16,949 Garden Web Discussions | Growing Tomatoes

Lyn,
My best to you. Effort counts!

Planting late isn't bad as long as the plants weren't stunted in small pots long. Warm weather can shock them, too. DO they look worse now that they're planted? Perhaps, they need a bit of shade in your hot weather climate. A bit of TLC & they'll recover from shock if that's what you're describing.

Deep watering 1x a week is usually sufficient unless plants wilt. Mulch will help prevent wilting. Your plants may have been quite root bound before planting and just don't have sufficient roots just yet to support growth. Soaker hoses water well and work great for me when I set a timer to turn off after 3 hours. You'll need to figure how long it takes for yours to soak the soil. Another idea is to bury a gallon milk jug with a few holes in it partway in the soil about 5" away from your plant. Water plant, fill jug. Can fill jug, move on to other garden plants, let drain & fill again as you go back to that 1st jug filled.

Feed plants: depends on what you have used. Plants in pots may have lighter green leaves for a few reasons one being nutrients & other being lighting.

I usually apply organic fertilizer (+ lime, bonemeal, crushed egg shells) at planting time and no more, so I can't give you good suggestions for feeding other than mulch with compost and cover compost with straw or dried grass clippings. Neither are fast feeders & won't burn plant if you also have applied another fertilizer.

Roses are heavy feeders, but tomatoes aren't. Be careful as too much feeding = big leafy plants with no fruit.
Sometimes, when I've kept plants in starter pots too long they become root bound & do flower earlier than I desire on smaller plants. Maybe your plants haven't yet flowered because they are too immature to flower.

What kind of damage is there to leaves?
Remove any leaves that might touch soil. Meaning 4" of stem with no leaves present. Those lower leaves won't produce your flowering shoots anyway. Removal of any other leaves above that first flower truss will reduce total number of fruit and yield. However, if damaged or diseased better to remove the leaves and save the plant.

Did you plant them deeply?

wet leaves = higher chance of disease, but if they dry off during the day should be okay
always better to water soil, not the leaves, so again soakers might be useful to you
sprinkler set too high can wreck havek as can a forceful blast of the garden hose
another option is to bury a bottomless large coffee can at least 6" away from stem to fill with water (directs the blast & helps you measure how much water you're applying

For next year - attempt to dig through that glatial rock using a pickaxe or pry bar for a drainage hole. It's not necessary to till it all up -- just layer materials upward to build a deep bed. We have a lot that same rock and have built up with lots of organic matter. Some gardens here have wood sides, but we also have layered up along the driveway and mound the beds pulling material from now permanent paths.

Many posts on GW about building good soil, lasagna gardening, sheet mulching, etc. Any organic matter applied after harvest (+ removal of all tomato foliage) will improve your chances of success next year. It may seem overwhelming to source enough material, but your family probably generates a lot of compost ingredients on a regular basis. When I set up additional paper trash baskets in our bathrooms & a step on trash can in kitchen for compost we increased our compost ingredients with minimal effort. Used facial tissue, toilet paper rolls, soiled paper napkins, cereal boxes, paper wrappings, junk mail, newspaper, etc. More info on the soil forum about what to gather & spread on garden space to improve soil.

Remember one step at a time.

Hope that helps,
Corrine

Corrine...

Thanks for the encouragement.

Some of the things I've learned about growing roses up here are transferable to growing other plants. When I first planted the tomatoes, they did look wilted. I knew the root system wasn't working yet and carrying moisture up to the top growth, so I did shade the plants by hanging a sheet over the fence and across the tomato cages. I do the same thing when I transplant a rose in triple digit temps....no, you aren't supposed to do that, but I can make it work ... Within a day, the wilting had passed. Whew !

Again, with roses, you never feed them until you see new top growth because that is the signal that the root system is working, so that's why I held off feeding the newly planted toms.

Re: the leaf damage. A couple of them look like water stress damage, which would have been caused by the plants being in the small containers for too long. A couple look like they have some insect damage, but I can't see any eggs on the bottom sides of the leaves... possibly katydids. I've heard them in the garden. There is one spot that looks like rust on roses. It's the color of the leaves that makes me sense that the plants are not getting any nutrients. The organic compost that I mixed in with the planting soil hasn't had time to break down to make nutrients available to the plants. I know that won't be an issue next year.

I am a gleaner at heart. I live in the mountains, so I often go out to the forest to get leaves from certain trees and forest duff to put into the rose beds. I also go to the utility company's chipping pile for wood chips to put over the leaves so that they will stay put and not blow away. Yes, any kind of wood will steal nitrogen, but that's easy to fix with some calcium nitrate in the spring. (I also age bags of chips over the winter, so they turn into beautiful stuff by spring.) I do understand not to use anything with a heavy nitrogen content on the toms.

I removed the bottom leaves of the plants before planting and planted deep because I had read that the bud eyes at the leaf nodes mutate to grow more roots, so I don't have any leaves touching the soil.

I generally don't put kitchen waste in the garden because I don't want to draw critters to the garden. We do have some nasty ones up here.

But I had not thought to use my paper goods for mulching. I usually have to recycle all of that stuff. I can see another mound coming ...lol.

I am still not certain as to the "why" you don't wet the leaves. Is it the force of the water ? I know that when I spray down my roses when the triple digits hit for weeks every day, it helps them to be more heat tolerant because the plants absorb moisture through the leaves and the area around the rose is more humid...my climate is quite arid during the summer months. The daily spraying also totally keeps the roses free of spider mites. Is this one of those things that is NOT transferable ? I do know that if I wet them, it would be earlier in the day and I know they will be dry by the time the night temps start to cool things down.

btw ... this has been a very, very cool and unusual spring. We've only hit the 90s for a couple of days and then it has cooled off back down into the 70s & 80s. Generally once the temps hit the 90s, it never cools down until fall. We do have a 40 to 50 degree variance between night temps and day temps. Does that matter ?

Sorry this is so long.

Smiles,
Lyn

See discussion running on it linked below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Proof that breeders....

Clickable link to bcskye's article:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120628181729.htm

It's true that the uniform ripening gene has been introduced into most modern hybrids, which eliminates green shoulders,but that's hybrids that have been the result of human breeding efforts.

But the recommendation to use only cherry tomatoes I think is a bit overboard since there are maybe 15-20,000, maybe 6 to 7,000 available commercially, varieties out there and only a few hundred are F1 hybrids which have been bred, quite honestly, mainly for the large commercial farming industry.

The rest are open pollinated, some heirlooms, some not, and there are many that naturally have the uniform ripening gene and many that don't. Yes, many of the non-F1 ones were also bred, but not many have the uniform ripening gene inserted into the genome, especially the older ones since that gene wasn't known back then.

Taste is both personal and perceptual and there are many variables that play into taste such as where a variety is grown, inground or in containers, kind of soil, if inground, kind of mix used in comtainers, amendments used if any and if so how much and when and what the weather is like in any ONE season when a variety is grown.

But the primary determinants with taste are the genes that a variety has.

The only way that a person will know if he/she likes the taste of a specific variety is to grow it b'c I know I can praise a variety highly and always there's someone who says that they will never grow it again. SOP as long as I've been around.

As for me, there are a few hybrids I really like but most of the now over 3,000 varieties I've grown have been open pollinated and I'll continue mainly with the OP's.

So one doesn't have to go to just cherry tomatoes and small types for taste, as the article suggested, for there are thousands of OP's out there that taste great as I know many here already know. Actually in making that suggestion the article seems to me to be anti-F1 hybrid and not be perhaps up to date on the thousands of great tasting OP's.

Carolyn

Until the last couple years, I was never able to find a tomato that tasted very good on sale in any of the large supermarkets in Southwest Ohio (Kroger, Walmart, Meijer, SuperValu). I think the reason for the recommendation for cherry tomatoes and other small types is meant for those who live in food deserts without access to farmer's markets and upscale grocery stores. One nice unintended consequence of the horrible hybrids in most markets is that Americans are returning to gardening in record numbers, primarily in search of better tomatoes.