2020 Tomato Grow List
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
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hazelinok
4 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
4 years agoRelated Discussions
2012 Tomato Grow List
Comments (94)Pam, "My" recipe is just my adaptation of Al's 5-1-1 mix from the Container Forum. I've tried to tailor it to the kind of conditions I have here, as well as to my wish to largely avoid peat as much as possible. I even vary what I put in it and in what proportions depending on whether I'm expecting a year that is wet, dry or average. For example, if we were expecting an El Nino spring with heavy rainfall, I'd mix it so it drains better but if I was expecting a drier year, I'd add coir to help it hold moisture. When it is very hot and dry here, even 20-gallon and larger containers often need to be watered twice or three times daily in hot weather so my container plants suffer in a dry year if the mix drains too quickly. As far as the ProMix, that's a lot of peat. If I was going to grow regular plants in it, I'd add pine bark fines for sure. If I was growing acid-lovers like blueberries or azaleas, I'd still add pine fines, but less of them. I can only dream of growing anything here that likes acidity because my soil and water both test at about 8.2 to 8.3. I can modity the soil and lower its pH pretty easily but not the water, so I don't grow anything that prefers highly acidic conditions. Peat is so peculiar. When it is wet, it can hold moisture forever, and that's what I don't like about it. And, when peat gets really, really dry it is hard to rewet it. In climates where the weather can swing from dropping several inches of rain in a few hours to virtually no rain at all for weeks or even months, I feel like mixes that have a heavy peat component underperform compared to mixes that have only a moderate amount of peat, or no peat at all. I do agree that pine bark fines improve any mix heavy in peat, and would drastically improved most any mix you can buy. The heavier peat component in starter mixes is necessary for great drainage, but I don't like that heavier percentage of peat for growing plants beyond the starter stage. Pine bark mulch seems controversial in terms of being used in a veggie garden and I suppose it might not be helpful in every situation and every climate. However, I have used it in years when I couldn't find much hay to use as mulch, and I loved it. It looked wonderful, didn't wash away in heavy downpours and didn't cause me any problems. I read a magazine article once that I think was written by a Texas gardener who was coping with high clay content...as in almost pure clay. Defying the conventional wisdom, he routinely rototilled huge amounts of pine fines and pine mulch (the smaller pieces, not the gigantic ones) into his clay and had huge improvement in a pretty fast time frame. He didn't even state whether he added additional nitrogen to compensate for whatever nitrogen is depeleting as the bark decomposes, but he had enormous soil improvement and was very pleased. His article made me smile because I had started adding some pine mulch to my soil about 3 years before and hadn't noticed any problems and also had huge improvement. For me, the amazing thing is how fast the mulch rototilled into soil breaks down. If I rototill it into soil in January or February, it is largely gone by the following winter. Only a few pieces that were larger than average to begin with will remain a year later. I started adding the pine mulch because so much of my compost was disappearing every year (as the old saying goes, "heat eats compost") and it seemed like I just couldn't add enough to the red clay to fix it. And, I should add, that my red clay is flower pot clay---I believe I could wet it down and work with it and make flower pots---so it takes massive amounts of improvement to make it workable. I wouldn't necessarily add pine bark to fairly normal soil. Having never had fairly normal soil, though, I use lots of pine. This year I added vast amounts of pine fines and humus to one 8' x 4' raised bed that had amended clay that just was not well-amended enough for potatoes. I then immediately planted the potatoes. That was probably in late January or very early February. Those potato plants are growing incredibly well and are about to flower. By contrast, the four long rows of potato plants planted at the west end of the main garden are 1/3 their size and a lot way from flowering. Those were planted in an 8" deep trench and I covered the seed potatoes with a couple of inches of soil, and then continued to add soil as they grew until the trenches were filled in. It really isn't even fair to compare the performance of potatoes in a raised bed to those in grade-level beds, but it is such a striking difference that I cannot believe it. I do think heavy, heavy rain that filled those trenches with water for several days likely had a negative impact on the potatoes and slowed them down. Clearly I need to add a gazillion tons of pine bark fines and compost to the west end of the veggie garden before next season. It is a sandier-clayier loam than the rest of the veggie garden, but no matter how much compost I add to it, it still seems like it isn't as improved as the heavier clay. I usually grow either sweet potatoes or potatoes there, but then find the soil rock-hard at digging time. It probably is the least-improved soil in which I grow veggies because it started out in better shape than the clay, so I kind of ignored it and didn't amend it nearly as much. Now that the rest of the soil is so much better than the west end, I need to work on the west end a lot to bring it up to speed. Susan, I'm sorry you couldn't get the soccer goal. That would have been so perfect. I find so many interesting things at garage sales that can be used in the garden. I got a wooden ladder for $3 once, painted it a medium purple, and now grow purple hyacinth beans on it. It is just the coolest-looking thing when you see only hints of the purple ladder peeking out through all that bean foliage and flowers. Mommyrosalyn, You're welcome and be sure to let us know what you end up with and how they do for you. That's how we all learn from one another. I did forget to list one favorite (not hard to do when you have 100 or 200 favorites) that doesn't get a lot of attention but which does produce very well in our climate, and it is one called Fantastic. There's also an improved version of it called Super Fantastic. I actually prefer Fantastic, which I have to raise from seed myself because I usually don't see it in stores, but I see Super Fantastic in stores pretty often. When you are tomato shopping in chain stores or nursery chain stores watch for tomato plants from Chef Jeff. That particular line carries oodles of heirlooms. However, if you can shop at The Tomatoman's Daughter or at any of the festivals where Duck Creek Farms sells heirloom tomato plants (see link to Duck Creek Farms website below---their schedule of farmer's market and festivals is available there), then any variety they sell likely would please you. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Duck Creek Farms...See More2014 Tomato Grow List
Comments (51)Hi Bob, I'll preface my comments by stating we were in drought throughout the spring and summer with very little rainfall at all until June, and even then, there was far too little. So, while our growing conditions here in Oklahoma are always pretty harsh, this year was worse than usual because it was backwards. Instead of having good spring rainfall to get the garden off to an early start and then the usual summer drought, we had drought from Jan-Sept (and the drought still is going strong), and began June with only about 6" of rainfall recorded for the entire year at that point. We got a lot of rain and humidity in June and July, though not nearly enough rain to end the drought. With the weather being so bizarrely dry during our normal wet season, some tomato plants weren't very happy. TexWine (and Dixiewine, and it was my first year with both) germinated a little slowly and grew, as seedlings, very slowly. Because of that, I kept the seedlings in their starter containers longer than all the other varieties I grew, and didn't put them into the ground until late April. Most of the other varieties went into the ground between late March and mid-April. Even then, the Dixiewine and Texwine plants were ridiculously small and were so far behind my other plants that I feared transplanting them into the garden was going to be a waste of time and space. How did it work out? Texwine set fruit earlier than Dixiewine, and set a lot more of it. The first few were quite large, and the later ones got progressively smaller as summer went on, which is typical in our hot growing conditions. Because we had several good days with decent rainfall and cooler than normal temperatures in both June and July, Texwine (and Dixiewine) continued setting fruit well into July. The Texwine fruit had very good flavor. So did Dixiewine, which may have hurt its own cause by setting tons and tons of fruit all at once. Because it had set so very many fruit during a period of severe to extreme drought, the fruit stayed much smaller than I expected. TexWine had significantly fewer fruit but they enlarged to the expected size. Even though Texwine produced less fruit per plant than Dixiewine, it still produced a lot of fruit. I hate to even attempt to form an opinion on varieties that are new to me on the basis of one very odd growing season with weather that is almost totally opposite from what we usually get, but I was pleased enough with how they both performed that I'll plant them again next year. Drought conditions worsened again in August in conjunction with very hot weather at our house, and both plants died back to the ground. I didn't irrigate as much as I usually do in August and probably could have kept them alive if only I'd watered them. A little rain (though not nearly enough) began falling again in September, and both plants have resprouted from the ground but the chances that they'll flower and produce a ripe tomato before the first freeze here (around mid-November) falls somewhere between slim and none. I do think it says something about their resilience that they did regrow from the roots once some rain finally fell. Are you wondering if the flavor is a good as Brandywine? I'd say that, as grown here in the conditions we had, it isn't quite as good, but it is very, very good. Finally, to give you the proper context, I planted two Brandywine Sudduth plants in the ground around the end of March. Normally, I am lucky 4 years out of 5 to get 6 fruit off a Brandywine plant. We just get too hot too early for it most years and the heat and humidity shut down pollination before many fruit can set. In this most bizarre year of years, both my Brandywine Sudduth plants produced dozens and dozens of fruit per plant, with the first ones ripening very early (either very late May or earliest June). They also continued setting fruit as late as mid-July, though production slowed down a lot by early July. This was our best Brandywine year since 2004 (a very wet and humid year that the Brandywine plants loved, likely because the weather also was cooler than usual). I wish I'd had the Texwine and Dixiewine plants at the same size as the Brandywine Sudduth plants and could have put them all in the ground, side by side, at the same time, because that would have been a more fair comparison. My expectations (prior to sowing seed) were that Texwine and Dixiewine likely would outproduce Brandywine (in my garden everything outproduces Brandywine most years) and, instead, the total opposite happened. I don't know if their slow growth as seedlings will be repeated in 2015. I'm hoping it was just a fluke. I grow hundreds of tomato plants from seed every year, and there's not many varieties that ever have been as slow to grow in the seedling stage as Dixiewine and Texwine so I am hoping that this year's extremely slow growth was an anomaly. We had an incredible tomato year here despite terrible drought conditions, and a huge onslaught of grasshoppers, so I cannot complain. Mostly, this was due to the miracle of irrigation. Local gardeners here in our area tended to have either a very bad tomato year (if they were not irrigating in March through May when the rain was almost nonexistent) or an outstanding year (if they irrigated in spring) I'm hoping for more typical weather conditions next year so I can see how Texwine and Dixiewine perform in the type of weather we normally have. Dawn...See More2011 Tomato Grow List
Comments (69)Carol, You're welcome. Gary has a wonderful assortment of plants, and if I lived anywhere near Tulsa, I'd visit the Farmer's Market and other places where he sells plants so often he'd probably think I was stalking him. I've been outside mowing up leaves this morning, collecting them in the grass catcher, and then dumping them into black lawn-and-leaf bags. It takes a lot of lawnmower grasscatcher bags full of mown leaves to fill up one big lawn and leaf bag. I hope to fill up 150 of those bags in the coming weeks so I'll have oodles to dump onto the garden beds. The wind is blowing hard and bringing down lots of leaves this week, so I should get a few bags done this week, but it is still warm enough during the day that I have to watch for snakes. My most recent snake sighting was a little skinny non-venomous snake in the garden on Monday. Even after the first few freezes, the ground is still pretty warm and the snakes come out on warm days. I usually don't see any snakes after December 1st though. My plan is to mow leaves all day, taking periodic rest breaks which double as housework breaks---so I can come inside from mowing leaves, sit down and rest a minute while I drink something cold, and then do laundry or vacuum or whatever before going back outside. I can get a lot done when I alternate back and forth because it keeps me from getting too bored. If I tried to mow leaves all day without a break, I'd get bored and just stop. I noticed a few onions in the garden today. Guess I missed a couple when I harvested, so I'll have to dig in the soil around them and see what I've got. With all the wind blowing and the grasses dormant and dry, I've been somewhat concerned about the prospects of grassfires, but so far it's been pretty quiet with only a couple of them lately. In the meantime, I'm a leaf-mowing maniac....See More2013 Tomato Grow List
Comments (112)Mike, Most beefsteak types are late to set fruit and to mature fruit. Since yours are from volunteer seedlings, you have no idea what is normal for them if you don't remember what variety they are, but it sounds like they are setting fruit late and, thus, it ripens late. Too much horse poop also could mean they are getting too much nitrogen which makes the plants stay vegetative for a long time before they flower and set fruit. If you want fruit earlier, your best bet is to start out with purchased transplants and to choose varieties that mature more quickly than the average beefsteak type. You could plant Early Girl, Bush Early Girl or Better Bush and get fairly early fruit...a couple of months after you put 6-8 week old transplants into the ground. Jetsetter or JetStar would give you fruit a couple of weeks later than those, and most standard hybrids that produce red, roundish tomatoes would give you tomatoes 75-80 days after the transplants are put into the ground. Many beefsteak types, although they produce big, luscious tomatoes, do not produce fruit well in heat and they have DTMs of 80-90 days or more so they always are going to be fairly late. It may just be that in your climate, you still won't get many ripe fruit until fall. It depends on how early you can transplant tomato plants into the ground there. When's your average last freeze date? One problem is that tomato plants mostly stop setting fruit once daytime highs are above 92 and nighttime lows are in the 70s. You have to get your plants into the ground early enough that they set fruit before that happens. They won't start setting many fruit again until the temperatures cool down. That is an issue we face a lot here in OK. Cherry tomatoes or the varieties that produce smallish slicer or salad types like Jaune Flammee' or Fourth of July will set fruit more or less all summer, except in the hottest weather, so they might be a good variety for you. I like Early Girl because not only does she set fruit early, but unlike many other early types that shut down after producing early, Early Girl will go right on setting fruit almost all summer long. Some years it still is setting fruit for me in August when it is ridiculously hot here. Hope this helps, Dawn...See Morejlhart76
4 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
4 years agoslowpoke_gardener
4 years agojlhart76
4 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
4 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
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4 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
4 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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4 years agojlhart76
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4 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
4 years agolast modified: 4 years agochickencoupe
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4 years agoRebecca (7a)
4 years agoRebecca (7a)
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4 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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4 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
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2 months agoKim Reiss
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