16,949 Garden Web Discussions | Growing Tomatoes
Some tomatoes Seysonn are very dry and certainly much drier than Roma VF for example. Why San Marzano Redorta is much drier than regular San Marzano but I think San Marzano is drier than Roma. Some of those other ones Linda and Ted mentioned are just all little hunks of meat. Redortas are huge though so that's something to consider. I sometimes just split em, and toast them with cheese. Toasting burns off a good amount of their juice.
Sandhill has Piennolo del Vesuvio. Look it up on google and watch the videos.
What affects a tomato plants fruiting schedule is weather. If you are growing during cold weather, and low light conditions typical of Winter, the plants are slower to produce fruit. If however you are growing when nights are in the sixties and days no more that eighties with strong sunny conditions they will set and ripen fruit like crazy.
Different varieties take differing amounts of time to produce fruits "early tomatos" like Early Girl or Bloody Butcher may list DOM (days to maturity) as 58 or 62. But that is from setting the plants out, not from seedling, which would typically add another 45 to 60 days. Big beefsteak tomatoes like Brandywine may be 85 DOM.
Theoretically indeterminates in the right climate can live and produce for a long time, but blight and pests often take them down before the end of the summer season. But, if you like the taste of either variety, you can root a pruned sucker or two, from a healthy plant, and have another crop later in the year.
Jan
Seems like a consensus is forming! Thanks so much for your help. We have had too much rain for tomatoes this spring and with our sandy soil I guess that's a recipe for nutrient run-off.
I have given them some Powerfeed Flowers and Fruit and will post the result.
Any opinions on foliar feeding?
Thank-you PC.....I agree that it was not stabalized before release.And since todays tomatoes of this variety are seedy,its been crossed many times since then,But not surprizing after 100 years.But im still going to grow them all out and see what I come up with.Some of the original genes has still got to be in the tomato.Especially the seeds im getting from the original company,and the seeds from the seed bank which are from the original company in 1992.
This post was edited by pappabell on Sun, Nov 30, 14 at 7:27
pappabell, good luck with your great project and thanks again for posting all this! Above is my attempt at the complete translation of the long original release description from your page of the old Ingegnoli catalog you posted ;-)
Ciao but I hope to learn how it goes!
PC
Size of the fruit is primarily determined by the genes of the variety so without knowing the name of the variety those fruit may be perfectly normal.
In addition container grown plants will almost always produce smaller fruit than those same plants if grown in ground. It all depends on the size of the container. If too small the roots are compressed and the plant is stressed. The bigger the container the better and many recommend using nothing smaller than 10 gallons.
Dave
Hi PC, Happy Thanksgiving and thanks for the reply!
I'll bring the lighting down to 16hrs. Initially the grow light was a few inches above the plant, though with the new tent I had raised it a few feet above to get the light spread covering the floor where the herbs and lettuce live. This has made the plant stretch right out trying to get to the light. I'll raise the tomato plant within a few inches of the light again.
Analysis of the Ionic is N-2.3, P-.33, K-2.9, Ca-0.95, Mg-0.42 (%w/v)
It also contains all the trace elements. Recommended EC is approx 1.4-1.6mS/cm which is a little above your recommended max. so I'll drop the concentration a bit. I thought an excess of calcium could be inhibiting nutrient uptake so I've stopped the nutrient the last 4 days, just water but have seen little difference.
I plan on mixing my own nutrient soon, I'll be testing it on a batch of lettuces to see how the ratios affect the yield. Though this Ionic is only $8.00 and at the listed dilution will make over 1000L of nutrient.
How do you know I have excess salt? Is it something you can see with the plant?
Thanks for the help, I'll make the changes as per your recommendations and post how it goes!
Hi BennVenn,
I didn't realize you are in Australia till now... who in their right mind isn't growing their tomatoes outside down under in this wonderful season? You know 80% of the North Americans are foaming at the mouth just waiting for Spring here ;-) Just joking around ... I'm sure this is a great learning experience. Let me just give a few pointers and address a couple more doubts you had.
OK, $8/1000L for an all-in-one product .... hmmmm Unless I'm wrong that's 3 cents a gallon, way to go mate! .... wait, let's just look at it to be sure ...
OK, the formula is no good for fruiting tomatoes, though it ought to be ok for greens and herbs. Potassium nitrate was not the way to adjust it, it should have been adjusted with sulfate of potash, and we don't knowthe micros so who knows except the leaves don't show any problem with them yet. Too young to say really. I looked at the way the leaves curl in your excellent pictures and that is why I thought you had some accumulated salts already. But it could be that the plant is simply weak. Both are likely. Coconut based substrate is less forgiving on roots than a mineral substrate and when repotting that is an art, not a science where you rip as few roots as you can and open it up somewhat, and put it in its new place avoiding compacting in any way so the roots have time to spread out. I think your comments about roots and water are not far off the mark, except that it is oxygen, not water that is getting excluded and this will be a risk of fungal problems now ... another reason not to dawdle on repotting.
We didn't talk about the composition of your source water. 16 CF is fine at this stage including the water ;-).
OK, if that is fine ...back to the formula, if it is one liter (100:1), you are blasting the poor plants with nitrogen, and unless your source water is passing through a calcite mine, the calcium is not a problem, but will likely become your first deficiency ... it's too low. The formula will work fine at 200:1, but as the fruit load increases, then iron must be added as long as you want to use this sub-optimal tomato product.
What kind of grow light do you have? can it deliver roughly 500 W/m2? OK, well, at least 350, but to each of the leaves? All right, you can twist the tomato plant's arms some and have 200, but that will only get by. Unfortunately it is the lower leaves that are doing most of the photosynthesis and the bulb must be near them unless it is one of these expensive new bulbs that claims a mini-solar directed output. Still the nice reflective room you made is better than I ever had.
Your choice of plant variety is a problem to light up. It is a vigorous indeterminate which needs to make lots of plant mass to complement that fruit mass you're after. Consider a manageable dwarf variety for indoors like that ... and adjust your expectation actually, back to being realistic. You can utilize light with enormous efficiency then. Google the Southern Hemisphere dwarf project and get a good one of those and you'll really have a wonderful project.
OK, I hope I helped more than I confused... but I'm thinking it might be a bit much ... let me know if it's helpful or I if need should clear up or said something dumb lol.
PC
It sounds like large temp swings, when juicy tomatoes don't ripen properly ... especially on cold nights followed by warm days. The secret is uniform temp...
Celebrity was bred in part to address this problem. It is pretty fim a tomato but not as bad as they say :-) Look for an heirloom with similar characteristics if you want one but keep in mind many hybrids that are heat tolerant have this bred into them so will likely handle the fluctuations better. Costoluto Fiorentino, Pruden's Purple, Stupice maybe. I'm going to try Bradley next year, and it is probably a good bet for you too.
Happy Thanksgiving
PC
I grew Pozzano F1 from Johnnies two years in a row and it performs ok, but they are indeterminate, so by mid June they are pushing through the plastic of the tunnel.
I also grew Burpee Super Sauce and was really impressed with the outcome. Big giant baseball sized sauce tomatoes that performed well in the tunnel even with the crazy temperature swings. They performed so well that I'm debating on dropping the Pozzano all together and just grow these.
I'm sorry tete-a-tete, but I don't know the variety. This year I planted 35 varieties.
It was pretty difficult in that "jungle" to see what varieties were the tomatoes I picked up. Many vines were 15+ ft. long.
Next year I'll have a CLEAR system, to know EXACTLY what variety is EACH tomato in my garden.
Daniel, thanks for the suggestion. But this is an old thread about "planting plans" and I will just let it ride.
OTOH, I thing the two ( what to grow and what NOT to grow) go hand in hand , as part of the plan, to me at least
BeesNeeds , ... That is very interesting : Growing just one color.
I like colorful basket of tomatoes; Red, Pink ; Brown, Bi Color, Brown, Yellow/Orange, Green, ... But always Red/Pinks are dominant. Well, we all have different preferences.
This post was edited by seysonn on Sun, Nov 23, 14 at 12:14
HOW MANY VARIETIES YOU GREW/MENTIONED ?:
A rough count in this thread alone shows that in 2014 close to ONE HUNDRED varieties mentioned/grown.
Maybe another hundred was not mentioned ( just GW members). But I have read that there are 20k tomato varieties in the world today. Let us say that there are just 2k. So we are just growing one out of 10 of them. I have come to believe that smart gardeners like YOU screen and pick the best to grow. So , instead of going to the commercial seeds catalog I would pick my tomato plans based on the recommendations and reviews right in this GW forum. AND that is what exactly I have been doing. I bet growers like Bonnie listen to you as well and grow/sell what is REALLY good stuff.
Thank you all
Seysonn
Actually those are good ideas from grubby's input, especially about gaming the last frost. But you'd have to get lucky because your last frost date ranges to April 20, and the way this year is going winter isn't giving any breaks.in the southeast, but mabe the southwest will have better luck and maybe you can get a few weeks.
Since it is the first time he's growing I was trying to keep it simple. You won't believe all you can learn by going through it one time with the surest thing and then if you get into it you can build on that with experience under your belt and do some of the stuff other forum participants do to increase their luck. Now I'm bucking the recommendation again with plants when the season should be over (as of two nights ago, hard freeze, 9a). It kind of gets tedious instead of fun at times, and there is really no substitute for getting a productive plant that allows a beginner latitude to make a few mistakes but still get his bushel full to show for the effort.
Best gardening
PC
In addition you will be dealing with wind, quite a lot of it in your high dessert location. Get your tomato plants set out as early as humanly possible. You can purchase or make frost caps or purchase specialty product to protect young plants. Your best bet will likely be smaller tomatoes, including cherries and salad size.
Hi JennieBoyer. I am not a fan of fried green tomatoes and don't think tomatoes should be cooked BUT I found a nice recipe for green tomato soup. I believe it's from Epicurious. You can also make chutney (I've never made it but I've heard its good).
Here is a link that might be useful: Green Tomato Soup
There are only so many uses for green tomatoes and I believe that unless you like the end product you are better to not waste time preparing large quantities of it. I decided this morning to compost over 10 bu. of larger green tomatoes which I had picked prior to the freeze and the last farmers' markets I attended. Eventually they all rot if just held in storage and even those that turn color lack the flavor of a vine ripened tomato. I still have a few bu. of colored tomatoes but what I envision is a weekly sorting routine to toss the decaying fruits and in the end we will have eaten a dozen or less tomatoes.
My vote and my quest is for the vine ripened tomatoes next May. I believe the overwhelming majority of my tomato customers feel the same.
I grew a different one, Indigo Blue Berries. Tough study plants and
the flavor is good when they turn red where the sun doesn't hit, not orange, red. They were a longer DTM than Black Cherry and Esterina (a hybrid) while I was dying to try them. They were the most prolific and were still producing into fall. I had six of them this year. Next I want to put one in an upside down thing, easier to see under them.
Mary E.
From another tomato discussion board we can't link to here - "Taste is not really mild but more mellow yet a fairly complex, well balanced taste."
I find them to have little to no acidic bite yet not overly sweet. An underlying smoky flavor I find in many of the black/blue varieties. But as we often say here, taste is totally subjective so YOMV,
Dave
edited to note correct spelling for searches is Helsing Junction Blues.
This post was edited by digdirt on Mon, Nov 24, 14 at 13:21
Linda, I hope you saved some Pipo seeds! If you did, treat them like gold! Tatiana announced last year that she was nearing the end of her supply, and I haven't found them anywhere else. I don't know why that variety never seemed to catch on....at one time I saw it being called the '42 day tomato' and thought surely that would do it, but the name didn't stick.
My seeds are old, and so far only one has sprouted, but I'm going to treat that plant like garden royalty, just so I can harvest a fresh batch of seeds.
I've only grown two of the cross hemisphere project's dwarf toms, (Iditarod Red and Perths Pride), but you've reminded me that I need to look at this year's offerings and see if I want to repeat those or grow something new. Have you made your selection yet?
jan
Hi Jan,
I saved seeds from Pipo. It's a winner! If you need some, please contact me privately and we can swap.
I also have seeds for 42 Days, so you are saying that these are the same as Pipo! I gave my seedlings away last summer and am growing it again this winter!
I have seeds for the following, so it looks as if I'll be growing:
Dwarf Mr Snow
Dwarf Rosella Purple
Dwarf Arctic Rose
Dwarf Tasmanian Chocolate
Dwarf Wild Fred
Dwarf Rosella Crimson
also
New Big Dwarf (not part of the dwarf project)
These are all rated really well for taste by Patrina, the Australian lady who is in charge of the dwarf project out there.
Linda