of inches from the plant and loosely tie the plant to it with a zip-tie. This helps encourage the plant to stand up straight and tall as it begins to branch out rapidly....sometimes they get too heavy too fast and lean sideways a little.

Secondly, I put the cage around the plant and stake the cage on 2 to 4 sides, depending on that variety's general rate of growth. The stakes help keep the cage from tipping over when we have a thunderstorm with very strong winds. I also attach the stakes to the cage with zip ties. I use zip ties a lot. After the tomato plant is a couple of feet tall, I cut the zip tie holding the plant to the original stake so the zip tie won't cut into the ever-enlarging main stem.

If we are having a REALLY windy year, I run a bamboo stick or PVC pipe horizontally through several cages so they can help hold each other up.

If a plant becomes a big monster and the cage is in imminent danger of tipping over, I add a 4' to 6' tall metal fence post as a stake on the side from which the wind usually blows, which for us in the summer is from the south.

Sometimes, in spite of all you do, a cage will topple over anyway. That is where good mulching comes in. If your garden is well mulched, the toppled plant won't get a lot of foliar disease from the dirt.

I am glad you enjoyed your first tomato. Home-grown ones are SO-O-O-O much better. You do know, don't you, that you shouldn't refrigerate homegrown tomatoes if you can avoid it? Once the homegrown tomatoes are refrigerated, their taste and texture both change and they are almost as bad as grocery store tomatoes.

For fall tomatoes, you are at the mercy of whatever the stores have. There are some hybrid tomatoes that produce better in the heat, like Sunmaster, Sun Leaper, or Heat Wave II. Unfortunately, they were NOT bred for good flavor. I'd still go with ANY available heirloom, except Brandywine, which does not produce well in our heat. ANY cherry or paste tomato produces through the heat of the summer.

I have had the best production in summer months from Better Boy, Big Boy, Bucks County, Porter, Beefmaster, Big Beef, Brandy Boy, Nebraska Wedding, Mule Team, Box Car Willie, Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Arkansas Traveler, Bradley Pink, Lemon Boy, Super Boy (lots of tomatoes, but poor flavor), Fourth of July (same problem as Super Boy), and Celebrity as far as big tomatoes go. Well, Porter and 4th of July aren't big, but they are bigger than cherries.

Among cherry/grape/currant tomatoes, these are my favorites for summertime/fall production: SunGold, SunSugar, Ildi, Black Cherry, Sweet Million, Orange Santa, Dr. Carolyn, Rosalita, Coyote and Snow White.

Among paste tomatoes, almost any of them will produce in the heat. Some of our faves include Principe Borghese (for sun-dried tomatoes), Amish Paste, Orange Banana, Black Plum, Viva Italia, and San Marzano or San Marzano Redorta.

Of course, my favorites tend to be different every time I type a list because there are so many good ones, and many produce better in the heat than I had expected.

For me the ones that DON'T produce well in the heat are those that make really large beefsteak type tomatoes, generally those weighing in excess of a pound each. I never get very good fall tomatoes from large pink-fruited ones or from large bi-colored ones, altohugh Lucky Cross may prove to be the exception.

Hi Hank,

As a minimum container size for a single-staked indeterminate, it depends on the particular variety. Some indeterminates top out at 4' or so feet and could probably survive in a 5 to 10 gallon container as long as you water at least twice a day every day. I don't like to grow them in anything less than 10 to 20 gallon containers, and mine do best in 20 gallon or larger containers.

No matter how large a tomato plant gets in the ground, it will always be smaller in a container where its roots are more confined.

Container-grown plants need more frequent feeding as the constant watering leaches nutrients out of the soil.

I have had NO LUCK staking container grown tomatoes. They really need to be caged. To keep them from blowing over, I put the cage on the ground with the container sitting inside the cage. I then stake the cage to the ground. It makes it impossible to move the plant around, but it keeps the container from blowing over when the wind blows.

In my largest containers, the tomato plants hardly ever get taller than 7' or 8' tall. Often, they stay in the 4' to 5' tall range, depending on the variety and the container size.

I just look at a 5 gallon bucket and estimate sizes of containers upward from there. Some of the best containers don't come from the garden center. Those square Rubbermaid-type storage totes make great containers if you drill or cut drainage holes into the bottoms of them. If you don't like the available colors, you can spray paint them with the Krylon Fusion spraypaint for plastics.

Some of my favorite containers are 'muck buckets' sold at feed stores and farm and ranch stores.

You can turn almost anything into a container if you put drainage holes in it.

I know people who grow tomatoes in cheap 25 or 30 gallon trash cans. They fill the bottom half with shredded mulch and get put soil in the upper half. You can grow huge plants in containers that size.

Dawn

SNORT!!! You made me laugh so loudly I scared the dog!!

I have some tomato plants in 5-gallon buckets from HD and Lowe's (with drainage holes drilled into the bottom, and I use cages on those, mainly because I have more than one plant in them (I know, BAD me), and also because they're in a spot where they get much more wind. My other plants that are up against a wall are in planter boxes, and this year I staked those. They are all growing quite well--one of them is almost up to my chest, and as Dawn said, it's only June!

I'm hoping they don't all give up the ghost at once--maybe I need to think about starting some more plants for later in the summer . . . hmmm . . . .