16,949 Garden Web Discussions | Growing Tomatoes

Okie:
Isn't that a great film!
I am working on my mulching little by little.

Gone.

Thank ya'll for the info I couldn't find a thing on that name but I'll tell you one thing they are delish. I looked at some images on the web and it looks like a pilcer Vesy listed on the Bakers creek site. I recieved the seeds on a swap so who knows I don't keep a list of what I get or who I swap with. Thanks again!

Maybe related to the Kentucky Beefsteak?

You say "large" plastic containers. How "large" specifically and what variety? The typical cherry tomato plant gets huge and to thrive it would need a container the size of a half whiskey barrel. Your plants may just be root bound and so dying off since they have out-grown their containers.

Dave

You can measure your pot in cubic inches, then divide by 231. That wlll give you the size in gallons. [231 is the number of cubic inches in one gallon.]

Another way to calculate it is that one cubic foot is 7.48 gallons.

Others are far more expert than I am, but I have grown tomatoes in middle tennessee in a raised bed. I think the problem with crowding is not only about whether the soil fertility will sustain that many plants, as DarJones speaks to, but about air circulation. Middle TN is horrible for blights. Every year I grew I just had to chase time to try to harvest tomatoes ahead of the blight consuming the leaves from the ground up. The more crowded your tomatoes are, the poorer the air circulation, and the greater the chance of blight (at least, thats my understanding, and my experience supported that). Unless I misunderstand the transfer mechanism, I think you can still get blight from the surrounding environment even if you are container gardening.

So my two cents is that planting them farther than an inch apart might give you a better over all yield if it protects the plants you've got.

And if you keep the close planting, be sure to pinch all those suckers!

If you have some extra room and no shade or walkway concerns, I would let the outer tomatoe vines sprawl down the sides of the planter if it truly is almost 4 feet tall.

that planter is so massive that you probably used topsoil? It would take an awful lot of bags to fill the back of a pickup truck with an 8' bed.

Usually we plant in April and turn out June 1st, never get tomatoes till mid to late July. This year we had tomatoes in the potting shed before turning out and we currently have a steady supply of them now. I may not plant as early next year (we had a warm May and got lucky here in Buffalo area) but it definitely helped them being early, no doubt. I will probably plan some beef stakes early and see how they turn out. I've never had a ripe beefstake before mid August and had given up on them.

Yeah, the main issue I've run into starting too early, is lighting and space. Plants start to turn purple under the leaves when the light is insufficient. I use a few T5HO's, but not a bank of them. As soon as I get them in the greenhouse, the purple goes away. I don't find in the long run, that I get more yield, so I now start the recommended 6-8 weeks before final transplant. This minimizes light stress, and I don't need to transplant out of 3" pots before I do final transplant.

DRtomto~ I mixed up the recipe you posted for deer detterant spray and have used it. Wonderful, that it does go through the spayer hole and does not clog. I see that you recommend that it be re applied after a rain. My husband is watering our tomatoes with an overhead sprinkler. He did not think this spray would have to be re applied after he waters. I think he is wrong, according to what you write. Am I right?

donna-
I usually give the new growth, the little tips of the new growth, a spray after a rain or shower. There's no need to ever water the plants leaves, all the water absorbed by the plant comes from the roots.
Why this stuff works is because deer don't eat meat(protein). Eggs are protein, so they are naturally turned off by the odor. They also don't like the capsaison in the red pepper. Bugs don't like the garlic. Also the longer it sits in the bottle and gets stinky the better it works.
I live in the country and have deer all around me. I eat deer and have venison in my freezer year round.
People that I have given this recipe to can't thank me enough. This stuf works better than a electric fence. We literally watch the deer walk right up to the plants, take a smell, turn their heads then walk away. Pretty cool to see.
,Dan

I have a few of my parents' very old and rusty, short, wide ring cages which I use for short varieties. I think I've seen a few cases where a tomato presses against the ring and there is an indentation (not an actual hole), sometimes dark. I always assumed the sun heated the metal and it burned the skin of the tomato. No idea if that's what actually happened.

Missing, I mentioned the physical denting, which is what I called it, in my post above and no, I don't think it was b'c the metal got hot and did it. It's just a physical thing when the fruits enlarge and just happen to be next to some wires of the cage so get pressed against it.

It has happened for me when growing tomatoes in standard tall CRW cages as well as the short spiral ones, which I've used for quite a few years now since I have to grow my tomatoes only in the backyard in 12 gal Gro-bags and have Freda put the short spiral ones in the gro-bags to get a bit more height to the plants before they flop over.

Carolyn

hi grrrr.egg no probs I go down below freezing. The first tomato last year was Marmande which set while others had their flowers falling off. This year I'm trying more cold climate varieties including pathenocarpic tomatoes that set at lower temps. many of these are available in Oz. Cheers Max

Greetings from very far away! The temperatures you quoted are outside temps, right? What matters is the temperature inside the hothouse. For myself, on a sunny February day in Illinois, which is our very early spring, it can be 7 degrees Celsius outside and yet still be 35 degrees inside. Solar gain should make it nice and warm inside, and you should have tomatoes as long as things don't freeze on a cold night. Good luck with everything.

Yeah, that's deer. Notice the edge that they bite off is never a very clean cut, because deer have only one set of front teeth and press them against an upper jaw pad to tear off foliage. They always seem to be too lazy to eat the entire plant and prefer to nibble out the tops instead.

Around my area deer eat the tops of big plants, and eat small plants (tomatoes) down to a 2" stem stub. The problem has gotten worse the last few years in our suburbs. You can see a deer standing in someones front yard eating off a tree in daylight.

I put out dog dishes with water outside in case a animal wants to eat a tomato for the water content.

I would guess that its Roma. Volunteers can be pure or crossed. Many of my volunteers are pure from the previous year whereas others are clearly crosses. I'm with dickiefickle on "new varieties." I think some of them are the same plant re-named something else. Or, in some cases, they descend from the same seed source. For example, I have found little difference between some of the black tomatoes. Other times they may originate from a seed mix up and someone who buys it renames it something different. For example I have a tomato that my father purchased at a nursery that was labeled brandywine. It turned out to be a black tomato of some unknown variety. Its probably black krim or black, but it does have slightly different cracking paterns (concentric versus radial). It also tastes slightly different than other blacks. However it does breed true and is most likely just a strain of some existing variety where someone switched the id sticks or mixed up the seeds they were planting. In any case, its not a new variety, just a mislabeled existing variety. A stablized cross on the other hand is something different and should be named.

Kevinitis you are exactly right, Look just like Roma, only NOT determinate, and the fruits are smaller than what (I thought) Romas were, 2 inches top to bottom, is that correct?

Yes, sweat bees are one of the most common pollinators of tomato blossoms, but oh so tiny and I've never seen them myself but have seen pictures that others have taken of VERY close up shots of them.

Carolyn

Yes according to the experts, "Tomatoes are self pollinating and no bees are needed at all"; however my real world situation in my garden, these bees have helped greatly increase the number of blossoms that actually set.