OT: Tomato Plant problem

Maybe the seeds were collected near Fukushima?

I use chicken shit as fertilizer, with good results.

============= for some suggestions see

Maybe it needed more phosphorus (to help better flowering -- no flowers, no fruit). Here's an article I found:

Weather this year has been farty. I lost 4 of my 6 basil plants back in May. Tomatoes need tons of sun. Is that one shaded at all, perhaps by the others? Do you use drip irrigation? Veggies love that.

What were the results of the _soil test_, Tawm?

Dig in some organic compost this winter, and mulch with it after planting next year. Since most gardens go in the same soil year after year, they rob nutrients every year. Maybe yours ran out this year.

Also look into micorrhizae. Once you start with that, don't till any more. Let it grow! Rillyrilly good stuff. Made here in GP. -->

-- The problem with borrowing money from China is that thirty minutes later, you feel broke again. --Steve Bridges as Obama

You're about at the point it don't matter. You can stimulate fruiting by damaging the root system. Take a spade and shove it clear in the ground a few inches away from one side.

Nutrition is one possiblility if you ruled disease out. You can't beat organic fertilizer. I get one or two semi load of chicken shit every year. Even moved up to turckey shit last year. I attend crop schools every year. A soils scientist told us he can see if the farm had a dairy twenty years later.

Karl

Obviously it's an iron deficiency. (Waddaya expect in a metalworking group?) Art

Pig shit worked real good too, but you have to put it on in the fall and let it mellow out.

John

Not laughing at you, Tom, just at the memory of Dorothy's tomato crop a couple of years ago. Man, she worked and worked and spent a small fortune to grow a dozen tomatoes. They must have cost $20 each. But they were really tasty!

Your county extension service ought to be able to tell you why that happened. A common reason is that the tomatoes are fertilized too soon. If you fertilize before the buds have emerged, you get a beautiful crop of...leaves.

Knowing when to fertilize tomatoes is part of our citizenship requirement in New Jersey....

Thanks Ed. I'll pass that along to the gardener...

Are tomatoes self-pollinating? Are you having a bee shortage?

Thanks, Rich

Hybrids are supposed to. But the fact is, according to most experts, they really don't. They can be hand-pollinated but they really need bees that do a lot of vibrating, if you aren't going to get into hand-pollination. Hothouse gardners use bumblebees.

If there were lots of blossoms but no fruit, then it's pollination problem. More common for the home gardener is exceesive early fertilizing, which prevents the formation of blossoms.

That's the key to figuring out what happened when you don't get tomatoes. Did you have blossoms but no tomatoes? Then you have a pollination problem. You might have to hand-pollinate. Did you have healthy plants with lots of leaves but few blossoms? Then you fertilized too early.

Those are the most common reasons for tomato failures.

Similar experience: Planted three Better Boys which usually give several dozen fruit--or more--- each. Also a couple of odd varieties. I may have gotten two dozen total, and a lot of them were small. Very disappointing because we prepared raised beds a little more than a foot deep, and filled them with a mixture of topsoil, humus, perlite, and all the other good stuff; none of our own soil for these beds.

I looked up some problems that can occur, and one strikes home: when temperatures are too high, one result can be less fruit setting. Most of our season has had a low of mid-70s and highs in the 90s.

I hope you and I both do better next year.

-- Best -- Terry