How to Encourage Mega Blooms for Competition Tomatoes

[MissS]

Dale Thurber from Delectation of Tomatoes came out with this article on promoting mega blooms on your tomatoes. Mega blooms produce the competition sized tomatoes. While they are quite ugly and not so great for the home table they are what competitors dream of.

https://delectationoftomatoes.wordpress ... ato-vines/

[MissS]

I'm not sure that I agree with this article. He says that high temps promote mega blossoms for him. Here in Wisconsin I never get a mega bloom in mid summer when temps are in the 90's I only get them in the cold cool weather of spring. So I am wondering if it is just the early blossoms that offer us mega blooms regardless of the temperatures. This is when the plants are young and in their first growth spurt. Dale is in a very different climate than I am but both of us are getting mega blooms early on. What is your experience with mega blooms?

[slugworth]

Heat puts the kibosh to them and big tomatoes for me.
Getting a lot of deformed tomatoes that started off promising.

[Barb_FL]

My season starts off hot, then 5-6 months of nice temperatures, then hot until it's over. I only have the fused/megablooms when the plants are young.

[mama_lor]

I skipped around that article, but can't find what the secret is?

In any case, the plants must have a lot of vegetative growth, and full of growth hormones, to produce megablooms, which is why typically the young plants are more prone to it, not sure temperature has necessarily a big role here unless it's detrimental to growth.