Tomato Review

I would like to know how everybody's tomatoes have done this year?

I used to get enough tomatoes in less than a week to cover my 48" diameter kitchen table.
Last year, I did not get A tomato until August 1st. This year, it was the last week in July. So far, we have had four tomatoes.
Last year, we moved the tomatoes to a new location with no results. This year, we returned them to the former location. They are in a raised bed with good organic soil and are watered on a regular automatic cycle. They are mulched with straw.

We have had a bumper crop of cucumbers this year, so I know we have good pollinators.
We're scratching our heads and wondering what we can do differently.

We did have LOTS of rain this year and terrific humidity. So, I suppose we could blame the weather due to lack of pollination and high night time temperatures. But, this is the third year in a row we have not had tomatoes. I think there's more to our problem than the weather. If it's the weather, we may never get a lot of tomatoes. The plants look happy.

I want to can some but, heck, we can't even get enough to put on a sandwich.

We only grow heirlooms.

Tomatoes are self pollinating, unlike cukes, they do not need pollinators. That being said the humidity can make the pollen clump. I have a bunch of green fruit but have only picked a couple ripe ones. I got a later start. Are your plants blooming?

Whooops! Learned something-maybe I have heard before about self pollinating tomatoes, but I have forgotten. Good to know.

Yes, I have blooms and some green ones, but it seems pretty late to be getting red tomatoes. In the past, we have had tomatoes from about the second week in July.

We have about one more month of good tomato weather.

Am I whining?? :)

I'm somewhat relieved to hear others have be4en having a less than stellar yielf from their tomatoes.

This is the first year I've grown tomatoes and expected a nice return for my (daioly) efforts. Instead, I've gotten barely enough tomatoes to supply my nearest family and myself with 'maters: from eight plants!!

ive been having a pretty good tomato harvest up here in VA (but i started my seed super extra early....in fact too early, at the beginning of the year, lol).

But have been having problems with the bugs being poked and prodded by stink bugs, and they rot prematurely, sometimes within just 2-3 days of bringing them inside.

It seems pretty late in the season to just now be getting a few tomatoes. I'm not sure why. It could be the weather, but I don't think that would be the case three years in a row.

If we put out tomato plants early: April, we get so much rain in the spring develops lots of lush green foliage followed by lots of fat aphids.

Here, this is not late to be getting tomatoes. I should have my best harvest in the Fall, but our growing conditions are different.

From what you discribe it almost sounds like your soil had/has too much Nitrogen.

lisac
Thanks, for responding. I don't think there's too much N in the soil because we have blooms and green tomatoes. I am disappointed we have not had tomatoes sooner. Gosh, it's August. We used to be eating tomatoes for 3 weeks by now.

I think it takes longer for Heirloom tomatoes to get going??
I wonder if we should plant a few (1 or 2) hybrids, so we can have tomatoes from the garden sooner?

Yes, there are hybrids that have shorter DTMs. It seems like the average for most heirlooms is 75-80 days. But high humidity and high temps will slow done or prevent pollination.

I don't see how it could hurt to plant a couple hybrids and see if they produce earlier.

Yes, I think I am going to plant a couple hybrids.

Anyone have a favorite hybrid? Guess I could start a new thread or maybe there's already one around here
I have had Celebrity, Jet Star and Goliath in the past..

The one tomato plant that has produced nicely, and early, is a hybrid that I grew from seedds from byrpee.

I've been eating red, ripe tomatoes from it beginning the last week of June and, while it took about 2 weeks off becase we were hyaving temps near 90, it's consisdtently keep me in 'mater sandwiches!

It's called "Fourth of July": indeterminant, very ea;y Maturity of D$(, grows 55" (4.6') tall and 20" wide, yields red 4 oz fruit (green shoulders are kinda usual but the Agri Extension office here explained the fruit WAWS ripe, just that the skin was the last to ripen...so go ahead and pick 'em: I did and they were right!! Tasty, juicy 'maters!!)

This PC crashed recently and I lost all the backed-up piocs, so here's a new one. I have several different kinds of plants; this was one mornings yield in late July. The "necklace" at the bottomis from my Fourth of July plant.

Thanks for the suggestion of "4th of July". I've seen this tomato in catalogs but haven't heard anyone talk about its flavor etc. I see the picture of your tomatoes. They look tasty! How big in diameter would you say they are?

they say 4 ounce tomatoes and that's what they are! I wish they were b8igger, but as plentiful, tasty and juicy as they are...I just use another one oer two to make a big ol 'mater sandwich! LOL

Seriously, though, they are bigger than a golf ball but smaller than a tennis ball. The pic I posted should help with size comparisons: the clump of 5 small cherry tomatoes (at the top, center) are 1 ounce fruit abolut 1 inch round globes; the biggest tomato, with the red dot, is a Big Beef and made four thick 'mater sandwiches (one slice/slab covered the entire piece of bread!) with a top and bottom (blossom end) left over (the cook's morsels hehehe.

I've another pic of that big, red dot tomatoe, and the two biguns in the middle (all from the same plant on the same day) - taken with an 8 ounce can (the small 1-2 serving size cans) for easy comparison: use this one to help you see the rough size of the 4th of July fruit/

This was one of the best tomato season ever.
From May 11th my kitchen counter was constantly cover by tomatoes.
I frozed so many roasted tomatoes with onions and garlic for the winter.
Then I though myself how to cook and can: tomato sauce. marinara sauce and bolognese sauce.
Then more tomatoes ... so I have made enough salsa for the all year.
I harvested my first tomato on May 11th and I am still harvesting today August 6th.
Maybe one more week and that's it !
This will be a season to remember !

Again, thanks, Bet for the pictures and descriptions. You make my mouth water. We still don't have tomatoes. I noticed a squirrel is eating them green. I wish I knew how to stop that.

drthor. Wow, so many nice tomatoes. We can't even get one. Well, we've had about five. It's just not enough.

birder:
If you want early tomatoes you might try Moravsky Div, an OP cherry which has produced the first tomatoes in my garden for two years running. (~55 days from planting out).

birder
I used to have the same problem, only with Birdws AND squirrells! I solved it immediately by putting a rubber snake (black and white banded - most animal species aren't able to "see" colors but they DO recognize patterns - that I bought at a local Dollar Store) and placed it in conspicuous, easily visble to all tomato-ruining vardmints! Move it every day, so the varmints don't become so used to it that they know they can wsafelky ignore it. For instrance, I had a ripening tomato that I was determined that *I* was tgoing to get to eat: I placed that snake daily verry close to it (under it, next to it, on the branch immediately above it, one day even draped OVER that ripening tgem.
I scxrolled back up to my post extolling the Fouth of July. The date of maturity got typo-ed. It's a very early D49, too. This year, my first ripe tomatoe was during the last week of June:
This morning, I picked six...and a bunch more are in various stages of ripoening so I'll be continueing to pick a goodly amount every day for even longer. (The tomatoe I was referring to above was Tomato #5:Birds +squirrells 3, me 1).

DonShirer
I am looking for a different very small fruited plant for next year. I have Baxter's Bush Early Cherry (D71; 2 months afte4r starting from seed - even before planting out -it had flkowers so within days of planting out, it had already set fuit). It too, is still churning out tomatoes! It has 1" fruit, too big to pop in your mouth and eat (unless yiou're ready to clean up the spurt of seeds and juices!). I'm wanting something smaller: I'm considering Mexican Midget and Texas Wild - both are wild varieties, prone to ge4nerously seed the surrounding gqarden and both well adapted to hhot and very sunny. Do yoiu hav3e any other like candidates or have some knowledge about either of these?

Glad I read this before I went to town! I'm on my way to buy me a snake!! :)

Thanks for the good information about days to maturity. I will make note of these for next year.
Still no red tomatoes. Another week. Got green ones. :(

Birdrer, when I posted DTM I meant days to maturity. Many of the smaller fruited varieties take less time to ripen (shorter DTMs), they also produce more fruit then larger fruited varieties.

You mentioned that you only grow heirlooms but 4th of July might be a good Hybrid to try.

I only grow one, maybe two, small fruited varieties a season. I just don't have the patience for them. Right now Red Defender (hybrid) is producing nicely. I also don't grow many red tomatoes. Lol

We are under a heat advisory my garden looks great from my living room. Lol

Bet,I forgot to say that there are Currant Tomatoes that are very small fruited. I've grown Tx Wild and Everglades, they are both prolific and taste good too.

I have tasted the Currant tomatoes. They are tasty but quite small: about the size of the tip of your little finger.

birder:
I've heard good reports about Mexican Midget and am going to try it next year.

Thanks Don, I'll research that one.

These are ALL this morning's picking from my Fourth of July plant.

Not too bad. : )

That's really good, Bet, especially since that plant has been pumping them out since early July or was in last of June? Wow! Still no tomatoes for us.

birder
my first tomatoes were from this plant: the last week of June!!

That is really good.
Mexican Midget and Moravsky Div seem to be cherry tomatoes. I may try one of those, but I'm also think I'm going to try one of the Fourth of July tomatoes.
Does anyone know if you can buy the Plants locally or must you start them from seed? I need to know so I can get the seed early enough.

birder:
Local nurseries usually only sell the most popular varieties of tomato (and other) plants. I raise my toms from seed (there are many sources of both MM and MD) but you may be able to order MM plants from an online source. Chileplants.com had them this year and sold out. I have not seen a web source for Moravsky Div plants, but it is a strain of Stupice and you may be able to find plants online for that variety.

Bet, my favorite small tomato is Sun Sugar. It's a yellow, similar to Sun Gold & in size to Sweet 100, but it has a thinner skin and is slightly sweeter IMO to SG. Love it. And thanks for the reminder about the rubber snake. We're mostly had problems with possums and raccoons. Trapped a raccoon last night as a matter of fact.

We've had a fairly good year but after being on vacation for over 2 weeks, the tomatoes are looking rough from disease. I did have a friend picking and she left me some partially ripe ones to come home to and I still am able to pick some SS and SG. The peak was just before we left for vacation so I was able to roast and freeze quite a bit from the 6 plants. I experimented (again) with Costoluto Genovese and Brandywine this year. I didn't have much luck with production on Brandywine. Better than the last 2 times I have tried it. Good thing my 3 Cherokee Purples & 2 Better Boys did good. Costoluto's were a disease magnet and have already been pulled up.

As for hybrid recommendations, in the past I have grown Celebrity, Rutgers and Better Boy. BB is the largest & good for sandwiches IMO. My grandmother always grew Rutgers for canning and freezing. Celebrity is pretty reliable too. Some say Rutgers is no longer a heirloom due to improvements made over the years.

Mexican Midget is a wild variety and it's classified as currant sized, with tomatoes being 1/2 inch red globes the size of a fingertip: HALF the size of cherry tomatoes at 1 inch.
Description of Mexico Midget http://www.totallytomato.com/dp.asp?pID=00466&c=9&p=Mexico+Midget+Tomato

IMy son says I'm weird. LOL When blue M&M were first introduced, I simply wouldn't/couldn't eat them. so I bouight an M&M dispenser (Mr. Blues, the jazz musician) and would put all my blue M&M in it. I put it by the front door and told my son he could have as many as he wanteed, whenever he wanted! He LIKED that but to this day still teases me about this idiosynchrony of mine!

I told y'all that to help y'all understand why I need RED tomatoes!

I have Bush Big Boy and Rutgers: they've both been disappointing. Big Boy suffered so severly from blossom end rot (alone out of 10 other varieties I'm growing: same place, same time, same conditions) that it's only yieldede ONE tomato so far. Rutgers . . . I don't know why, but it's only produced three tomatoes but , as of a couple of weeks ago, resumed growing and setting fruit, It's always been healthy (all my plants have been so healthy with the exception of Big Boy) but it hasn't lived up to its catalog description: several flushes of fruit starting with its midseason Days-to-Maturity. Both are being considered for replacement in the line-up for nesxt year!

From reviews I've read, Celebrity is reliable but there are better ones since its introduction. I'm considering it, since I could do with a reliable producer!

I subscribe to the e-magazine type newsletter Tomato Dirt. It's latest described step-by-step freezing cherry tomatoes in 6 easy steps. Since I didn't save it, I'll have to tell y'all instead. Remove stems, wash & dry, spread them on a cookie sheet (one layer, not touching each other), put (uncovered - as is) into the freezer, once they're frozen solid: store them in bags/jars/whatever. . .. keeping THAT in the freezewr and only taking out & unfreezing what is wanted. . . do NOT re-freeze!

Such very good information. Thanks all.
I will grow the tomatoes from seed. I always do that each season, but I've been growing heirlooms, and they aren't always in local stores. I just thought hybrids would probably be more prevalent. I would think the 4th of July would be pretty popular since it produces early.

Bet, I've roasted the currant tomatoes. Very Sweet! when roasted. They work pretty well in salads especially the salads that the base is a grain: quinoa, barely, brown rice etc. Also, would be wonderful in focaccia and other breads.

Thanks for the directions to freeze the cherry tomatoes.

I still will grow heirlooms, but I am going to grow a couple of hybrids as I think they are more reliable.

Birder, which heirlooms do you grow? I experiment with 1-2 different ones each year too and had less than stellar success with many that some people swear by. Brandywine is one. I always give them more than one chance in case it has been a bad year but I never hang my hat on just that one new variety for the year.

Cherokee Purple is a great one for me, and I've heard Indian Stripe is a close relative so I may try it next year. So I always have about 3 CP's every year in addition to a couple of Better Boys which do well for me. Lemon Boy (yellow) is another that is pretty good. And then I have my Sun Sugar and Sun Gold and usually a Sweet Million or Sweet 100 (this year the seed wasn't true and I got a large tomato out of it).

I gave Brandywine another shot this year. Got more than previous years but still no great star in my garden. I can't even remember which others I have tried. I received some free Sioux seeds one year and it was a heavy producer but the fruit was icky (mushy, mealy, no flavor). I pulled it up after a few weeks. Not worth the time.

The tomatoes we planted this year:
Ozark Orange, Cherokee Purple, Kellogg's Breakfast, Box Car Willie, Indigo Blue, Mortgage Lifter, Green Zebra, Arkansas Traveler, Marianna's Peace.

We have had very good luck with Cherokee Purple, Kellogg's Breakfast, Mortgage Lifter, and Arkansas Traveler.

New this year is Box Car Willie and Indigo Blue. Both of them are very healthy. Box Car Willie was a strong plant right out of the chute.

My two favorite are Cherokee Purple and Kellogg's Breakfast. Kellogg's Breakfast is a large, very tasty, beautiful tomato of red, yellow and green. Both are delicious.

I woke up at 3 am last night so turned on a recorded "Garden Smart". I believe they explained why I don't have tomatoes. I have them planted too close together.

We love tomatoes so much and enjoy trying different ones each season. I think we just crowed too many in our small garden area we have designated for tomatoes.

Do you (plural) think taking a couple out or every other one etc. would give us tomatoes yet?
Or, perhaps, it's not the problem? I do have green ones but it's been sloooow. We have had 5 tomatoes this year.

We have a small yard with not much area to grow tomatoes. We cage them.

birderr
My tomastoes are all in containers on my very small back patio(which is why I had to give away two. . .already planted and caged! My klittle patio only had enough in ful, sun for 8 hours, for the remaining 8 plants.)
So I don't know about spacing: my containers touch each other and the cages inter-lap at the topws.....but I have very happy tomatoes!
I want to ask you about Arkansas Traveler, as it's on my short list for next year's plantong. Supposedly, it standfs up well to heat & humidity; when it got very hot here (in the upper 80'2, even a few days of 90) my plants just STOPPED! Flowers didn't open, turned brown and dropped off, 'maters didn't continue to ripen and (I guesxs) the plants took daily watering like mad!
I'm also considering Mortage Lifter, so also interested in your input on it, too. . . especially since you must deal with similar summer conditions.

Because my plants are confined to containers (rasther small 5 gallon shop containers at that!) plant mature height must not be over 7 feet. . . and, of course, must yield big, red tomatoes (about 12 ouncersto slightly less than a pound: definately NOT the giants of beefsteak fame)

You do have a lot of tomato plants! I did cut back this year due to several reasons. Ended up with 3 CPs, 2 BB's, 1 Brandywine and 1 Costoluto Genovese, 2 Sun Sugars and 1 Sun Gold.
I use Texas Tomato cages. They are a bit pricey but they are worth their weight in gold for me. I am also very diligent about cutting off the suckers early in the growth stages and also keeping the bottom leaves trimmed. I'm not very good about doing this when the plants start getting huge, however. Maybe try this next year if you don't do it already.

Spacing is always good, not only for disease control but also (for me anyway) ease of picking and for the obvious reason of pollination. And then there is crop rotation. For the cherry types, we use cattlel panels and I just trellis them and tie up the runners. Works better for picking that way as I can pick from both sides.

I have grown Arkansas Traveler and Mortgage Lifter in the past and had some pretty good luck with both, especially Mortgage Lifter as I recall, except for one year when nothing did very well. Not so much with Kellogs.

In Missouri, you might try removing a couple of plants and see what happens. I don't know what to tell you at this late date.

Brandywine is notorious for not setting fruit well under hot humid conditions ie the South. I've tried many different strains over the yrs and gotten 2 tomatoes. Lol

I can tell you from past experience "back in the day" when I had good tomato crops. :(
1. MORTGAGE LIFTER is very reliable and produces a lot of nice sized tomatoes. Not huge, but about 2 1/2 inches. Produced all summer and is one that has tomatoes now (green) at the top of my plants. There's a story w. this one: man was going to have to give up his land, then developed and grew Mtg. Lifter. Rest is history!
3. ARKANSAS TRAVELER is about the same as Mortgage Lifter. Ark. Traveler was chosen because it is similar in growing conditions to SE Mo. It did well. M. Lifter "may" be a little better tasting.
4. I gave the wrong name for Indigo Blue--it's INDIGO ROSE. Although there's an Indgo Blue and an Indigo Rose. Right now, it has about 3 tomatoes on it about 1/2 inch to an inch in size. Not a sizzler!
5. We also tried GENOVINE-it' not even there. Pulled it fairly soon after planting.


We have tomatoes [green :( ] on MORTGAGE LIFTER, ARKANSAS TRAVELER, CHEROKEE PURPLE (actually nice sized ones but not very many), MARIANA'S PEACE (good size one or two), OZARK ORANGE (one or two small), GREEN ZEBRA about 6.

GREEN ZEBRA has been reliable for us, but the flavor is a little citric (lemon). It's good with other tomatoes in a salad and adds pretty color, but it's sure not the star in our tomato garden.

Well, heck, we don't have stars this year but I'm referring to other years.

New post:

I'd really like to get a handle on my tomato problem, so I can have fresh tomatoes from the garden next year. This is the third year we have had almost no tomatoes. I guess this is the worst of the three. However, our co. agent says this was a really bad year for anything-especially tomatoes. So, that has to be taken into consideration. But, 5 tomatoes out of all those plants!

So, here's more info. to see if anyone has ideas for next year.

3 years ago, not as many tomatoes as usual. Produced a little late.
2 years ago, Didn't get our first tomato until August-we usually get tomatoes about 2nd week in July.
1 year ago, moved the tomatoes to a different location. Even worse.
This year, put new top soil in. Very nice soil. Smelly, but very nice at $30.00 a scoop.

Tomatoes are strawed, watered on a timer. Definitely touching each other. Always grow 10 ft tall.

I took some pictures. Sometimes that helps.

1. This is facing West.
2. This is facing East.
3. The height of these tomatoes.
4. At the top. Nice and green but no tomatoes.
5. Cherokee Purple

And one more...........

This message was edited Aug 13, 2015 1:20 PM

And this is what we are finding: