16,949 Garden Web Discussions | Growing Tomatoes

not on thread topic necessarily.but..i was going to say..
i have been using fish bone meal last couple yrs.. and my tomatoes respond well to it..
so do the racoons too..:( so..i fence around the tomatoes at start of growing season.keep them from digging around my plants..
fish bone meal has good levels of phosphate,and calcium
plus helpful for good soil bacterial levels..
seem the more diverse soil is in humus levels,good bacteria,worms..helps fend off problems..

The word is "Hugelkultur".

That's what my mom used to practice, on a small scale.

When preparing a vegetable bed, she would strip the area of all the top vegetation - weeds, ferns, shrubs, saplings. She then strips the layer of top soil and put this aside. Next she would dig a trench in the ground - orientated north-south lengthwise. How deep this trench is depends on how difficult the soil is to work on. In this trench, she would throw in all the woody twigs, small trunks, and rotten debris. Next, she would cover this with the weeds/ferns/saplings that she collected from clearing the area. She compacts this down with a "hoe". She uses the top soil she had previously set aside to complete the final layer.

The final result is a long mound on which she would grow her spring onions, pak choi, chilli, etc. The mound usually ends up about 20 feet long, about 3-4 feet wide, and approximately 2 feet high. It often ends up not looking all that pretty - it would be crooked, and the height and width would vary. But, boy didn't it produce good crops!! (She would grow sun/heat loving crops n the west side of the mound, and the less sun tolerant types on the east side.). She uses fern leaves to mulch the soil. A heavy tropical down pour would easily wash away the top layer of good soil if left unmulched.

I did not know, until recently, that this technique of vegetable growing that my mom used to practise more than 40 years ago actually has a more fancy name "Hugelkultur", done on a much larger scale.

Now-a-days, in addition to maintaining a compose bin, I collect the larger chunks of organic waste by setting them aside in a pile through the growing season. In the winter, I trench the beds, throw in all the organic materials, together with any kitchen wastes that may be sitting around, and build up my "Hugelkultur" bed - albeit on a small scale.

Another vote for Heidi. Outstanding performance for me last two years.

eel

Opalka was the best producer out of all my tomatoes in 2013; I just wasn't blown away by the flavor. Wasn't bad, just wasn't outstanding.

This year I'm gonna try San Marzano Redorta--it's supposed to be a lot bigger than the regular one. I don't know how it'll do in our SC heat, though.

Here is a link that might be useful: San Marzano Redorta

Just a note here.. our local Master Gardener association NEVER can grow enough Cherokee Purple transplants for our annual sale. No matter how many we grow, they always sell out, often on the first day!

I grew a bunch of heirlooms in 2013, Cherokee Purple being one of them. It was pretty good, but in exactly the same growing conditions it was surpassed (in flavor) by Black Krim, Marianna's Peace and Stump of the World.

Wow SunQ, sitting here in west tn. with temps in the twenty's and looking at your garden. Makes a old man want to relocate to Florida. Must be so nice to garden the year around. I sure enjoy your posts.

Thank you! I have a funny feeling that come July, I will be whimpering at my laptop screen while all of you post pictures and talk about your tomatoes. Mine will be shriveled up from the heat, humidity and daily torrential downpours. I'll be thinking about germinating seeds for my fall plants and missing the taste of fresh garden tomatoes.

I have learned so much about growing tomatoes from reading here and getting advice when I'm "stuck."

So far I'm winning the war against the little beasts that decimated my tomatoes the first year. I attached bird netting to 6' canes and have the plants completely surrounded. I pick them when they first start to blush and let them finish ripening in the kitchen window. I also spray BT to keep up with the caterpillars since I can't keep butterflies out of the yard. Some of my plants are now more than 9' tall. I may have to start cutting the tops off!

Now while you dream of warmer days, make plans to start seeds and draw your spring garden plans, here's a picture to give you something to look forward to soon. I grew San Marzano, Amish Paste and Black Plum this fall. I've started seeds to transfer outside in the next few weeks and will also try to grow cream and green sausage, orange banana and Jersey Giants. I'm hoping they'll do well enough to can them. I'm dying to try making marinara and salsa with a colorful assortment of tomatoes. Here are the San Marzanos outside now, getting ready to ripen. I can't wait to make a pot of sauce with them and some sweet basil from over in the raised bed.

All of you stay warm and safe!

If your seed is fresh (no more than 2-3 years old and from a reliable source), and you have experience growing from seed indoors, you really don't need to plant more than twice as many plants as you will need for your garden. Germination rate is usually very high for good tomato seed. I grew 1 plant each of 10 varieties last year, and started with 4 seeds of each variety. For 9 of the varieties I chose, all but one of the seeds germinated, so I had 35 seedlings. The one variety I love the most, Mortgage Lifter Estler's, took much longer to germinate than the others, probably because I was using saved seed. All the others germinated within 4-5 days, but the MLs hadn't germinated in 10 days, so I planted a bunch more. Finally 9 of them germinated.

At 5 weeks, I transplanted each of them into a one-quart pot because they were so big. There wasn't enough room under my 8-tube, 4-foot grow lights for all of them along with the peppers and eggplants I was also growing. I was able to give away or sell several of the extras at that point, but the weather was still cold, and friends who didn't have a place to maintain the plants inside, lost a few of my babies before they could plant them out. I felt like the old woman who lived in a shoe with so many children she didn't know what to do.

This post was edited by Ohiofem on Wed, Jan 1, 14 at 16:30

I believe tha the cost of seeds in comparison to the value of time and my efforts is very low. Say one seed costs 25 cents. If I plant 2 extra seeds my cost/loss is 50 cents IF I didn't need to plant those.

I am going to grow about 2 from each variety. But I will want to germinate maybe 5 seeds of each.

Linda, I'm mathematically dyslexic. If there is such a thing anyway. If there is, I am !

@ antipodean

Here is the conversion in metric verion( grams and centimeter)

w(g) = 0.5 *(d^3) ---- (( d= diameter in centimeters))

NOTES:
-- this is for tomatoes that are FAIRLY round not awkwardly lobed, flattened, cat faced, elongated.
BTW:
I bough some tomatoes from store today: did the measurements, checked their specific gravity. Compared the actual weight to the formula. It was right on the money.

Principe Borghese is a good one to dry
in dehydrator.Great tasting.

I think most of the so-called "sundried" tomatoes are actually partially sun dried and then preserved. If you truely dry any tomato very little will be left of it. Fully sun dried tomato will be like crunchy potato chips.
JUST MY UNDERSTANDING.

seems much more labor intensive than seeds and wet paper towels

With the "seeds and wet towel" method, you still have to transplant from one container to the next.
With my system, you only do it once or finally into the garden.

What ever happened to figuring out if pruned vs unpruned plants yielded more?

Probably they deleted the pictures too. HMMM
I could not see any pics nor link to any.
Most cherries are prolific any way ; pruned or not.

"But what you say cannot explain the preservation of shape and color of a variety over several centuries."

Sure it can. Humans are still invariably in charge of selection. If they stay in roughly the same climate, and select for conformity to what the variety is known to be, they can keep it the same. Somebody who grows something different would do one of two things. They'd either give it a new name to differentiate it from the variety it no longer resembles, or they'd call it the same name and you'd have differing strains of a variety that are not the same. (Isn't this common?)
There is genetic variation between individuals, even within the same variety, and if a person chooses to save seed from outliers, plants that exhibit the extreme of various traits be it size, color, etc. how can they preserve the uniformity and genetic diversity of a variety? Recently stabilized crosses have lots of outliers. The Big Sungold Select you sent me produced all sorts of variation in fruit size, color, and shape. Most of our heirloom varieties have crosses in their ancestry. How long do they possess the ability to occasionally throw out a plant with different sized fruit, shape, different color, or different leaf from one of the original parents? 10 years? 30 years? 50 years? 100 years? What if people save seeds from those "aberrations?" Are they still the same variety?
I live in Southern Colorado where the brutal sun will make a plastic water bottle in the garden crack like a brittle egg shell in a matter of weeks. There is no humidity here to buffer the plants from the sun's rays. My tomatoes live in alkaline soils and only had 5 inches of rain last year. My tomatoes know months of summer without any moisture coming in contact with their leaves. In the most brutal parts of July and August, my plants turn dark grey from the sun. They twist their leaves this way and that, trying to hold in moisture, trying to block the sun yet not get burned. During the 9 consecutive days we had highs over 105, I had several plants that still set fruit. All the gardening literature I've read says that's not possible. This is a place far, far from the subtropical origin of tomatoes, and I help them along, giving them the bare minimum to succeed, saving seed from those that are best equipped to cope with the heat, the sun, and the lack of moisture. Are the individuals who thrive in this harsh environment the same individuals that would thrive in upstate New York with 60 inches of rain, glorious humidity, and acidic soil? If I planted one variety, and successively selected for 50 years from plants that could set during high temps and which were productive and I didn't care about size of fruit, color, or preservation of the characteristics that defined a certain variety, are you saying the variety would still stay the same, absent of an outright mutation?

The Big Sungold Select seeds, as sent to me by Reinhard Kraft, were ones not bred by him, but were sent to Manfred Hahm, who has a seed site at Reinhard's website.

Reinhard grew out just gold colored ones but it turned out the initial seeds were crossed that I sent out, not knowing that and that was confirmed by Brad Gates, who also got the same seeds from Reinhard and Brad gave percentages of the different colored ones,

So it wasn't a stable variety from the get go but Reinhard didn't know that.

Yes, I know what the Co weather can be since I spent many years in Denver teaching at the med school at Colorado and 8th and also travelled to different parts of the state when time allowed for that/

At least the humidity is low.LOL I'd fly home via Chicago and when I got off the plane in Albany,NY I could hardly breath. Sigh.

And yes, I'm saying that many varieties have stayed the same for many decades without mutation or at least s msjor mutation that would make a major change.

Subtle mutations s do happen almost all the time but for a variety to adapt to local conditions, the sum of those subtle mutations can take up to thousands of years to adapt. as iI said above with the landrace Ethiopian Wheat story. Same with corn.

If you have five plants of the same variety in a row can one see differences, yes sometimes, as in differences with internode length, leaf shape, time to blossom set, etc., but nothing that would prevent a person from Iding a plant as the variety it's supposed to be.

Carolyn

This post was edited by carolyn137 on Mon, Dec 30, 13 at 16:15

And yes, please do mulch on top of your drip lines. Mulch actually lessens soil born diseases from splashing up onto your plants. Mulch conserves water and cools the roots in hot weather. Pine straw, dried grass clippings, chopped dry leaves, clean straw, applied a few inches thick will benefit your plants, lessen your water bill and will improve the soil.

During the summer days, with no rain, I give each tomato plant about 2 gal. of water each time. My garden hose with a shower head delivers about 4pm. so say I have 6 plants in one bed, I water that bed for about 3-4 minutes, once every 5 to 7 days. I also have a rain gauge. Any rainfall less than 1/4 inch per week does not count. No watering when there is 1.5" of rain or more .

Geosankie, both plants are in 5 gallon containers. It's the brandywine that is purple, not the sun gold. Sun gold is doing great other than the early blight :/

Sun gold is in Lamberts organic potting soil and brandywine is in MiracleGro regular potting soil.

Carolyn137, I am not convinced yet that the brandywine has spotted wilt virus as the purple parts of the leaves are not dying. I'm not sure what to do though. And how should I treat the early blight?

There are lots of dying leaves shown in the link I gave above.

TSWV is caused by thrips of a certain kind and if you did a Google search I'm sure you'd come up with more such pictures.

It's a suggestion, not a definitive diagnosis, since you say that your other plants don't have the same symptoms.

Since all of your plants were given the same growing conditions the purple can't be due to a mineral deficiency, and leaves can turn purple in cold weather as well, but it's not cold where you are right now.

Carolyn