16,949 Garden Web Discussions | Growing Tomatoes
Seeds are not commercially available. It is an F1 hybrid. See link below for more info.
Carolyn's book is available from amazon.com and several other online book stores.
Dave
Here is a link that might be useful: Source for Purple Haze seed discussion
I'll offer a bit of real life experience......
Lawn company used weed killer with 2-4D as an ingredient.
8 weeks later, after many mowings with removal of all clippings, I saved some grass clippings and allowed them to dry on driveway.
After drying, I used clippings as mulch on some potted plants
Shortly after, the plants began curling up as if they had Cucumber Mosaic Virus.
The lack of cucumber beetles and a little research later suggested possible herbicide damage.
I removed the grass clippings and flushed a ton of water through the potted plants.
Each recovered and produced a good supply of fruit.
Tomato plants are known to detect minute traces of 2-4D. They are able to detect levels that lab equipment can't.
Hope this helps,
Lee
Your problem is what you have in the containers already. Adding more junk to it will only make it worse.
Read here about BER and what causes it - and it isn't lack of calcium in the soil.
Then do some reading on what growing mixes belong in containers. They don't include garden soil or pea stone or compost or bone meal.
Container size is yet another problem.
Sorry but based on the information you have provided and this late in the season it is going to be really difficult to get any usable tomatoes out of your set-up no matter what you do now. Better luck next year.
Dave
Here is a link that might be useful: BER FAQ and discussions
Yeah you need to ask the neighbor what they put in the pot for planting to know what is causing it. It sounds like they may have added some manure to the mix. Some do that.
It won't hurt the tomatoes but if it is attracting flies that can be a pain. Are they regular house flies or small gnats, what are called fungus gnats?
Dave
Some of my earlier tomatoes did the same thing this year... something that I have never seen before. Some of my Brandywines, Big Rainbows, Persimmon and Purple Cherokee had this problem. Parts of the flesh towards the middle of the fruit were too soft to eat. Almost mushy and partially disintegrated And they were just barely ripe. Later in the season, it disappeared. I live in Charlotte, NC.
Thanks for the reply. I think the 'ol timer probably knew what he was doing, sadly I don't ;) I'll stick to vinegar and water for my tomatoes. As far as canning the cherries, I'm leaning toward throwing them all in the blender and making a sauce out of them. I just have so many I was trying to think of some way of preserving them whole without having them fall apart.
Last year, I made spicy dilly green tomato pickles for the first time from end-of-the-season cherries. A good friend of mine in his 50s said they are the best pickles he's ever tasted. It took me a while to acquire the taste, but now I'm considering picking the cherry tomatoes early in their unripe stage if the other varieties are productive enough for my other needs.
The NCHFP site has a recipe that uses sweet peppers, but I understand that you can safely trade sweet peppers for hot peppers as much as you want as long as the total amount of pepper doesn't exceed the amount of pepper called for in the recipe.
So you know I'm 73 and can't walk either and have to use a walker b;c of a fall in 2004 when I severed all fout quads in my right leg, and someone else, actually four people help me.
Craig L in Raleigh raises my plants and sends them up here and Freda who helps with cleaning and does all my gardening for me tends the tomato plants and all else. And then Shoe and Lee in NC do seed production for me as well as Neil in IL but with the drought in IL it looks like he will lose all 600 of the tomato plants he has out, of which only maybe 7 varieties are mine.
Remember, older is bolder and also wiser and if you are older than I am it also means you are bolder and wiser than I am. LOL
And yes, I know CO well for I lived in Denver for many years and taught med students at the Med School, corner of 8th and Colorado Blvd and my home was on Locust, one block down from the 17th ave Pkway and one block East of Monaco. .
Yup, I grew tomatoes there in the 70's to early 80's, yes I did. LOL
Carolyn
Yea Carolyn I know. Got you beat by 10 years. Born and raised around Greeley. Only knowledge of Denver is VA hospital for 30 days with staph from heart surgery 26 years ago--not many of us around. On my second ICD and trust it. We are both examples of not ever giving up. I was keeping track of you a bit back when you were having some problems. God, wouldn't it be nice to be able to just walk around the yard again? But I'm glad for what I have and I bet you are too.
Sorry for all this to you health people. But I want to tell all of you to take care of your selfs and live every day to the fullest.
KennyP
I've been pruning the lower leaves, suckers and some of the large leaves at the top (but only the ones that have been yellowing or otherwise appearing unhealthy or nibbled at), there's still lots of top leaves though. When it was extremely wilted, I over-watered it a bit, but only from the tray beneath rather than the top of the soil. It went from wilted to perky within the afternoon, so now I'm just watering (again from the dish beneath) in the morning to keep the soil just wet enough that it doesn't seize up. Leaves have been kept dry. What should I be ideally "feeding" it? I've used Miracle Gro since bringing it home but am open to other options.
I recommend Mykes organic fertilizer. You should use something for tomatoes. It should have a higher K content than N(nitrogen). I would not use Miracle Gro because you could end up with more leaves than fruit. It's okay to water in the pot as long as you do it slowly and thoroughly and making sure it doesn't sit in water. If what you're doing seems to be working then that's ok. I do container plantings and it's always a challenge to make sure they don't dry out or get over watered.
I'm always skeptical of superlatives in naming. its like they are trying too hard. I mean, if it really WAS superfantastic, would it need to declare it? Its like all those old time migrants who were shocked upon arriving that Greenland does not so much have lots of green land, as it has lots and lots of ice. Too much markting in a name makes me suspicious. :)
Superfantastic is a great plant and fuss free. But not much good that does me as I don't care for the flavor. There is a tomato named Fantastic, this I think is the improved version, therefore the name.
I give lots of tomatoes away to neighbors and friends as I am growing way to many to use. I found the taste challange useful for myself as I now now which are my preferred tomatoes to pick for myself.
And I want to try new to me varieties next year and now know which I don't want to bring back. That opens up room to try new ones. New to me at least!
"Given that real Black Brandywine is rare and seldom, if ever, grown by plant suppliers, the odds are 50:1 that you have one of the many much more common blacks."
I was thinking the same thing, but then I realized that I don't even know of any other black with potato leaves. Are there any?
Yes, there are quite a few black varieties that are PL, whether what I call pink/blacks which have a clear epidermis or red/blacks which have a yellow epidermis.
Here's just a few that I've grown:
Southern Night
Black Sea Man
Black Pear
Blue Fruit ( Blaufruct)
Cherokee Purple PL ( also Spudakee)
Indian Stripe PL
Japanese Trifele Black
Black from Tula called Spudatula
..... and many more.
With the Spud ones the word spud means potato.
A larger question to ask, which to me is more imposrtant is if a PL variant of an original RL is the same except for leaf form, and I posted about this in a recent post here, but I don't remember where.
Some on that above list are not variants of an original RL and some are. That is, they've always been PL from the get go.
Carolyn
I see the one blossom you refer to.
Without doing some research online the only thing I can think of offhand is that the blossom has not been self pollenized and is about to fall off where the pedicle is. Another possible reason is too much rain causing rotting of the stigma atop the style.
Do either of those make sense to you as in how many other blossoms are showing the same symptoms and have you had lots of rainy weather lately?
Carolyn
I really don't see too much wrong with the tomatoes except for a few yellow leaves.
They look a little leggy and under nourished though. How much sun and food do they get?
There are two kinds of Powdery Mildew that can affect tomatoes, but neither one of them are the same that causes powdery mildew of cucurbits such as squash, cukes, melons, etc.
Your plants look pretty good to me as well, just a few yellow leaves that always appear from time to time. I see no spots on the leaves that would suggest a foliage infection, nor do I see any evidence of a systemic disease either, at this point.
With the weekend rains we just had in our area no doubt youll see mroe yellow leaves and since reports if late Blight ( P. infestans) are in out area, do keep a look out for the symptoms of that disease since it's spread via wind and rain, and once infected the plants can be a pile of black mush within a week.
There are many many pictures of Late Blight if you do a Google search.
Blight is just a general word and doesn't refer to any specific disease although there are quite a few specific diseases that have the word blight as part of the name. For instance Early Blight ( A. solani) is a foliage disease and can be controlled, and Early Blight and Late Blight are caused by two different pathogens and either one can appear early OR late in the season. Southern Blight is a systemic disease and caused by another specific pathogen. Systemic diseases are those where the pathogen is found in the soil.
Hope that helps.
Carolyn