Do yourself a favor and not use this year as a basis for growing. It's the worst year I've ever had with mine. The month of June was the killer,at least for me. I normally have ripe and normal size,for the variety,on early varieties(DTM 65-72 days)by mid July and mid season(DTM 72-80 days) by the first week in August. Here it is 12 August and I'm setting fruit,which will never ripen on my Brandywine and Delicious varieties, near the top of the plants. I did get a little fruit set in late May/Early June on the bottom of these plants.

Take a look at this website to get your answer on how long it takes for Tomato to get ripe from the bloom stage.
http://www.tomatoenthusiast.org/index.php?NT=Cultivation&RE=Truss_Timeline
Winnie

win586w...thanks for the link to the website! This will hopefully inspire a bit more patience in me...my Mr. Stripey is taking FOREVER!

Thanks for the timeline, thats perfect info.

Since there is ?only 6-8? weeks left before frost,
should I start clipping off the flowers and plant
tops?

There was a several day heat wave in early june( 90-95F ), followed by a few days of a cold snap 40-45F. All the blossoms on the bottom of my plants dropped off.
Had that not happened, would I be enjoying ripe tomotoes right now?

Aside: Stupice is a winnner of a plant. My biggest is ten feet tall, covered in hundreds of small/medium ripening tomotoes, most of which are ripeneing now. Fairly tastey too.

I'll second what jwr6404 said, for the last 6 years that I've been planting tomatoes (I live by SeaTac airport) this is the only year that everything went haywire! I planted 24 diff varieties and only Stupice gave me 6 ripe tomatoes (small too) and Anna Russian gave me one... all the other heirlooms I have, early and mid-season are nowhere near the produce I had since 2001! I started having green toms in my Roma mid-May and until now they're still green! Around this time, I'm already having loads of tomatoes, I guess I chose the wrong year to plant a LOT of varieties! Oh well, we'll see what happens til the first frost comes.

Kito, I am in Portland and planted 5 varieties, all of them 70 to 80 days for first fruit. Well that was 104 days ago and have picked one Tom. The cooler summer is killing me. I have lots of green ones which I will cover with clear plastic when it gets colder. I have picked tomatoes as late as the last week of Oct. doing it this way. You got to do these steps here in the PNW especially when summers like this occur. Just relax and have your plastic ready

I'm in Everett and this has been a strange year for sure. With all the rain and cold staying so late into the summer, I'm just now getting some kimberly's and bloody butchers. Mighty few of them to boot, alas.

My mortgage lifter is only now setting fruit, same with BW, CP and a few other beef steak types. Strange year is putting it mildly.

Bill

Things have been pretty bad in Maine too. It's no small wonder that my tomatoes aren't going well when I harvested over 2 pecks of sweet peas just a couple of weeks ago. It's annoying though, because I'd much rather have a couple of bushels of tomatoes!

Almost everything you need to know to grow tomatoes around Seattle is in the book "Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades" by Steve Solomon. All local libraries have this if you want to check it out before you buy.

It helps if you plant several varieties. You never know what problems you'll run into and each variety has strengths and weaknesses.

We start indeterminate seeds from Territorial in late February. We have a south facing window so the plants get plenty of sun. We also use a four foot fluorescent shop light. On nice days the plants go outside.

The tomatoes are planted outside in April when it looks like the cold weather has finally passed. You need a spot with lots of sun and up against a south facing fence or wall helps too.

We use a slow release organic fertilizer from a recipe in the Solomon book, a plastic ground cover and a soaker hose.

The plants are trained to grow up a string and all suckers are removed so there is a single leader. The plants are spaced 24" apart so they get plenty of sun and air circulation.

This year we have six varieties ranging from early ones like Matina to late ones like Big Beef, including two cherry tomato varieties. All our plants are covered with ripe tomatoes. We picked our first tomato (sweet million, a cherry) the last week of June.

The height of this year's plants range from about six feet (quick pick and first lady II) to almost nine feet (bambino, a cherry).

The week of rain caused some problems, splitting and dark spots on some fruit, but this year is no worse than most.

The plants live up to the first hard frost, usually in October.

Glad its no worse for you. cause this time last year I was giving away bags of tomatoes. Now I'm not getting enough to make a BLT. And I do have a variety of maters out.

Stupice, Bloody Butcher and kimberly are all DTM 60-65 and I have a Sweet 100 that I've only gotten 2 or 3 off of.

Bill

I think for most of us it is an off year where things are extremely late. Other than sundevil.

I had to laugh at the news last week when they said "it seems like the weather has been worse this year but it has not" then thye mention the average 24 hour temperature being the same 65 degrees this year as last. Well, they may want to wake up and remember all these cloudy rainy days keep it a lot warmer at night. So the cool days but warmer nights make the news say this year is similar to last...ok, those 1.4 inches of rain in July compared to a normal .4 and how many full sunny days have we seen so far in August? maybe 4 out of 15...

back to tomatoes. The year is a poor one but I will say it looks as though I may get better production on many plants,the german johnson and some brandwine and other OP beefsteaks have more green fuit than last year but about a month behind. I would say I see 40 green beefsteak per plant but I am wondering if they will ever ripen as it is the heat that turns them and the bad weather returns tomorrow for the next week at least..bad to me is no sunshine....

anyway, been a slow, tough year but things are fruiting and I am eating a fewe sungold and black cherry and kimberly....

Keith in Buckley

DTM 60-65 what does dtm mean?

"Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades" by Steve Solomon.

I snagged that from my mom about a week ago.
very informative.

It helps if you plant several varieties. You never know what problems you'll run into and each variety has strengths and weaknesses.

good idea. If one does succeed this year, should I give up on it forever?
I have a couple plants 8-9' tall, but no tomatoes on them at all.
All my other large plants seem pretty happy though.

The tomatoes are planted outside in April

In April?
Isn't that 2 months too soon?
Where abouts in WA?

Keith,

My CP, ML, and BW are all setting fruit finally. But like you, I don't know if I will get to taste any.

I'm making plans now so that I can build a carbon fiber green house attached to my garage for next spring. that way I can plant out 4/1 and not late May or early June. although my lettuce and brocolli have been going like gang busters.

Bill

DTM 60-65 what does dtm mean?

Days to maturity. The dtm is a very approximate rough estimate of the number of days from the time the plant is set out, until it yields ripe fruit. It is very approximate, and it won't be the same for all, due to conditions being different in different places. Additionally it will vary from season to season, just as the weather does.

I think of it as a 'swag'.

Sue

Hello elskunkito, and anyone else that usually waits until June to plant their tomatoes.

I'm just 10 minutes from downtown Seattle, so your location might dictate a different approach.

I like to mix in the organic fertilizer and put down a plastic ground cover a couple weeks before planting time. The ground gets a lot warmer when it's covered and that helps the plants get a good start.

We always plant in April and usually pick the first tomatoes in early June. It the weather turns nasty I'll cover the plants until things improve.

We also plant mostly hybrids that are bred for this climate. Territorial seeds has a good selection and the catalog has good advice for getting the most from your efforts.

Probably as important as anything else is each plant is trained to grow up a string, none are allowed to sprawl and cages are not used. The plants are not crowded, the sun is already in too short of supply around here.

This year is ok, and with 19 plants we are getting more than a family of five healthy eaters can handle. This week we dehydrated about 10 pounds of tomatoes and still have five pounds of fruit to eat in the next couple days.

We always plant in April and usually pick the first tomatoes in early June.
Awesome. thanks for the additional info.

The tomatoes are starting to get ripen.
So I have another question....

Very few slugs arround this year, so the tomatoes are safe on the vine.
When and how can I tell the optimal time to pick them?

Are tomato seeds readily available year round?

Next year I want some planter box varieties.
Any good ones?
How much space do they need?

That moderated climate in Seattle must be helping you, sundevil. I also start seeds in Feb. and start to plant out in early April but I use tunnels over the plants to keep them warm. Mine are a mix of a few early and mostly mid-season in the 72-85 dtm range. Up here with the cool nights the dtm are another 40 days added on for many. I started getting tomatoe- IPB, July 15, and now more are starting to get ripe at once. There is unusually heavy fruit set on many but they are really slow to ripen like most are reporting. Siberian Pink, Tricot Czech, San Marzano, and many of the heart tomatoes are doing very well for fruit set. My first large tomato ripened today, Lucky Cross.

Elskunkito, tomato seed may be ordered from the catalogs at anytime of the year.

Sweet Baby Girl performed very well as a container tomato for me. A lot of folks use very, very large containers for their tomatoes but with such a small variety as Baby Girl, I only needed a few gallons of soil.

And, WA State Cooperative Extension recommends Small Fry.

digital Steve

Sundevil, if you are within 10 minutes of downtown Seattle, then you are either WELL within USDA z8b (and possibly technically 9), or you drive too fast!!

(friendly laugh)

As for the main point of this thread, the usual rule of thumb is to add FIFTY PERCENT to the DTM ratings, to compensate for our cool summers. Anything rated 90 days or more is a longshot although they can be done in normal years with a little TLC. 70-80 are usually decent ranges for sweet, full-flavored late tomatoes, although this year everybody I know says they're just not ripening.

Matina and what I think is Gardner's Delight (accident with the labels) are doing OK for me and have been ripening tomatoes for about a month now. It will be nip and tuck for most others but I think they'll be OK. Clint Eastwood's Rowdy Red and Earl of Edgecomb should be ripening within a few weeks.

Pineapple is probably a lost cause at this point. I'm not sure it even has a single significant fruit yet. It is a very delicious tomato, quite sweet and "fruity" (as are several of the "German Bicolor" types), my wife's favorite (she told me to grow nothing but that), and it makes beautiful slices and dices with its multicolored fruits (I got red, yellow, and quite a bit of green even dead-ripe) and I've gotten them other years, but it is always a risk with its long DTM.

Oddly enough tho, "Ananas Noire", which I think is an accidental cross of Pineapple (ananas = pineapple) and one of the "black" tomatoes (noire = black), is doing just fine. Not ripe yet but big fruits and they seem like they should be able to ripen one way or another.

When I first grew tomatoes here we had lots of them in December. Early and late blight hadn't hit that particular part of the Puget Sound yet, and killing frosts are often that late. Now with the blights, not to mention an increasingly destabilized climate, we need to get the tomatoes in earlier.

My strategy is to grow lots of short-season and cherry tomatoes, and only a relative few of the big, long-season, late tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes aren't always early, but they are usually easy to ripen. I love "beefsteak" type tomatoes (for sandwiches...or sometimes just eating slices straight), but they are ALWAYS risky in our climate. Even when we have a decent summer, all we need is one big summer cloudburst, and a lot of the beefsteaks, which tend to have thin skin and tender flesh, swell up and turn watery, or worse, split There seem to be some exceptions, but in general, smaller tomatoes are safer from too much summer rain or for that matter not being able to ripen.

Sunset Magazine recently suggested covering tomatoes with plastic sheets to keep the rain off them, to avoid blight. I haven't tried it yet but it's worth a shot. I will have to try it soon as the rain is already here, and the days are cool and autumnal. I will try to give it a go and report back the results.

Personally, Steve Solomon's books and ideas are too colored with Marxism (for those who are not aware he is a Messiahnic Communist) to have any use for me. He would denounce most of you for your decadent bourgeois elitism for growing heirloom or open-pollinated tomatoes instead of more productive F1 hybrids to make for central committee's glorious 5-year productivity miracle, and that was a typical kind of value judgment that underlies a lot of his assumptions without being explicitly stated (I assume he didn't want to scare his publisher). Yes I am aware that he speaks of personal sovereignty today and yet he still has plugs for the wisdom of Karl Marx right on his personal sovereignty page.

atash
I'm eating a BW tomato sandwich as I send this message. Already consumed 3 with 6 to go. Have to admit they are a nice tomato but not near as good as the Caspian Pink and Perfect Purple I've grown in the Past. Not sure of which BW I have . It is PL red with a slight tint of orange. I have many small(1") tomatoes on top but I'm certain they will not ripen. Should get 2-3 tomatoes off my Delicious variety. Next year I'm going back to my Plastic covered cages from early May until mid June.This year I used the Walls of Water and it's the first year I wasn't happy with my results. Probably just a coincidence that this was the worst weather as well. Next year I'm going to break from my policy of different varieties every year and grow a few of those that have done well for me along with Rutgers. Will try to find a large hybrid that grows well as Big Beef and Delicious have been a bust.,any suggestions?

Appreciate your comments on the Soloman book. Had placed it on my Amazon want list. Will not order.

Seems like this year the maters are ripening much later. Most of my plants are fairly well loaded, but only gregs altai, nyagous and beefsteak have given up some red ones. Many plants havent brought any green ones to full size either. Luckily my greenhouse earlies have been giving me ripe fruit since mid july. I have had one plant succumb to late blight and two that looked like they were about to. I picked all the full size green fruit of rogers best black and black from tula to avoid losing them to blight. They will ripen indoors and lose some flavor, but better than the alternative. At this time of year I watch the plants closely for blight. When the little green stem hat on top of a mater turns blackish brown, its a goner. Thats when I pick the greenies that still have green hats. I pulled all the suckers, all blossoms and all tops off on august first. My worst plant is andrw raharts umbo red. Only 8 maters and still only golf ball size. Best is gregs altai with maybe close to 75. Biggest was polish c with about 20 fruit. biggest plant was galinas for cherrys,8'. and druzba had most foliage. Aunt ginnys purple was tastyist last year. Had one B from Tulu, very nice.

JWR you've gotten Brandywines to ripen already?! Wow.

And the same plant produces small tomatoes too. I like tomatoes that are more uniform. But I am still impressed and I bet they are very tasty.

It seems to be common consensus on this board that "Delicious" is a DUD! I was not impressed with the flavor and several other people here have said the same thing. Performance of the plant was poor with me too.

>>Will try to find a large hybrid that grows well as Big Beef and Delicious have been a bust.,any suggestions?

I gave up on the hybrids as I have never found a good-tasting one for some years now. Some people on this board say the hybrid "Brandyboy" is good. Have you tried it?

What's large? Moscovitch gave me pretty decent tomatoes early last year. They had a fairly classic tomato taste.

Siletz produced a crop of beautiful, surprisingly uniform (for their size) tomatoes that are somewhat bland and a bit mealy but fresh from the garden they were better than store-bought. The vines seem more disease-resistant than usual.

I wonder if determinants are best for bigger tomatoes in this climate. Moscovitch and Siletz are both determinates.

>>Next year I'm going to break from my policy of different varieties every year and grow a few of those that have done well for me

At this point, disease resistance and tolerance of uncertain weather are so important to me that anything that performs well gets invited back.

A lot of the seed merchants tout tomatoes from Russia that perform well in short season. Some of these have done well for me. But what I would REALLY like are tomatoes that are reliable when it's cool and rainy (both in terms of ripening, and not splitting), and more disease-resistant too.

Paul, uh oh, already getting blight?! I've got a systemic infection in a lot of my plants, but no early or late blight YET. They've been eliminating all chance of late crops in recent years, tho.

I've tried a few new varieties this year, lots of black varieties, and many are slow to ripen due to the weather. Most of my plants do have a good number of good sized green toms on them, though. Sungold is always a winner, but still slower to ripen than usual. Pruden's Purple is actually giving me a few ripe ones. I've got a couple Black Russians that are finally ripening, but still waiting for my Cherokee Purples to blush; I grew those for the first time last year and they were absolutely delicious! Santian, a determinate variety, was quick to ripen and tasty. Stupice, an early variety, is now finally starting to take off in terms of ripening. I don't have any other early varieties this year and just want my existing tomatoes to ripen before the end of the season. I remember last year I was eating tomatoes every single day and this year I've been having to be extra patient. Not fun.

atash
Yes I did get a few BWs,off my first BW ever. After reading your post I tried one of the Delicious and gave the other away. It wasn't a total Dud but not worth growing again. My hybrid for next year will be a Japanese variety from seed I got from a local Korean Market.The package of seeds is written entirely in Japanese and fortunately my neighbor is Japanese and she translated the variety as Kuri Hari or Kurihari.She wasn't able to tell me anything about it. The picture on it reflects a large attractive tomato. I assumed large as it appears large compared to the leaves. I've grown Momotaro and Odoriko and its not one of those. I've sent a couple of packages to New York and Florida. The Market has 6-8 packages left and since it's late and Koreans dont often plant,eat or cook tomatoes they haven't sold. I'm going to try to purchase them all just in case their good and/or someone in GW land might want to give them a try.

>>Stupice, an early variety, is now finally starting to take off in terms of ripening.

Dr. Cindy, I tried that last year and was disappointed. It was all of about 1 week earlier than any other tomato and not very productive. They probably got a systemic disease, such as are common here.

Matina has a core too, but it is smaller, softer, and not as noticeable. It is definitely dependable for ripening, and well ahead of any other tomato this year. My kitchen hanging baskets for fruit and vegetables are loaded with them. The tomatoes are typical of cool-season varieties like "Sub Arctic Plenty", very firm, thick skinned, salad size, but they do not have too much "gel" like some smaller tomatoes do, and they do not split after a summer rain (that's probably from being firm and thick-skinned). The flavor is mild but not bad for an early. The tomatoes are very uniform in size and shape, round, and blemish-free.

The plants bloom precociously (like maybe a foot tall), were vigorous even in cool weather, and seem to be fairly resistant to summer diseases. One surprising thing is that even the earliest fruits had seeds. They probably self-pollinate at lower temps than most tomatoes. Might have shorter stigmas.

The plants are potato-leaved and rangy. Not as handsome as many tomatoes. However, they look good for being healthy while many of my tomatoes got infected with something systemic and are frequently wilting on me.

JWR, my wife is from Xin-Jiang, where she says the tomatoes were fabulous. Sweet and fruity. They have to beat the clock there too as the climate is similar to that of, say, Montana, but maybe even more so!

I think we really need our own tomatoes. I think it would be fun to try my hand at breeding them.

atash, there is a variety that was bred for the PNW, Saltspring Sunrise from Saltspring Island BC. We have grown it for years and it isn't a big tomato, but it ripens well in our climate and has been consistently good, and good tasting. Unfortunately, the experts say that it isn't a good variety and others are better so it is hard to get hold of. But. if you get a chance, give it a try.

One of your old posts said you had maxifort seeds to trade and I would very much like to try them. I have many different varieties of tomatoes and other veggies to trade.
Thank you
Tabbiea@yahoo.com
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