16,949 Garden Web Discussions | Growing Tomatoes

Not always true, but often potato leaved plants are sort of gangly. Would it be likely to do well in your container? Keep one and give one to a friend who grows tomatoes. Mysteries are fun.

Thanks Carolync, I didn't know that potato leaf plants tended to be gangly.

Yes, I have decided to give one of these seedlings up for adoption to a co-worker of mine. I think I might just keep the potato leaf variety simply because I don't have any idea what it is and it will be a fun surprise. I've already been there, done that with Amish paste.

Thanks all

I get the distinct impression that we can't convince you that not only is it "unlikely that you have 'blight'", it is essentially impossible.

So ultimately you have to do what you will be most comfortable with. If that is toss them then fine. If segregating them is enough reassurance for you, do that.

For comfort in future years take the time to learn the real symptoms of the various types of 'blight', the causative agents, how they are transmitted, the types and conditions of expose required, and the time frame required for those symptoms to develop.

Good luck with your plants.

Dave

update

lost about 30-40 tomato plants in total. They all got the same symptoms, leaves died off, left with a leafless stem that dies pretty quickly.

now im just hoping it has not spread to my pepper plants.

for anyone that is interested, I have sent around 10 plants, some foliage, and soil samples to a plant pathologist to identify what this exactly was. The full report should be back sometime next week.

Nows the time to get your guess's in.

My guess, Sclerotium rolfsii.

" Cal-Mag contains Calcium Nitrate and is therefore not organic. Ca(NO3)2 is an inorganic compound. It's used more often by hydroponic growers who need a water soluble form of minerals. You would be committing organic tomato heresy using this product. Oh, the humanity!"

LOL...

Well newman...that's why i laugh at BER with the use of cal mag throughout the season.It's part of my watering regime while indoors and much easier to feed my plants at the desired rate rather then using DOL LIME.

We mix our own - less expensive - small or large quantities - we know what goes into it - different recipes for seeds and transplants - works great !

Bruce, in my utterly non-botanist view, a tomato stem just sort of widens. The various structures (layers of outer skin, inner vessels, pith, etc.) stay in their places but increase in size. Not quite as simple as how your finger grows from babyhood to adulthood, but closer to that than to a tree trunk. There will be other changes in the tomato stem later, but not till your plants are much older than they are now.

Click on the links marked "Primary tissues" and "Secondary tissues" here:
http://www-plb.ucdavis.edu/labs/rost/Tomato/Stems/Stems.html

Here are some close-ups of tomato stem grafts:
http://www.ezrasorganics.com/ezras-organic-methods/ezras-grafting-process/
http://therealgarden.com/2011/05/tomato-grafting-spunky-pulls-through/

One of them talks about grafting stems which don't quite match in diameter; maybe that's what happened with your indentation. Could you post a photo?

I'm betting your leaf color issue would be solved with a bit of Miracle-Gro. Probably a lack of iron. But I-am-not-an-expert, so we'll hope one of them happens along soon.

Don't knock scars: they're very useful things. They hold us together. ;-)

-mto

Thanks very much for the links, and for your layman's explanation. Those are very nice-looking grafts in the photos! Mine look nothing like that! The ones on my plants are on a diagonal, and as I said, there's a gap of almost an eighth of an inch between the rootstock and the scion. There's the tan-colored scar tissue, around a narrower stem in the graft site.

We've had a few warmer days, but mostly "coolish" since I received them (40-45F nights, 55-65F days). I noticed in one of the links that the author mentioned he preferred warmer temps for the grafts to heal better. Perhaps that has something to do with the sluggishness. There just aren't enough roots to feed the scion, and the restriction around the graft site isn't helping matters. I could try a bit more fert, but I don't want to burn their feet. I know there's probably some leftover fert in the compost they're in.

I'm afraid my camera's not cooperating these days...

Thanks again!

-Bruce

Both plants have regular leaves. I was in the same pickle once with Sweet 100's and beefsteaks.

My experience with Sweet 100's is that their leaves are not as long as the larger tomatoes. The middle leaf seems especially shorter. I don't know if that is just me seeing things, but I've noticed it several times over several seasons. Middle leaf on Sweet 100 seems shorter than the middle leaves of larger tomato cultivars. Maybe that's a cherry cultivar trait; I don't know. Also, the sweet 100 plants seem slightly shorter within the first month of seedling. But the latter assumes same germination date to make such a comparison. I've also noticed the Sweet 100s to be of a slightly lighter green colour than the beefs.

Once again, these are just my own observations of my own plants over many seasons. I love sweet 100's.

Good luck,
Tim

Forgive my lack of describing properly the structure of tomato leaves in the previous post. What I meant by "middle leaf" is the end leaflet in a cluster of five or nine leaflets on a leaf.

linzelu100 - No this will be my first season growing the Reistomate. I am very intrigued by the structure of the fruit so I decided to give it a whirl. I have heard different opinions on the taste so I am excited to see for myself. Here is another pic! MMM MMM Good!

Now that's a tasty looking tomato...100 days until my first tomato will be on the plate, let the countdown begin.

I just looked at my notes from the time I grew seeds from a grocery Campari. It was one of the Late Blight years; I only got a handful of fruit, but they seemed like the parent fruit I'd eaten several months earlier.

I remember the F2's "white core" as more of a white thread or string: annoying but involving a smaller percentage of the fruit than the white cores some larger varieties have.

I was very happy with the taste of the Campari I started from seeds of the store bought varieties, as were the people I gifted with my extra plants.

I did not save the seeds and try for another generation. I not gotten into dehybridizing at all, but I have read that there will be much more segregation in the next generations, and that it is not until F-8 that one can be said to have a stable variety.

5 bucks for three or four tomatoes IS expensive. but when you look at it in the light of the comparison Uncle has made, it is really a bargain. And you don't have to pay postage!

Jan

Not really sure what you mean by "DE," so it's probable that I haven't tried it. Is it a kind of pesticide?

DE is diatomaceous earth. It kills soft bodied insects tat come in contact with it. It's not very effective against hard bodied flea beetles who jump around. As tomahtohs said, flea beetles don't do a lot of damage to healthy plants, although in large numbers they can weaken them. If you want something organic to deal with them, consider spinosad or neem oil.

Bonnie, the origin of Ludmilla's Pink Heart I find interesting.

Reinhard Kraft in Germany and I have traded seeds for many years and it was from him that I got the Ludmilla ones the pink, red Plum and yellow Giant.

I think the heart one is very good but the Ludmilla's Red Plum is outstanding, but not a heart.

I don't know if you've been to Tania's superb website before, but when on the page I linked to go to the upper left and click on Main, look around, but them click on shortcuts at the top and when you know the name of a variety I find it's easier to use the alphabetical way of searching, so just click on that link.

Many other ways to search for this and that are also on that shortcut page.

Tania now has pages for over 4,000 varieties with pictures and seed sources for those that do have seed sources, and that link is on any specific variety you look at.

She also sells seed for about 600 tomato varieties.

Good luck with the Anna Russian seeds and let us know how that turns out.

Carolyn

Here is a link that might be useful: Ludmilla varieties

Thank you again, everyone, for all the helpful suggestions!

Here is the list of what I ended up sowing:

Aunt Gertie's Gold
Amish Paste
Amazon Chocolate
Anna Russian
Black Cherry
Box Car Wilie
Earl's Faux
Galina's Yellow Cherry (the few Isis Candy seeds I had left didn't look viable, so I had to pick another cherry type.)
Giant Belgium
Gold Currant (I'm going to give the hanging basket a try.)
Gold Medal
Indian Stripe
Ludmilla's Pink Heart
Matt's Wild Cherry
Neves Azorean Red
Soldacki
Virginia Sweets

I sowed 2 - 6 of each, depending on the age of the seed. Tomato plants are usually pretty easy to give away around here in May, so not worried about the extras, assuming I can find space for them until then!

gunnarsk: "I suppose Orange Strawberry is orange due to the "tangerine" allele ("tt") rather than "rr",which gives a yellow flesh color ripening to orange. You can also try Anna Banana Russian, available eg. from Gleckler and Knapps."

Heheh, I don't know anything about 'alleles', but seems I read somewhere that OO is sometimes streaked with red inside.

It's hard to tell through cyberspace, but I hope my friendly question was not taken in the wrong light.

&&&&&&

I did take it in the wrong light when you asked about my business ventures, of which there are none.

I wouldn't have written what I did above if it weren't for that, since I didn't want you or anyone else thinking I was making money off something, presumably tomato seeds or profits frommy book, of which there were none.

I don't think folks realize that when I, or anyone else, sends seeds for trial to a seed vendor, there's no money that changes hands.If the vendo likes the variety and then listsit, all money goes to him or her.

As for SSE listings and a request piice, SSE sugggests $3 for a minimum of 25 seeds which I think is way too high, especially since most of the listers are not professionals, but amateurs ,so in the 2013 Yearbook I offered 10-15 seeds for $1 to both listed and unlisted SSE members ( the SSE request price for the latter is $4), anywhere on earth.

The SSE Yearbook in my opinion has become a seed catalog and no longer has much to do with seed preservation by relisting varieties requested.

For my seed offers elsewhere I let those outside the US e-mail me their requests and then I pay the postage for all of those wherever they go.Gunnar can attest to that. (smile)

Finally, you want to see my bill for supplies from Staples and my postage costs? No way can I cover what I need as supplies from SSE requests but my supply costs also pertain to my seed offer elsewhere, I agree..

What I prefer to do is to share what new and old vareities I have with others, for a SASE for my annual seed offer and going as low as I can with a request price for the SSE listed ones.

Ok, Peace.

Perhaps I over reacted, it's possible, but let's go forward now.

Carolyn, who has not seed any red streaks or blushes in OO or Orange Strawberry or Herman's Yellow or any of the orange hearts she's grown in her area.An allele is an alternative form of a gene, not all genes have alles, but to give one example, the gene gf ( green flesh) has I think 4-5- alleles, I didn't check those numbers but I'm close, and scientists have been able to determine the specific allele in different so called black tomatoes and put them into categories which then gives an estimate of where they originated from. And that helps distinguish heirloom ones from ones that have been bred more recently or are the result of natural cross pollination.Doing that it was found that the 100 yo variety Cherokee Purple was not that old, seeds given to Craig L by John Green of TN who was told that when the seeds were given to him.

Cut off one of the stems and put in a small amount of water. If you see a white milky substance coming from it, it is Bacterial
Wilt.

Here is a link that might be useful: Tomato diseases

These are the same plants from your previous post about them? If not then have these plants been outside?

If they are then that information needs to be included here.

Dave

Here is a link that might be useful: I think I killed them all post

I am reminded of Fedco's description of another Sungold like tomato: "From a chance sport in their tomato patch Rachel and Tevis Robertson-Goldberg from Crabapple Farm in Chesterfield, MA, selected and developed Honeydrop, sent us the original seed and continue to grow our seed crop. Growing in our estimation, Honeydrop is drawing comparisons to Sun Gold, only with much less cracking in wet weather. Its sweet juicy fruity honey-colored treats taste almost like light grapes." I grew Fedco's Honeydrop Cherry Tomato ECO OP in an isolated area and saved seed for sharing if anyone is interested. I also grew Sungold and consider it superior in terms of yield, vigor, flavor, fruit color, and productivity over many weeks.

Well, The Wow! seeds are one of two varieties of tomato (out of 15) that haven't germinated after 3 weeks, the other being Bellstar. Now I wonder if I should bother to try starting them again. Gold Nugget is doing well (and a couple of other paste tomatoes).