So Texans, Where do you Stand on Tomatoes?

[karstopography]

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Tomatoes still producing well here on the gulf coast. Giving away plenty, freezing them, eating as much as we can, Armyworms are taking a healthy share, but yet the tomatoes still pile up on the counter. We’ll see how long it can continue. I’d love to have fresh garden tomatoes here in August, when points well to the north are in their peak season. The tomato plants are looking strong enough at this stage overall to get there.

[karstopography]

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Saving seed from Hoy. Been through a few days of fermentation, washed, now about finished drying.

What chance do these seeds from unbagged blooms actually have to grow out true to type?

[MissS]

@karstopography They have a pretty good chance of growing true to type since the blossoms are self-fertile. It will depend on several things though. If your plants blossoms have an exerted stigma they are more prone to bee/wind pollination. If you have many pollinators in your garden the chances of a cross are higher. If you plant close together the chances are higher. All in all though the majority of your seeds should grow true to type. It is even possible that each locale of one tomato can be pollinated with differing plants.

[karstopography]

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It’s been a good year here. Started getting ripe fruit early in May and it hasn’t stopped. Looks like I’ll have some tomatoes into early August and perhaps later based on what still out there on the plants. Things are most definitely winding down though and I have removed nearly half my plants. Probably need to remove a few more.

The strongest of the survivors are Hoy. That one plant still has five surprisingly good sized fruit on it and they are still getting bigger. The plant looks healthy.

Other honorable mentions are Japanese Black Trifele. It hasn’t quit. Still a lot of 2 ounce fruit on it. Paul Robeson has several fruit and looks good. One carmello has a number of fruit. Kellogg’s Breakfast has a few.

Not sure where I go from here. Do I try to keep the healthiest going into the fall? Still working it out. I’ll let most go into August and see what they look like then. Nothing I really wish to plant just yet anyway.

[MissS]

@karstopography That's a great harvest for anywhere and here this is coming out of SE Texas in the mid-summer! This makes it a huge harvest with great bragging rights. Usually I am hearing that everyone's plants have shut down from the heat by now and people are now starting tomato seeds for their fall crops. You surely have done something right this year to be getting beefsteak types this late in the season. Well done!

[karstopography]

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@MissS if I have any take aways from this season, I do, the first one might be I’m lucky on my garden site as there is some lightly filtered by the tree canopy light and that attribute really helps my tomatoes not burn up in the relentless southern sun. Maybe I’m getting less hours of direct sun than the books are recommending, but I do believe I get some beneficial reflected light off the bright white rocks of the drive way located only a few feet away from the plants.

Second take away is I’m learning to prune less. Less is more, in my plot. Less pruning means more flowers, more flowers means more potential fruit. The deal is, this I have also come to believe or learn, is that tomatoes can set fruit in temperatures maybe higher than I thought they could, but they don’t do it all that well and so by having multiple stems by the point of the season when it’s getting really warm means I’ll get at least a few fruit rather than one or two if I pruned to one or two stems. Diseases haven’t been the issue or challenges, it’s setting fruit once it gets really hot. I need multiple stems with multiple flower trusses and a few end up prevailing with a few tomatoes. Several stems, several trusses, one, two fruit on each, it adds up. Plus, all that foliage helps shade the fruit from sunscald and provides energy.

Fertilizer, do that more frequently, but dilute it. This I believe helps here.

Battle the squirrels for all I’m worth. They cannot be allowed to get the upper hand.

Getting nearly a pound beefsteak like the Hoy in the photo at the end of July certainly doesn’t make me sad.

[karstopography]

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I ripped out all but two of my spring tomato plants as they looked so ugly, but left in a big beef and a Beefmaster. Beefmaster is still in business it seems. Big beef is blooming. Looking at a few garden tomatoes for the fall.

[PlainJane]

I’ve tried and tried and just can’t seem to get a fall tomato crop here.
Kudos @karstopography.

[karstopography]

@PlainJane I planted a number of seeds for new fall tomatoes, but instead of messing with the grow lights indoors like I do in winter for the spring crop, I tried to do the sets outside in filtered light. Big fail on those, something, some malady or disease, took them all out.

I had a bunch of other spring tomato plants still up and growing, but they got twisted and folded over on themselves, sprawling into other areas, some had spider mites pretty bad, I said the heck with it, take them out. Turns out they had a number of cherry tomatoes on them, maybe I should have stuck with it.

The two I left in were in an isolated bed and seemed healthy enough.

I’ve tried for fall tomatoes in the past. In innercity Houston, they did great and I had tomatoes all winter. It’s quite a bit warmer and much more protected from frosts there, though. Here, with new plants for fall, I seem to have less success with getting them up and growing and thriving. The sets seem to be somewhat stunted and fail to really grow well. But, since these plants were from the spring they are already established and big, they are now flowering again and look alright, if not a bit out of control. I’ve never tried carrying spring plants over to the fall so this is uncharted territory.

[karstopography]

Fall is sort of a mirror image of spring here or spring in reverse. Spring goes from being a little too cold early on to goldilocks weather to gradually too warm. Fall is just the reverse of spring here, for the most part. A little too warm in September to really good October into November to a little too cold in December. The best weather for tomatoes here will likely be from October until mid November and maybe into mid or late December if we get lucky, at some point it might freeze and it’s game over. I’m twelve miles from the Gulf of Mexico and once the wind comes off the water, it is relatively warm again. As long as the cold fronts aren’t too Arctic in nature, things should do well. Our freezes in recent years have been mostly later in winter with November and December remaining frost free. Our average first frost date is mid December, but some years we really don’t get a frost to speak of. But, it could freeze in November.

[worth1]

One year I had a volunteer Orange Russian grow all winter long in a pile of leaves on top of concrete.
Got tomatoes from it in the spring.
The seeds came from a tomato that was bird pecked i tossed down the driveway into the composting leaf pile.

[MissS]

One year I had a volunteer Orange Russian grow all winter long in a pile of leaves on top of concrete.
Got tomatoes from it in the spring.
The seeds came from a tomato that was bird pecked i tossed down the driveway into the composting leaf pile.

It's name was Fred was it not?

[worth1]

One year I had a volunteer Orange Russian grow all winter long in a pile of leaves on top of concrete.
Got tomatoes from it in the spring.
The seeds came from a tomato that was bird pecked i tossed down the driveway into the composting leaf pile.

It's name was Fred was it not?

No Fred was the one I raised from seed.
He got root rot and I had to put him in intensive care.
He came out of it and survived.

[Wildcat82]

Temperatures here have been in the low to mid 90's and are projected to stay there for the next 2 weeks although nighttime temperatures are dipping into the high 60's. The night temperatures are giving a huge boost to my tomatoes. My 5 foot tall June plants are now setting. Here's my Fall scorecard.

- The 3 Juliet plants are absolutely loaded with a hundred tomatoes on each plant. I've picked 2 dozen so far. IMHO Juliet is the best "insurance" tomato for Texas growing conditions.
- Both Porters have been setting fine though they are a couple weeks away from ripening.
- One of my Abu Rawan plants is setting nicely now though the other 2 Abu Rawan are not. I think my seed might have been mislabeled since these plants are my tallest of all plants at least 6 foot fall. Abu Rawan is supposed to be a short determinate plant
- My Chadwick cherry I planted in May is a very short squatty bush with a lot of fruit set but has a lot of dry leaves.
- My August planted Chadwick, Supersweet 100, and Rose Quartz Multiflora, and Better Boy are still pretty small but starting to set.
I really wish my Black Cherry and Sun Gold plants hadn't been killed by mites.

Both King Arthur bell peppers planted in August are loaded. Meanwhile, the 6 Flaming Flare jalapeno types from spring are now spitting out a bunch of stubby 1-2 inch peppers.

All in all, it's looking like a pretty good Fall crop.

[karstopography]

A friend here has Juliet and it is loaded with fruit. He has been traveling some and neglected watering for long periods, yet his tomatoes set out in the spring in full sun look really good, all things considered. He did hugelkultur beds so that must be the reason the tomatoes look as good as the do in spite of the neglect. He has other cherry types that have abundant fruit. I don’t think his juliet has stopped production all summer. He did set his plants out very late in the spring.

I picked one 12 ounce beefmaster that was just breaking color a day ago. There’s three or four more small growing tomatoes on the plant. I saw one small growing tomato on my remaining big beef plant. That plant is being attacked by mites, unfortunately. The Beefmaster is under attack by some leaf eating caterpillars, but not hornworms. I don’t plan on doing anything to stop the attacks.

[Wildcat82]

A friend here has Juliet and it is loaded with fruit. He has been traveling some and neglected watering for long periods, yet his tomatoes set out in the spring in full sun look really good, all things considered. He did hugelkultur beds so that must be the reason the tomatoes look as good as the do in spite of the neglect. He has other cherry types that have abundant fruit. I don’t think his juliet has stopped production all summer. He did set his plants out very late in the spring.

I picked one 12 ounce beefmaster that was just breaking color a day ago. There’s three or four more small growing tomatoes on the plant. I saw one small growing tomato on my remaining big beef plant. That plant is being attacked by mites, unfortunately. The Beefmaster is under attack by some leaf eating caterpillars, but not hornworms. I don’t plan on doing anything to stop the attacks.

Once Juliet gets cranked up, you can easily get 1/2 - 3/4 gallon tomatoes per week from each plant. It's the highest yielding plant I've ever seen, even better than Big Beef. And it is the only tomato I've seen to keep producing during the July/August/September period when absolutely nothing else here will set.

FYI - Spider mites were in the process of destroying my tomatoes (like every year) til I sprayed with Ivermectin. At a rate of 1 gram/gallon, I got a 100% wipeout kill with no sign of mites for 3 weeks afterwards. Amazing! A 6 gram tube of Apple flavored Ivermectin cost $6 at Tractor Supply.

[Wildcat82]

Virtually all the tomatoes on my 2 Porters and 1 Abu Rawan had cabbage worms and/or BER. I sprayed with Sevin 10 days ago and that stopped the cabbage worms. I also sprayed with Bonide Rot Stop but it didn't help with BER at all. I've managed to pick about five 1-2 oz tomatoes from these 3 plants in addition to 50 I've had to toss. It's too bad because I like their flavor. Meanwhile my 3 Juliet aren't fazed with either cabbage worms or BER. Maybe the tougher skins help?

The 3 Supersweet 100's I planted 1 August haven't yielded anything yet. I'm not sure why these plants are so lethargic. My goal was to have the Sweet 100's start producing on 1 Oct since they are a 60 day tomato. Two of the plants are only 2 foot tall with a bare handful of green fruit while the other plant is over 4 feet tall, loaded with flowers, and not one single green fruit. I got mad the other day and dumped a triple serving of fertilizer on them. I figure they will either start to produced or die trying. The 2 Better Boys have been lethargic too - 2 foot tall plants with 3-4 tiny green tomatoes.

[karstopography]

I have roughly twenty tomatoes of various sizes on my two remaining plants. Biggest might be 7-8 ounces, but likely still growing. There’s tons of blooms, though, so I’ll likely have more tomatoes if they set before the upcoming chill. The relative cold is supposed to be done by Friday and it’s back to better tomato weather.

Overall, the plants look great all things considered. I’m shocked that they came through the summer and bounced back so well and made a decent amount of fruit.

That’s the way to go I decided, select the best of the set out in Spring plants and keep them going until the fall.

As it is, I’ve had fresh tomatoes from the garden since early in May. September was a tiny trickle, October so far about the same. November looks pretty good. Can I get some in December? Hope to.

[Wildcat82]

As it is, I’ve had fresh tomatoes from the garden since early in May. September was a tiny trickle, October so far about the same. November looks pretty good. Can I get some in December? Hope to.

That's awesome you get 6-7 months of production. That's my goal too. I get zero production due to the heat from 1 July- 1 October so I'm going to put up some shade cloth next year. One of my projects this winter/spring is to place some T-posts around my beds to hang the shade cloth. Since I can't drive in a post, I'll have to use a pickaxe to chip down a couple feet them set the posts in quick dry cement. Sounds like a pain but hopefully it will be worth it.

[karstopography]

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Came back from a nine day out of town trip to some ripening tomatoes. Brought them in to finish up the process as colder weather has arrived. Big beef and Beefmaster, the flatter are the latter.