16,949 Garden Web Discussions | Growing Tomatoes
Really nutritional deficiencies are hard to predict and we don't know what is in your water (enough magnesium Mg?), but I would suggest you check your label for micronutrients in the fertilizer to be sure it contains at least iron and manganese (Mn). Potassium rate (elemental) should be double or triple nitrogen.
I would add some iron first and foremost, and if my water were soft a little epsom salt (Magnesium sulfate heptahydrate) from the pharmacy or grocery store.
Good luck.
Hi seysonn
Yes I thought so too regarding the leaves but I discovered this silvery residue only on one branch pretty high up. No residue anywhere else nor any damage from a slug as someone suggested. I haven't seen it again on this or any of my other tomato plants nor have I ever seen any signs of slugs. Who know LOL. Anyway my SFT is still giving me fruit. No more blossoms though I'm sad to report. Of the 18 varieties that I'm growing this year the SFT has lived up to its hype! I'd recommend it to anyone! Thanks for your response.
My SFT has stopped flowering. Right now she is raising her babies. :-) It shows new growth and probably will resume flowering after the current fruits have ripened . It lost lots of flowers during the recent heat wave. It did not like hot weather and kept wilting everyday even when fully watered.
I agree with Osagecounty,
I am also growing a yellow grape size that is the same.
Most cherries seem to have a wild vine growing habit. But I am growing one (from store bought heirloom) that is manageable. No ripe fruits yet but it is loaded under 4 ft height .
Tim, I call a rare variety one that there's no place to buy seeds and it doesnt show up on anyones trade list via Googling it or at a message site,
But there are two seed sources for it.
Looking forward to seeing your picture though,(smile)
Carolyn
Centexan254: thank you. That sounds like the right reason. My other tomatoes are also smaller than they should be. I have also been skimping on water.
Another question: should I trim/prune the plants (the branches that don't have any fruit on them now) in preparation for them to start fruiting again when it cools down some or just leave them as is, most of them at 5-6 feet high. If the answer is yes, can someone give me a little more detail on which branches to trim and where (if that matters)? Thanks.
If the branches are healthy then I would advise to leave them as they are. More branches will give more fruit when it does cool off. If they are in cages then they will drape back down the sides.
The only pruning I do is taking off the dead, or dying branches.
This post was edited by centexan254 on Tue, Aug 5, 14 at 18:50
"Reflector" is a term for posting used by electronic mailing list forums, when one posts by sending an email to a single email which is the forum reflector email address which "reflects" it back to the emails of all the members.
On GW'sthere is a feature called clipping. If there are posts you want to remember you can clip them and they appear on a separate page called "my clippings" which get saved to a page of memorable highlights you can refer to and designate each clipping as private or public.
kpn, I didn't say that your pictures was photoshopped, what I said is that we have seen some photoshopped ones here that others noted were off the net from somewhere. ( smile)
Carolyn
This post was edited by carolyn137 on Tue, Aug 5, 14 at 9:51
I think you should put a piece of paper with YOUR initials on it under YOUR porn tomato and upload that photo, but anyone with photoshop could photoshop your initials out.
Sad world we live in. It wouldn't surprise me if YOUR photo makes it's way around the web............
Anyway, I bet that tomato tastes as good as the rest even with it's deformity. Probably common in tomatoes.
First year growing MWC. It is an amazingly huge plant with impressive production. The taste is as sweet as it's reputation. My only knock on it is:
1. Very small fruit
So I knew it was going to be small, but I guess I didn't know it would be that small. I'm also growing a variety called "Coyote" which is very productive like MWC, sweet like MWC, but yellow. I just wish I would get more bang per tomato in terms of size. I like the cherry size that are large enough to cut in half and add to salads.
2. Cemented to the vine
So, staying on put on the vine is a good thing, but my MWC is almost cemented to it. When I pull them off, sometimes it's yummy meat inside stays with the vine. This makes it somewhat difficult to remove. Granted, this is early in the season and maybe this behavior will change.
What I'd really love is a cherry tomato, the size of Magic Mountain but sweet like MWC. Does anyone have any suggestions?
smithmal
This post was edited by smithmal on Mon, Aug 4, 14 at 22:26
Thanks Dill and yes the variety was Marmande, the one that the Proccaci Bros used to TMark the one they developed.
Through all of this mess and litigation I decided I couldn/t trust anything that the Procacci's notedat their website.
The way they took over the UGly Ripe from the woman in FL was awful and same for them when there was a huge mess and litigation when they thought they had put Andrew Chu in FL, who had introduced the first grape tomato that most folks knew, that being Santa F1, out of business.
But Andrew had other sources for that hybrid and continued to market fruits. What I don't understand is why, in the final settlement it said that Santa F1 seeds couldn't be sold in the US for X number of years, that time passed and still no seeds of it. The last place to offer those seeds was TGS and when I asked Linda about it she said she had heard nothing.
I'm not all choked up about that b'c I think most folks know they can buy Santa Sweets TM, brought to you by the Procacci's, they are hybrid fruits, save seeds and 99% of the plants will give the same as the original, the offtype being not the right shape and having a lower Brix concentration.
B/c I love the Procacci's so much I spread that info around at every site I stop by,after Andrew told me that and there are now folks as far out as the F9 or so, and all is well
Carolyn
Farmer Dill, thanks for that cat's meow of Grandma's Pick hybrid in the post and for clarifying the marketing scam that promulgated deceptive information about the cultivar, as I cannot believe it is a coincidence that so much misinformation is floating around for this specific UglyRipe™ base model tomato.
As for the other grape tomato, Thompson & Morgan have new for this year an improved cultivar based on Santa F1 if anyone wants to pay three pounds plus UK shipping for 6 seeds. They call it Santonio F1Their US website apparently could process the purchase (unconfirmed).
Carolyn or anyone have similar growing feedback for any version of the UglyRipe™ branded tomatoes?
This post was edited by PupillaCharites on Mon, Aug 4, 14 at 23:09
I'm mostly container growing and I finally took down a Red Penna. It started with the leaves looking like they had septoria or bacterial speck, then the stems started with lesions, but it was producing fruit. I n the last few days I realized the flowers were all drying up and when I cut off a few stems they were hollow inside. I tried several treatments and today I chopped it down and hope none of my other plants get whatever this one has. I think my plants were too close, high humidity, maybe too much foliage and not enough air circulation. I don't think it was too much nitrogen as I was using Foliage Pro 9-3-6 in a 5-1-1 mix, but at this point, I'm not certain of anything. I kind of thought it was tomato pith necrosis too.
Hi sharonie
There is a lot of good info out there on pith necrosis including pictures. After reviewing it all I am convinced that this is what my plants have...It's easy to over fertilizer ( I know lol) You mentioned about using Foliage Pro (Liquid?). How often did you feed them? Many here (Digidirt) recommend that a liquid fertilizer be used for container gardening and that you half the recommended amount when applying it and do it 2 times a week. Getting back to pith necrosis I've read that sunny weather restores the plant. I lost my Paul Robeson completely and am nursing my 3 others, Homer Fike's, Pearls of Wisdom and Livingston's Paragon. The weather here is not cooperating. Cloudy days, cool nights are not conducive to restoring my plants. I have though stopped fertilizing these 3 in ground plants and am concentrating on my containers and hoping that I don't over-fertilizer these.
No, you didn't kill your plant.
Take a look at the link below, from 1927 and all the basic tratis of many different veggies and fruits were studied in the 20's and 30's, scroll down to the tomato chapter, look at the illustrations and see that fibrous roots grow outwards from the top part of the root to often up to 6 ft below.
The difference in a fibrous root and a tap root structure for tomatoes is if one direct seeds tomato seeds and doesn't transplanted them just once that one gets a tap root structure and transplanting them just once gives a fibrous root structure which is more desirable for water and nutrient uptake, but is more fragile than a tap root, which is why I always let my transplanted seedlings get rootbound before they were hardened off and put outside.
Fragile roots break easily whereas root bound ones don't, and take off ASAP to form a fibrous structure/ And I never, but never transplanted seedlings more than once, as in no, for potting up as many call it.
Carolyn
Here is a link that might be useful: Root Development
Yes, I've grown Georgia Streak, and what's more interesting about that one to me is that Jeff Dawson in CA crossed it with Russian #117, a flat double red heart, to get the first bicolored heart called Orange Russian #117, which is what Jeff himself named it although others have used some different names.
In the link below take a look at the first known bicolor heart, which I've also grown,
Carolyn
Here is a link that might be useful: Oange Russian # 117
Cherokee Chocolate was a single spontaneous mutation from the clear epidermis of CP to a yellow one.
The link below, post by Mulio ,gives the classification of some varieties based on gf allele analysis,
As for alternative explanations as to where CP came from, yes, there are several theories and many threads here and there that have suggested that Phillipines #2 was the source, seeds sent to the U of now I forget which one in the south that "escaped" from there, but also seeds sent to a researcher in Canada.
And no, the Phillippine one was not widely distributed in the US,
I know of no one who has suggested that CP came from the Crimea which many think the first so called Black ones originated from.
Craig has been in touch with John Green on more than one occasion and John can no longer locate the woman who gave him the seeds that the variety CP was named from.
I think I covered all your questions from your latest post above and it is a complicated story. The gf analyses are not complicated, pretty straight forward, and I have link after link referring to this situation, but no way can I include them all here, or take the time to fetch them from my faves to do so, but I think my brief answers do summarize the major points.
Carolyn
Here is a link that might be useful: gf genetics
Donna, thanks for your experience growing BZ. Since I'm assuming Carolyn would laugh me out of the forum if I sent her seeds for some grocery store tomato like this, if you want to play with this to grow I'd be glad to send you some nice seeds from it to compare with your black tomatoes. Can't beat the price ;-) If I were sure it were BZ or some non-heirloom I wouldn't want it, but since I never grew BZ before and it looked different (but not different enough) in a pile of what had the classic BZ look IMO. The seeds do seem to have had a thick green gel as the Black Crimean tomato. I'll grow it after all and see if it makes jagged longer zebra stripes like you normally see.
Carolyn, As you've said, maybe the professor from the U of Ark was a Cherokee. Sevierville is 550 miles from me, so if I ever get bored I'll go Cherokee (tomato) hunting, if in fact the mystery woman and her neighbor were from the area, which is a little detail omitted from the description.
That is a great study referenced in the link you kindly provided and I can only say you helped me beyond my dreams, so please know that I value your advice and am very excited to read your replies to me and everywhere else. My only wish is the study referenced had done more than apparently restrict research to specifically gf alleles, and had the resources to look at markers that could separate the varieties rather than the hypothesis of the single black gene. I don't know about you but to me there seems far more to this story and 5 "recent" spontaneous mutations doesn't smell right at all to me, and based on that argument I would think multiple gf alleles have been around much longer than to suddenly express this degree of divergence, unless something simpler would have happened to see it at the phenotype level. Don't worry, I'm going to read a copy of the original paper and get a more complete idea about their experiments and results.
You are one classy oracle. Thank you so much. I promise to hold off on Thomas Jefferson (the man) until my head starts splitting LOL, this thread will not be about him. BTW, I heard TJ hid his Cherokee ancestry among many other things ;-)