Sunmaster Tomatoes

Some of our Sunmaster tomatoes are decent sized now. I wish they would hurry up and ripen! This is the only plant of the three holdovers from the Spring that I've been impressed with. The other two, a Black Prince and Lemon Boy, have done very poorly in the Fall. We've harvested one small tomato from the Black Prince, while the Lemon Boy hasn't even hinted at producing anything.

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November Tomatoes

I thought I'd start off November with a few pictures of what our tomato plants are producing. The Sunmaster that survived the Summer is doing the best by far. It has about 15 or so tomatoes growing and more starting. We're also getting tomatoes on the two Early Girl plants and the Hawaiian Tropic. The Black Prince, Black Krim, Ace 55, German Queen, and San Marzano all have blooms, but no tomatoes yet.

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Sunmaster

more Sunmaster

Hawaiian Tropic

Early Girl

Little Tomatoes

Since the temperature has cooled off a bit, our Early Girl, Sunmaster, and Hawaiian Tropic plants have started putting on tomatoes. All of them are still very small, but they are rapidly growing larger.

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Early Girl

Sunmaster

Hawaiin Tropic

Vegetable Update

Just a late Summer/early Fall update today on our various container-grown vegetables. The strongest producer at present in the okra. The four original plants are going strong and still putting out a decent number of pods. Over the last week, the two plants that I started later in the Summer have also started bearing. The daily high temperatures are still a bit hot for the tomatoes, but I have one Black Prince on the vine and just picked two off of the Sunmaster plant. We're getting lots of blooms but most are still drying out and dropping. Some of the plants are also looking a bit stressed and wilted on their lower parts. I'm hoping that when the highs fall into the mid to lower 90s (33 to 34 c) the tomatoes will pick up. The hanging basket cucumber plant is doing well. It now has a second cucumber growing. As for peppers, it seems that we are going to have several red bell peppers and the Habanero and Tabasco have put on lots and lots of blooms this past week.

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Cucumber #2

First Black Prince tomato of the Fall

Lots of blooms but no tomatoes on this Hawaiian Tropic plant

I Think I Killed a Tomato Plant

I decided a few days ago that something had to be done about the Sunmaster tomato plant that I had planted back in June. The plant had just refused to thrive in its five gallon container. About half of its leaves were always brown and its main stem never grew beyond the thickness of a pencil. It had put on three tomatoes at one point, but they remained small and ultimately rotted rather than ripened. So I removed the plant from its pot, dug a nice hole in my very small in-ground plot (see World's Smallest Vegetable Bed) and replanted it. As you can see by the results, it wasn't one of my better ideas.

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First Fall Tomatoes

Ok, I know we're still facing about a month of 100 degree (38 c) weather here and I'm sort of jumping the gun on the Fall thing. But it has cooled off just a bit, and our oldest Sunmaster plant has started to put on tomatoes. As these are our first tomatoes in quite a while, I am going to consider them the beginning of our Fall crop. Hope there's lots more to come!

Revenge of the Tomato!

Several weeks ago, hornworms attacked our tomato plants while we were out of town. The creatures completely stripped our Lemon Boy and Black Prince plants, while doing major damage to the Better Boy and Sunmaster. Although I replaced the Better Boy, I decided to follow a different strategy with the others.

Since I didn't have any seedlings ready to replace the other damaged plants with, I decided to try and save them. So I continued watering the poor leafless things and pruned back all of their old branches, leaving only the main stems. Within a few days, shoots of new leaves began appearing from the bottom of the plants and from the junctions of the old branches and the main stem. Instead of pinching off these "suckers" as guides advise when doing regular pruning, I figured I'd let them grow. The results have been pretty good, as the plants' have recovered quite a bit of foliage and even put on a few blooms. I suppose you could call it their revenge against the hornworms.

Sunmaster

Lemon Boy

Black Prince

Hot Weather Tomatoes

Since the temperature has settled in the 100+ degree range our tomato output has fallen drastically. Most blooms just won't set fruit at these temps. Yet, as an exception to the rule, our Sunmaster and Heatwave plants still have a few tomatoes on them. Two have ripened on Heatwave A (I'm using the A and B designations whenever we have two plants of the same variety) in the last week, and it still has three growing on the vine. Sunmaster B--a plant that we put out in June--has put on a couple of tomatoes as well. That's not many tomatoes, but I'm impressed with any production in this heat.

Heatwave

Sunmaster

Fall Tomato Crop

Just an update on my plans for a Fall tomato harvest. As you may have read on an earlier post, a recent hornworm attack destroyed several of our plants (see: Return of the Hornworm). Our very productive Black Prince and Lemon Boy plants were, unfortunately, among the fatalities. While this ticked me off severely at the time, all is not lost on the tomato-growing front. The two Heatwave and two Sunmaster plants are still growing and doing very well, while the Better Boy limps along in its normal, unproductive manner.

Along with these established plants, I'll soon be transplanting several seedlings in hopes of a Fall crop. For this purpose, I have Black Prince, German Queen, Ace 55, and Lemon Boy plants all starting under the grow lamp. I've grown all of these from seeds, with the exception of the Lemon Boy which is a bit of an experiment. But that's a topic for another day.

Fall tomato plants

Tomato Shake Up

Better Boy tomatoes certainly haven't turned out better in our container garden this year. Back in February and March I started several Better Boys from seeds, nurtured the three strongest seedlings into to healthy young plants, and set them out in mid-March and April. All looked great for a while, as they grew rapidly for the first few weeks. Then, two of the plants just stopped growing at about two feet while the third sprouted up to about five feet. Soon after their growth slowed, the leaves of the two stunted plants became a mottled yellow and green. Following this unsightly occurrence, their blooms began drying up and falling off. Now, leaves on the five foot plant have also started to yellow, while its blooms are also showing signs of drying out. So far it has produced only three small green tomatoes.

I'm assuming that some sort of early blight infected the plants or that they just couldn't overcome a short stretch of 105 degree weather we had in mid-May.

So, a couple of days ago I decided to pull the plug on the smallest Better Boys, replacing one with a Heatwave and the other with a Sunmaster. While it may be too late for these to produce in the Summer, the mature plants will hopefully provide a good crop in the fall. I'm still undecided on whether to replace the taller plant immediately or leave it a while in hopes that its three tomatoes ripen.