Any tomato gardeners out there?

WOW!!! Thirty quarts equals seven and a half gallons of canned tomatoes. That was a great harvest. Congratulations.

JohnnyK

Compost is a great addition to the soil. It isn't a true fertilizer, but it adds essential nutriants to the soil, makes it drain better, and adds microorganisims to the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy plants. Remember,  use a fertilizer that is rich with calcium and do not water the leaves. Calcium prevents blossom end rot. I don't know if you can get Texas Tomato Food where you live, but it really stops blossom end rot . Also, pick the tomatoes before they are perfectly ripe. Doing so will prevent cracked skins and will stop birds from poking holes in the skins.

Happy gardening.

 

First, thanks very much for such a helpful and informative post, really fun to follow this one. My wife is a dedicated produce gardener, she does most of what you stated and will use your suggestions that are new to her.

We had 5 Early Girl plants and two Sun Golds that were greenhouse starts, all did very well. We had no end rot issues this year, plus our three big life like red tail hawks and one barn owl plastic replicas kept the bird thieves at bay.

We canned the majority of the Early Girls for winter dining, thirty quarts total, several will be for friends that don't garden. Wife Karon does not like raw tomatoes, (great feature for me,) so I had a super summer with all of the Sun Golds I wanted.

We're in Western Oregon, quite ideal for gardening, and fortunate to have the space for a large garden.

Again, thank you for a very useful and enjoyable post.

Patrick

Thanks John, I'll check that out.

Pawel,

A tomato plant is an amazing plant. It can grow from a six inch plant to a three foot plant in a month and produce fruit. Put the green tomatos in a paper bag with an apple. They should ripen.

Dodgy,

Have you tried Amazon Australia? I buy Texas Tomato Food from Amazon USA. Will Amazon USA ship to Australia? I have no idea. I think that you can order from Amazon USA and ship it to you via US Mail.

Hello everybody!

I'm pretty surprised I can add anything to this thread - but as it turns out I actually CAN. Thing is my little daughter heard me talking about how you put an apple seed in the ground and a whole big tree grows out of it. To this she replied: lets take those seed and do it! I said awright, we took a pot with some earth from a nearby field, put apple and paprica seeds in it and we were watching. Some time ago my mother offered a small tomato plant in exchange for our small papricas - we said OK and since then out tomato was our fastest growing plant. Today I've seen it's starting to freeze outside, so I said it's slowly time to wrap it up.

Here's how our pot looked like this morning:

And this is what we harvested:

I wat to see if the yellow one will turn red laying on the kitchen counter, then I'll take down the green ones.

Thanks for looking and have a nice day

Paweł

Ta mate, taken on board. So far I havn't been able to find any tomato specific product.

Compost is a great addition to the soil. It isn't a true fertilizer, but it adds essential nutriants to the soil, makes it drain better, and adds microorganisims to the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy plants. Remember,  use a fertilizer that is rich with calcium and do not water the leaves. Calcium prevents blossom end rot. I don't know if you can get Texas Tomato Food where you live, but it really stops blossom end rot . Also, pick the tomatoes before they are perfectly ripe. Doing so will prevent cracked skins and will stop birds from poking holes in the skins.

Happy gardening.

Thanks for a very informative and entertaining thread. I planted my tomatoes about 6 weeks ago, way too early. But now they are putting on new leaves and growing. I prepped the soil with very old compost from my chook shed and dug it in well, but I never thought of planting them that deep. A lot of good advice there Johnny. I will take on some of your other tips and let you know how it goes.

Tomato gardening season is over. I estimate that my six tomato plantes produced about 350 tomatoes. 

I am a strong believer in growing a Winter cover crop in my Tomato garden. I plant Hairy Vetch in early September.

Hairy Vetch is an easy to grow,  cold-hardy legume that is planted in the Fall and plowed into the soil in the Spring. It's greatest benefit is that it absorbs Nitrogen as it grows and fixes the Nitrogen into soil when it is plowed under.  It will release about 100 lbs. of Nitrogen per acre.    When plowed under it improves soil structue,  increases the soil's ability to absorb nutrients and moisture. Hairy Vetch needs to be plowed under in the Spring before it gows to seed.

Happy gardening.

Well, it's the end August and, as usual,  the tomato plants look like trash. However, they are still growing tomatoes like crazy. I estimate the the six plants will produce over 300 tomatoes. That is a new record for me.

My wife makes tomato sauce with most of them. The cherry tomatoes make a sweet sauce. And of course lots of salads and sandwiches. Nothing like a home grown tomato.

Yum.  I like to cut them into decent sized chunks, coat in olive oil salt and oregano and chow down

cwalker3

We got a few. Well my wife did. She's the gardener. I'm just cheap labor.

 

 

cwalker3

Pass the salt and pepper, please; gon'na have me a sandwich!

We got a few. Well my wife did. She's the gardener. I'm just cheap labor.

Tanker-Builder

I own part of one of those.

            It is still imbedded in the side of my favorite all time car, that was paid for. I did have a 2002 series. Loved It! PCH Watch out.

 

I own part of one of those.

            It is still imbedded in the side of my favorite all time car, that was paid for. I did have a 2002 series. Loved It! PCH Watch out.

the Baron

When I was a kid, my dad kept a garden and we grew tomatoes, among other things, and we found that the best fertilizer was horse manure.  We had a friend who kept horses, and every spring, we'd muck out his stables and get a truckload of manure.  We tilled that into the patch, and it gave really good, crumbly, fertile soil.

 

keavdog

So I moved the tomatoes out of the green house, rigged up some fine bird netting to help keep the squirrels out and re-plumbed the drip system.  After a couple of weeks we now have 8 tomatoes that I can see!  They definitely like the cooler temps - great tip.

 

Keep an eye out for blossom end rot

This is caused by a lack of calcium in the soil. I used to have a real proble with blossem end rot until I started to fertilize with "Texas Tomato Food". Texas Tomato Food has a lot of calcium which completely stopped the blossom end rot.

When I was a kid, my dad kept a garden and we grew tomatoes, among other things, and we found that the best fertilizer was horse manure.  We had a friend who kept horses, and every spring, we'd muck out his stables and get a truckload of manure.  We tilled that into the patch, and it gave really good, crumbly, fertile soil.

JohnnyK

I wouldn't eat this stuff but the tomatoes seem to like it

But, it sounds like good stuff.

Bill

This is a single day's harvest.

I'll bet you won't find a tomato that color in the super market.

This is the fertilizer that I used this year.  Rich in calcium to prevent blossem end rot (this stuff really works). Made from bat guano (bat poop), worm casts (more poop), kelp,  mycorrhizar (fungus that feeds the plant's roots), hurmic acid (decomposed remains of organic life), enzymes and minerals. I wouldn't eat this stuff but the tomatoes seem to like it.

One more important tip regarding tomatoes. NEVER put a tomato in the refrigerator. The cold temperature will suck the flavor out of the tomato. That is one reason why market tomatoes have no flavor. They were transported in refridgerated railcars or refrigerated trucks. They were probably stored in a cooler.

My wife does cherry tomatoes as she likes them small for salads, I'm not a fan of them, and Peppers in a small greenhouse, as we have a small garden we grow pototoes and carrots in tall bags. When we in our early twenties and there were four of us I grew almost everything on a plot of 1/3rd of a acre, Potatoes, cabbages, cauliflowers, peas, green beans, broad beans, sweetcorn, tomatoes, cucumbers, a few other things. It was far cheaper than buying them but you had to be patient. 

But the flavours of any of them were superb as soon as they were harvested and cooked!

Store/supermarket Veg sometimes have no flavour because they are produced in such huge quantities flavour didn't come into it.

JohnnyK

DasBeav,

Do you grow the San Marzanos from seed? I have never seen those plants for sale at a nursery.

 

DasBeav,

Do you grow the San Marzanos from seed? I have never seen those plants for sale at a nursery.

Nice Post, JohnnyK. I am going to try the paper bag idea.

I grow mostly Roma and San Marzanos, along with peppers of all types for my chili and spaghetti sauce. This year the plants started out looking the best they ever had. Then North Central Ohio got two weeks of nothing but rain. The leaf mulch I put down to keep moisture in and suppress weeds turned into a swamp. Some plants died and others looking no so great, I still should have a decent crop, but not the bumper crop I was expecting.

Next year I will be doing mounding with the leaf mulch between rows and grass clippings on top of mounds. 

We grow a lot of stuff. Squash, green onions, leeks, Walla Walla onions, arugula, some lettuce.

No peppers, berries or toms though.

There's a fairly organized share co-op on my street because we live in an older neighborhood and some people have heirloom fruit trees. Cherries, plums, apricots, lemons.

i commute 20 miles mostly through farm lands, unless I take the Beemer out the valley way.

This month was a harvest of green row crops. Lettuce, chard, broccoli. A sad thing is that commercial farming only yields about 60% of the crop for market. This I know from a friend of mine who is the farm operations manager for a huge business in Salinas.

Look at a picked lettuce field and there are heads, partial heads and small plants everywhere. There are occasional efforts to organize gleaning operations, but the difficulties of access to private property, pesticide exposure and safety of the fields themselves tie it all up. Farm operations dislike the idea.

Well, John.That car doesn't know what a parking lot is. I have a space at work, otherwise it goes on round trips. Speaking of work, in addition to my big projects (hospitals and we are super busy redesigning for the October surge ); I'm renovating a 1949 mid-century modern house that was designed by the founder of our firm.

Bill

GMorison,

Nice car. I'll bet that that car is fun to drive on PCH.