16,949 Garden Web Discussions | Growing Tomatoes

I am not a container farmer, but have transplanted volunteer seedlings over the years. Mostly the results were low fruit yield or small fruit. These volunteer plants were in the garden beside healthy and good producing plants. I have concluded that the reason for poor production from the volunteer plants was that the seedlings were from hybrid tomatoes.

I have the same experience

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Cats are photogenic. I learned to use my first decent camera practicing on my cat.

I find that almost any picture I can take outside, with natural light, is better than any with unnatural light.

Of course professional photographers have the right equipment to take photographs with artificial light.

just my $0.02.

regard, Tom

Yesterday I planted tomatoes outside on spec and last night my wife said it was going to go down to 37 F. Since I have a bipolar micro-climate here, that went over not-so-peachy-keen. So, the most valuable lesson in pushing the season can be "are the plants small enough to still cover with a bucket at sundown"?

Pushing so early has risks like "failure", but a whole second set-out two weeks later is good mandatory insurance. You just have to be willing to pull the "bad" plants later on and put in beans!

@daninthedirt: at the urging of people local to me I started using shade cloth as a sunscreen, strung vertically away from the plants. It seemed to work, just nothing spectacular. Good enough to try again, though, even with the winds. Also, tomatoes can shade other tomatoes closely planted, also to a limited extent.

Thanks for the insight about shade cloth on tomatoes. Good idea to string it vertically, away from the plants.

Good point about tomato plants shading other tomato plants. Now that I think of it, I actually have two trellises for my cherries, one a few feet to the north of the other. That northern trellis (especially the lower parts) doesn't get as much sun as the southern one. That northern trellis is just as unproductive in August as the southern one. So I'm inclined to believe that shade cloth won't do me a lot of good. Of course, most of the flowering late in the season would happen near the top of the trellis.

Those look absolutely amazing! Can you tell me the exact make-up of the soil in your pots? Thank you!

Mike, I agree completely with using Joe's Pink OXheart, but if it were me I wouldn;t use Indigo Rose, the reason being that many who have grown it did NOT like the taste at all.

I think it does need to be a bit sweeter IMO and there are plenty of other varieties that could introduce not just that but also the antho and you might consider something like Purple Bumble Bee to name just one,

And it's good to remember that in the F1 that small fruit size in dominant,

And I hope that when I finally get my seed offer up ( not here at GW) and running that some will use it in breeding projects, b/c it is unique IMO.

Carolyn

Alfred Hershey came to Cold Spring Harbor in 1950. Two years later, he and Martha Chase performed one of the most famous experiments in modern biology, the âÂÂWaring blenderâ experiment, which reinforced the findings of other scientists that genes were made of DNA, not protein. The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, first described publicly by James Watson at the 1953 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium entitled âÂÂViruses,â heralded a new era in biology.

Above from your link.

Yes, others already had determined that DNA was composed of nucleic acids, not proteins,

And yes, Watson did present his findings at the summer symposium, which happened each summer but at that time was not a faculty member at CSH.

I too worked with phage as well as with other systems.

YOur link was great b'c so many of the names I knew well,like McClintock from Cornell, where I went,Luria, and so many more.

Please forgive me for posting more, but sheesh, it 's been a long time since I've seen those names, and yes, I attended two summer symposia at CSH myself.

Carolyn
Carolyn

A piece of that same Sungold plant is still there. So is a Black Cherry. I cut them off at soil level late last fall, but hadn't pulled up the roots. And they didn't have sense enough to notice the frost. Both are growing like crazy.

I guess I accidentally started my tomato season a few months early. A happy kind of accident, eh?

"Are you saying you got some Rebelion seed somewhere?
I had no idea anyone else could think of that. Wonder how
you did it. Is someone selling it here now?"

Ooops - sorry sneezer - It is the Marbonne (F1) seeds that I have purchased. Thanks for correcting me on the Marmande also - I can grow them a lot better than I can keep them straight - haha

Thanks for the correction. I hope your Marbonne does well.

I'll be looking for results, yours and others' around the forum come summer.

Actually, after my experience with "the R fruit", I'm a bit leery about the whole
trend of "improving" highly successful heirlooms. I just think something is being
left out of the mix as has happened so many times before. Especially from the
point of view of individuals growing for themselves and their families.

However, it's best to keep an open mind and I intend to do that and continue
to hope that the "project" turns out more successfully than I expect.

yardenman,

I tried grafting for the first time last year. I practiced all winter long. I got 0% yield the first couple of times I tried. But by the time February rolled around, I had the process nailed down and got >90% yield. The key learnings I got were 1) you need very good contact between the rootstock and scion and 2) you need to dial in the recipe for the healing chamber.

For #1, I found that getting good contact is extremely difficult with an angled cut because if the angles are off by even just a little, you get a gap and it's game over. I tried all kinds of jigs to help make the angled cuts uniform and repeatable, but I didn't have a lot of luck. So I ended up going with a basic horizontal flat cut. After that, my yields improved dramatically. The way I do it is I put a grafting clip on the rootstock and scion. I then lay a razor blade on the top surface of the clip and make the cut. This gives me a nice flat cut that is very repeatable.

The 2nd thing is to nail down the recipe for the healing chamber. The recipe will be different depending on what setup you have. I use a propagation kit with an extra deep dome. I put about 1/2" of hot tap water in the tray and then place a heating mat underneath the tray to keep the water warm. It takes 8 days for the healing to occur. The first 4 days I have a towel draped over the dome to maintain complete darkness and keep things warm. On the 5th day, I remove the towel, open one of the vents in the dome, and turn on one lamp (for 12 hrs). On the 6th day, I open the 2nd vent and introduce a second lamp. On the 7th day, I crack open the dome to lower the humidity even more and introduce a third lamp. On the 8th day I remove the dome completely and stay with the three lamps. On the 9th day, the plants are healed and ready to go under the lights in the garage.

The best way to fine tune the recipe is to graft a plant onto itself. This way you eliminate the contact goodness as a variable and you can focus on getting the recipe right.

Good luck!

Amazing. I thought a flat cut was the WORST way to go! Live and learn.

I have a humidity stand and it was warm upstairs where I had it, but I didn't use extra heat. I'll try that.

And I think, (from your description) that I left the grafted seedlings in the dark too long.

Thanks for all the advice!

I'll be starting mine in late March for a mid to late May planting.

Rodney

Thank you for all your help.
Nancy from ky

Taste is very good. For a tomato that gets to 40 oz in my garden I would say very prolific. Some of the bottom clusters had three tomatoes all over a pound. I broadcast lots of 6-12-12 when I tilled and then again about 4 weeks later.

Thanks bigpins

Now I have seeds both for Bear Claw and Brandy Boy. I will plant them both this year. Other than Ananas Noire and Cherokee Purple, I have no REAL BeefSteakd favorite so far. I hope that Bear Claw and Brandy Boy settle the case for me this season.

Seysonn.

I trialed several of the imposters back about 10 years ago. Nothing came close to Sun Gold. They were so bad, I'm only again hoping to do another trial this year with Ambrosia Gold and an F4 of Sun Gold that someone claims was extremely close in the F3.

tormato,

How variable was F3 compared to F1 Sungold?

Thanks for the replies all. The red must be brandymaster. It did have brandy in it and it was a red hybrid. I'm gonna go back and pick up a few more packs of Brandyboy to keep and share, since from comments it doesn't seem like it's a sure thing they may be offering it locally next year.

Thanks Carolyn, I know there any a few OP red brandywine strains out there. I do have seed for red, RL; not sure if it's the landis strain though. I love the taste of the basic pink brandywine, but the last 3 years of growing 2 plants, average I get about 1-3 ripe fruit per plant in my zone before frost, so I'm looking to branch out and try some of the brandywine hybrids this year, also have seed for OTV, excited about that 1 too.

My hubby did make me a hoop house over 1 of my raised beds, so I will also try to transplant out earlier in that bed also. My growing season is short for the late tomatoes.

When I was checking the racks, I was JUST looking for Brandy Boy, nothing else. And as soon as found it, I grabbed one pack and left.

Here is what I've got.

Seysonn

I was asking the same question last year on this forum, since I was planning on canning tomatoes whole. As per recommendation, I grew F1 hybrid Mountain Magic. What a perfect canning tomato it turned out to be!
It has multiple advantages over other tomatoes I grew for that prupose, some are:
1.Production is great and plenty of fruits ripen in waves, so when it is time to can them - you can pick up a lot of red matters from a plant.
2. Firm flesh and thick skin - not so great qualities for fresh eating, but priceless for whole canning - the skin won't crack even when tomato is processed/canned.
3. Uniform, red "cookie-cutter" perfect, bite-sized round fruit: larger than cherry, but small enough to fit whole in your mouth.

Also, MM is very disease resistant - it was the last tomato I pulled out in fall.

Juliet F1 tomato is also good for this purpose, but not as good, because the fruit size is smaller than MM. I use Juliet to fill the gaps in the jars between MM tomatoes.

I make some spaghetti type sauce (general pasta use). For that reason I just use whatever I have. But if I were to can whole tomatoes then I would go with plump type, San Marzano types which are smaller and have more meat than juice.

Seysonn