16,949 Garden Web Discussions | Growing Tomatoes
Anijs,
So far, I have not asked to have a light fixture for my plants. I live with my daughter and son-in-law and don't really like to bother them to put in one. There would be a place for them in the basement but since the plants have done so well I think I will keep them upstairs near the window. It is only for eight weeks or less and then I move them out to the garden shed that has a large window and the plants can be moved in and out easily.
Harryshoe,
I usually don't fertilize until they are in the garden because when I pot up I use a mix that has fertilizer in it. Don't know if that is the proper way but it has worked for me.
However, last year was not a good year for my tomatoes because they suffered from too much rain during their first few weeks in the garden. This year I am going to plant them in several places and maybe put in a row with a raised section with a small ditch.
My frriend grew a yellow/orange bicolor which I think she traded for with the man in this video. Youtube tomato video. It looks nothing like the picture on Isaacs, which someone told me was a generic picture because they didn't have one.
.
The man in the video ordered from Isaacs and thinks it is their Southern Belle tomato (which is a manufactured heirloom story attempted by those folks).
This is an attempt to manufacture nonsense heirloom stories by Isaacs combined with the fact that the guy who probably gave her the seeds is not being 100% sure he hasn't mixed up his seeds, but showing the bicolor in the video, which looks a lot like most bicolors, similar to the popular beautiful heirloom Ruby Gold which being the most common may actually be that variety.
Back to the fake stories from Isaacs and heirlooms. Their original site is Seeds for Thee. Go to that site if you want to cringe more. There you will find the seeds packets are from "The Rincon Plant Preservation and Introduction Garden", which is nothing anyone has ever heard of except sounds too much like a knock off marketing name someone got the idea from the Sandhill Preservation Center. Anyway, sounds like these Georgia belles and beaux at Isaac's suffer from a need to manufacture very tall tales and I would question their deceitfulness if they pulled a picture out of the blue from Costoluto Fiorentino and used it for their 1700's heirloom. (Bicolors, anyways are from German selection in the 1800's), not much known from the sovereign States that later became the country of Italy.
On their seeds for thee site we find more BS in the Red Babylonian heirloom tomato (deceptively as if there were tomatoes in the Babylonian Gardens of millenia past). Then we continue onward in more manufactured goat manure on the original site, now it looks like someone really did get the idea from the Thomas Jefferson story as I guessed earlier, as they seem to be fans of him and tomatoes...another heirloom story of their manufacture includes this dig at Virginia and Jefferson, showing these people are big time into making this crap up, because Saul's Grandmama told him about Brer rabbit:
Excerpt:
"Saul: "Grandmama
said Thomas Jefferson
grew Blackeye peas on his farm in Virginia.
'Brer
Rabbit Pinkeye'is Eatonton, Georgia's own
favorite pea- similar to Blackeye,
but has a
brownish eye, so why come it is called Pinkeye
I can't say,
but the important part to know is Pinkeyes
tastes whole lots better than
Blackeye. No insult meant
to the folks in Virginia. Also Brer Rabbit
Pinkeyes have
a purple hull. Fancy! I think you will enjoy these
peas.""
PC
To my understanding, if a tomato has very little juice , then it/plant could not get enough water. As the opposite is also true : when tomato plant watered too much, the fruits will be, well, WATERY.
Another factor not to be overlook here is the variety. That is why some are called PASTE tomato. They have much less water contents : Mealy?
Seysonn
Ok, you've already provided the answer.
I have seed tomato plants growing side by side. One has dark foliage and the other is light green. Amongst pepper plants this is very pronounced.
The other possibility is that a plant might not be quite as healthy and so it looks pale.
garf, growing spermarket tomatoes is a pot shot. Each commercially hi-bred (controlled inbred cross) hybrid is optimized for its characteristics of the original hybrid seed. The saving of seeds from them I'm sure you know, will be a mixed bag of characteristics like pulling the lever in Las Vegas, as each hybrid gives different odds of different combinations of desirable traits.
Your resluts as Seysonn has also pointed out support that they truly are a mixed bag of seeds, Some will be great and others lacking. The odds may be high against getting all the desirable traits, but it certanly can happen, and other interesting and useful combinations can happen too if you selectively breed instead of just getting new fresh tomatoes each season. When you get a good one, if you select them to grow true, you'll have a new heirloom to give to the world.
Cheers
PC
How about this one ?
Read all about it !
-------------------------------------------
Indigo Rose, the world’s first tomato variety with purple anthocyanins, was released commercially this year by the vegetable breeding program at Oregon State University.
“The purple color is extraordinary,” said Jim Myers, who heads the vegetable breeding program. “It has a good balance of sugars and acids and tastes just like a tomato.” (Anthocyanins are essentially tasteless.)
The new tomato is released as an open pollinated variety, and as such, seed saved from self-pollinated plants will grow true and not produce hybrids. “It’s also important to know that these tomatoes are not GMO,” Myers said. “Genetic engineering techniques are never used to develop these lines.
Seysonn, I have two purple striped red tomato plants, bred from the same stock as the ones you depicted. I was wary of growing these beforehand because I thought it was a step backward in breeding for flavor, and now after putting my mouth where my keyboard was by eating many purple striped tomatoes, I think they are the worst tasting tomato I've ever grown. I like them as much as the First Lady likes beets (and just to be clear, I love beets and broccoli). The use of the blue tomatoes I've found best is cooked with broccoli, onions, okra and hot and sweet peppers in a delicious gumbo. With all that going on the bitter aftertaste goes away...
PC (maybe not perfectly PC tonight)
I think, if you have to deal withshort season, winter sowing is not the answer. We start seeds inside under light 6 to 8 weeks prior to plant out to get a head start. TOMATO SEEDS need a minimum of 60 -70f soil temperature to sprout on time. That would be fine if you have a warm and long growing season. I have done it in GA. But here in PNW it would take til late June to see some thing coming up. By then I am getting ready to pick red ripe tomatoes.
JUST MY OPINION>
Seysonn
You have a point, Seysonn. I've already sown 4 tomato containers with winter sowing. I only need 10-12 tomato plants and I plan to purchase organic tomato starts at my favorite nursery. So I guess it depends on how effective the winter sowing is and when I have a transplant size tomato to put out. I will definitely be using nursery grown larger transplants for at least four of my tomatoes. And this year will be the deciding factor, about whether to purchase tomato starts or start from seed.
I had thought I might start seed under lights this winter. I've done it successfully before, but I wasn't able to do it this year. So, I'm trying it every which way but under lights this year. [g] I'm also going to put one Sungold, one Purple Cherokee and Black Prince in full sun and one each in 6 hrs of sun and see what kind of difference it makes. I think I will also buy a Sungold tomato start from the nursery and plant that out back in the 6 hrs of sun and compare how that does to the winter sown Sungold tomato start in 6 hrs of sun in the back.
Whatever the case, I think unstabilized tomatoes (peppers, etc.) are largely an unexplored frontier. I mean, with one set of seeds, you could get different kinds of tomatoes every year (and different kinds the same year, even). As long as they're bred to produce a desirable variation every time, that's totally awesome.
Nitrogen soil tests are not particularly useful because nitrogen changes forms so rapidly. Total nitrogen tells you very little about the availability of nitrogen during the upcoming growing season. Nitrate-nitrogen tells you what is immediately available, but that can change rapidly.
That being said, if you had lots of flowers, the plant was not just growing vegetatively. The flowers either did not get pollinated, or aborted before they developed. Many tomato varieties are fairly heat sensitive, and do not produce fruit in hot weather. Cherry tomato varieties are very heat tolerant and will set and develop fruit even in very hot weather. I would try different varieties and not worry about changing your plant nutrition.
NOT FRUITING can be due to more than onen factor:
A) plant is not flowering:
--- Too much nitrogen, not enough P
In this case you can tell that the foliage is lush dark green.
B) plant is flowering, but NOT fruiting.
--- High or very low temperatures.
--- Too much nutrients, forcing the plant to stay in vegetative state. So the flowers are aborted.
Pollinators are not needed for tomatoes. So that is not a problem.
Seysonn
It was a pretty good producer, the fruits were tasty and even with their growth and size habit of the fruits. More resistant to cracking than the bigger tomatoes I grew, but about on par with the Juane Flamme. It was great for canning, and particularly good for dehydrating. Plants were sturdy and stayed on the smaller/more manageable side- still for sure needed caging. I would grow it again.
I read up on tomato spotted wilt virus. What I have going on doesn't look exactly like the pictures I saw, but there are some similarities. I didn't really see any info on what this means for the plant or how to treat it. Is the plant a goner? Should I just take it out?
I'm no expert on this, but i think this is the virus that affected mine a few months ago. anyway mine deteriorated quite quickly and then the plant next to it started to show the same symptoms so yanked both of them quick smart as i believe the virus is transmitted via thrips. The others survived.
Sounds like you missed the "fresh seed" part of the OP's message.
I saw that, It still sounds like old or bad seed. Possibly badly stored or mistreated by the seller.