Be calm they will taste alot better if you wait.
Normally i like to leave as much foliage for better protection against sun scald.

Mom, i have a husky as well that was supposed to be a cherry but is obviously not. Im chomping at the bit waiting for that first big tomato to start turning pink........ Some people trim a lot, some dont. Ive done it both ways and i prefer not to prune at all. The shoots in between stems are called suckers. I leave them all. They will produce more fruit.

Emma

You can pick them now and hope beyond hope they will 1) eventually turn color, or 2) cook up some fried green tomatos. Another option is to wait until they begin to "blush", when they first develop a slight orange or pink coloration. I notice mine when they start to lose the green and begin to get a lot paler, or whitish in color. Some people say the flavor is not the same when you don't let them ripen on the vine. Different schools of thought. It's up to you. But,it seems like we all go through this "panic" phase each year, when we believe they will never turn color. This info does not apply to the "Green when ripe" tomatos. Can't bring myself to grow those yet. There is something that makes it feel like it's sacrilegious to grow a tomato that will never be anything but.......green.

Susan

I trim my cage indeterminate caged plants up from the bottom for a few inches. This provides better air flow and also keeps dirt from splashing on them if a person doesn't mulch.How much depends on the size of the plant when I put them in the ground. This is in addition to what I trim off because they will be buried. Then if I have time in mid to late season when the plants get huge and grow together I may trim a few more lower branches off to help with air flow. Otherwise I don't trim any. I leave suckers and all.
Now Susan some GWR tomatoes are ok. LOL. I know what you mean though. I don't mind the GWR but have never forced myself to grow a white one although I have been sent seeds for them.

Bre as to your other question is it takes time and patience. I have did some record keeping in the past. It can take longer on a first fruit than later fruit especially those set in late summer and early fall. In my opinion this is due to the fact the plants are already mature later in fall. And also mother nature has a way of trying to mature her seeds before a frost. I have observed it with many different plants. Look at a goat head. In the summer they grow a big vine. In the fall if one germinates it will set one goathead and it will mature before frost. There is nothing I would recommend to do besides just wait. I've had one Top Gun fruit on for six weeks. It was set when the plant was young. I probably should of pinched it off. The plant just stood still when I first transplanted it. Now it is growing some. Sure it put down a root system. I expect it to mature smaller than normal in another 10-14 days. And that is just from my past experience. Jay

I do not like picking tomatoes green and won't do it at all except when frost is gonna kill them in the fall. Remember that grocery store tomatoes are picked green and then gassed to redden them up. That is why their texture and flavor are so poor. Why would you risk doing that to your tomatoes? Patience, Bre, patience. Now, once they reach the breaker stage, you can pick them and let them ripen indoors. In fact, they'll ripen faster indoors than out because they will be less stressed, but you have to wait for them to reach the breaker stage.

We all know (and guess how we learned this) that, just as a watched pot never boils, well....a watched tomato won't change colors and ripen. So, try to ignore them and see what happens. Don't water them unless they are wilting. Don't feed them. Don't talk to them, give them bouquets of exotic hothouse flowers or buy them expensive chocolate. Don't check the fruit 15 times a day to see if it has started to break color. It won't help. They aren't going to change color until they are good and ready, which may be a month later than you think they should be breaking color and ripening. Bribing them doesn't speed up the process and neither does threatening them. What works? Being patient and letting nature take its course.

Click on the link below to watch as a truss of tomatoes grows and ripens. Look at how many days it takes! This is why patience is required.

With big ol' plants, I have them confined in big 'ol homemade cages. I hope you aren't using the relatively wimpy storebought cages because they are too small for most indeterminate tomato varieties in our climate where the high heat and plentiful spring rainfall tend to produce very large plants. Most of my cages are either 6 or 8' tall. When a plant grows out of the top of an 8' tall cage, I just let it cascade back down to the ground.

I don't remove suckers, but do remove lower foliage for better air flow exactly as Jay describes. Even though I mulch, I find the plants stay healthier in the summer if I remove the lower foliage as it ages. I don't do it until the plants are a pretty decent size.

Remember that the plant leaves conduct photosynthesis and it is the photosynthesis that gives the plants the energy they need to grow and set fruit. Also, our intense sunlight here will sunburn/sunscald fruit that doesn't have good leaf coverage to shelter it from a full day of intense sunlight, so be really careful about removing any foliage.

In some parts of the country, people remove suckers and also prune their plants a lot, but it tends to be in parts of the country with summer weather that is much less intense that what we have here.

The only "good" reason to remove suckers is to produce larger tomatoes if you are growing for size. I don't grow for size. I want as many tomatoes as possible and don't care if they are big, medium or small.

If I were trying to grow a really big tomato for a Giant Tomato contest or to enter in the county fair or whatever, I'd likely prune, but also would be pinching off blooms or removing smaller tomatoes so the energy would go into the giant tomato. That's a whole specialty area there, and Marvin Meisner has written the book on how to grow giant tomatoes.

With the exception of Green-When-Ripe tomatoes, there's not a good reason to harvest fruit green, unless you want to make green tomato cake or can some chow chow or something. I am not a huge fan of GWR types. It just seems unnatural to eat green tomatoes. My big problem is that I grow so many types and I usually fill up a 5-gallon bucket as I walk down the rows harvesting. When I empty out that bucket at the house, I'll look at a green tomato and wonder if it is a GWR type or if it merely fell off a plant when I picked a ripe fruit beside it. I like the flavor of a few GWR types (Aunt Ruby's German Green, Lime Green Salad and Cherokee Green) but rarely grow them.

The only white one I can remember growing, Jay, is Snow White and Super Snow White, but they turn a yellowish-ivory when ripe and to me that makes them yellows and not whites. I haven't grown them in a few years now because they are disease magnets.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Timeline of a Tomato Truss

When I first came to this country and heard people say that the first tomatos got ripe by 4th of July, I was delighted. In the Puget Sound area where I grew up, tomatos first ripened in August. So yes, patience. It's only June, And June following a very cool spring with several late frosts. Last year I got the first ripe tomato, from a plant seeded in the greenhouse in Jan and planted in the garden in midMarch, in late May. That's the earliest ever for me. This year despite the late spring, I've already harvested an Early Girl, from a plant I bought in March and held in the greenhouse til mid April, and a Sungold from a plant I seeded in Jan.

Like Dawn I cage tomatos in CRW cagess set 6" off the ground, trim a few leaves off the bottom as they grow, let them cascade back over the top and seldom pick green tomatos--before frost and occasionally to make fried green tomatos for my folks.

Thanks everyone! I will just leave them and wait for them to turn then..I was also kind of making sure I didn't screw something up for some reason!

Susan- My husband said he was going to go pick them and make fried green tomatoes, and I told him if he did he was a dead man..I didn't work that hard to have my 1st tomato of the year to be green and fried. Nope, I plan on eating more like an apple! LOL And no, I will never grow a GWR tomato. I'm with you, there is something wrong with that!

Based on everyone's advice weather or not to trim, I will stop plucking the suckers, but I might try to thin out the bottom a bit.

Jay- I had asked previously about pinching off the early blooms, and it was decided I should just let them go to fruit. So here we are, I am waiting, and my plants are taking their sweet time.

Dawn- are you my neighbor? Have a magic crystal ball? How did you know I was stalking my tomato plants, telling them sweet nothings, bring them marigolds and sunflowers(again, bc something ate the others?)

I shamefully admit I am using store bought cages this year..We ran out of wire to make the cages, and the 50$ for another roll wasn't left in my garden budget. The ones I bought are 54 inches tall.

So I will just keep repeating Mulberryknob's saying in my head over and over, the 4th of July...its just really hard when they are out there taunting me, look at my size, I am going to be sooo juicy and sweet!

Thanks again everyone! I will stay away from the garden unless I have to be out there and maybe I will see better results.

Bre I used to pinch off fruit and blooms on plants when I set them out and any new blooms for the 1st 7-10 days. After about the 2nd year of the drought and the issues with setting fruit I leave all fruit set and blooms. I relate a plant bearing fruit while small and still growing to a young heifer having a calf when very young. It takes her longer to mature and reach mature size. The same can be said about a plant. At that stage it usually doesn't have the root system to support growing at a normal rate and also to grow fruit. It stretches the available resource. In the end though I get a tomato that I might never get with the drought and heat issues we continue to have. I was a a nursery a week ago Saturday. They had the Super Mato grafted plants on sale. They were way off. I don't think they sold many and guess were trying to salvage a little. They were in nice sized pots but many were gangly and should of been set out at least a month ago. I found one that was the best one of the varieties I didn't have any of. So it got to ride home with me. It was a little leggy and also had several blooms. Being in the greenhouse I knew it wasn't hardened off properly but I really had no way to support the plant without putting it in the ground. It has sun and wind burned a little. I noticed yesterday one of those blooms has set fruit. The issue with grafted plants is you bury them like you would a normal leggy plant because the graft has to stay above ground. I figured the root ball would be at least partially rootbound. It wasn't. The roots looked good although not near the root growth I expected and want. I hope it develops some fast as it is going to need a better root system to properly support the plant and grow the fruit. I purchased a few more nice pepper plants today in Amarillo while I was there seeing the surgeon. I will let them harden for a few days before setting them out although it will be hard to keep them wet enough in the heat we will have this week. The plants that were soaking wet this morning were limp and hurting tonight when I got home. Jay

Jay,

Okay, that is twice you've mentioned seeing a surgeon. Are you trying to tell us something? (You don't have to answer this question if you don't want to, you know.)

I look forward to seeing how your MIghty Mato does. I heard they would be in stores this year, but never saw any of them.

I saw that your county was part of the Red Flag Fire Warning in KS today so knew that it was likely the heat and wind were going to be beating up on your plants.

Dawn

Jay- What part of southwest Kansas are you in? I grew up a little bit in Wichita, but call Winfield my hometown. Then after my husband discharged from the Army, we moved to Wichita, and lived there for 6 years. My dad lives in Cheney, and my mom and her family all live in Southeast Kansas.

I hate seeing anyone in fire dangers. Hopefully it won't happen this year? At least we can hope. It seems like the fires out there last year were just awful. Some of the worse I remember.

Jay's area in SW KS has another Red Flag Fire Warning for today. Expected high temperatures in warning area: 100-110 degrees, with relative humidity values expected to bottom out around 7% in some areas (though maybe not in all that area). The Exceptional Drought that they've been in for years now has left them so dry that I expect they will have lots of Red Flag Fire Warning Days this summer and probably far too many fires as well. When you add the winds to the heat and low humidity, fires are almost inevitable.

The fact that Jay has such a great garden in such tough conditions is incredibly remarkable!

Mom, a week of so ago my wife came home from grocery shopping and had some beautiful green tomatoes. I ask her "what are doing buying green tomatoes"? She told me that she was hungry for fried green tomatoes and figured she would live longer if she bought them rather than picking the ones from the garden. She may have been correct.

Larry

Dawn as the surgeon says it is a "fairly minor procedure." At least from his perspective. From mine anytime they put me to sleep and they have a knife in their hand it is major. Like I've told some I hit 60 and it is like an older vehicle it is time for some repairs. LOL. My right knee locked up in Jan and basically stayed that way for 6 weeks. I had an old injury to this knee that is at least part of the problem stems from. I was told when it happened that someday it would need to be addressed. I said that as soon as I lost 36 pounds I would go see the specialist. Him and his ex partner did my shoulder and treated my nephews knees when they were playing sports. So I trust him. Anyway basically he is going in to clean things up. It really limited what I got done till just recently.
In the last 4 days I have traveled from Dodge City to Amarillo. Some areas have received nice rains. But there are several areas that never received enough to even settle the dirt. Yesterday I would see bar ditches full and 5-10 miles down the road would be blowing dirt that limited visability. I'm thankful for every drop. Yesterday was 104 with high winds. They are saying 106 today with high winds and then at least a few degrees drop for the next several days.
Dawn the wind and high heat yesterday sure turned some of the leaves on the grafted plant crispy. And the tips of a few I moved directly out of the lean to even though they had been out a few days. I moved the others in the lean to I plan on transplanting to the hot frame and will leave them there a few more days before transplanting them. I bought some peppers yesterday and will do the same with them. This is a bad time to be transplanting but feel I need to get them in ASAP. When transplanting some of the peppers Sunday evening I found that in the areas that had 3" of mulch the 1.20 " of moisture only went down 5-6 inches. I gave that row a 2 hours soak with the drip tape. It looked fine yesterday morning. Jay

Dawn- Kansas is a different beast. Everything there is nice and flat, and the winds are always raging. Its funny, bc the song is Oklahoma, where the winds come sweeping down the plains, but the winds here are nothing like in Kansas.

I really hate seeing the plains destroyed by fires, any place for that matter. I know ultimately its good for the eco-system, that's how it rejuvenates, but it seems like the past 2 years things have just been terrible. Jay might be able to correct my memory on this, but it seems last year or the year before, I was watching the news and there was either some kind of wreck, or small plane crash, something that started a wildfire, in west/southwest Kansas that sparked a terrible bought of fires.

In 2011 the news men kept saying that it was the hottest driest year on record since the dust bowl, over 50+ days of 100+ heat. And we lived in an old house with crappy insulation, and a near broken ac unit. Come time to cook dinner it was 80+ degrees in that house, but we lived(that was the last year we tried to grow tomatoes). Just like those who lived in the dust bowl, they have seen this circle of life before, hot, dry, windy, economy in the dumps. We can only hope it comes back around now, like it did then.

And that was one of the things that cracked me up when we moved here is everyone was warning me about the weather, how horrible and hot the summer before was, so I compared this part of OK's 2011 summer to Wichita's and Wichita was worse.

I can't believe the temperatures already. Not that they should surprise me, but man. It was 94 here yesterday and all I could do was laugh and shake my head thinking, I thought they said this was going to be a cooler then average June.

I am not in the least surprised to hear Jay has a great garden given the conditions. I have learned between living here, and knowing there that there is one thing about these states and the people in it, they are strong willed and can handle anything.

Look at me rambling on like an old bitty at the hair dresser. If you could see how pink my cheeks are..

Larry- that's a smart woman right there! I haven't seen any green ones in the store, I will have to keep my eyes open.

MOS, I am from SE Kansas which is nothing like Western Kansas. When I saw Western Kansas for the first time, I was stunned! How could people live where there are no trees? I don't envy anyone living there, but I suppose one adapts to the environment. I certainly have a lot of respect for those who garden there, cuz I figure if you can garden there, you can garden anywhere on this earth!

Susan

Everyone who gardens faces challenges. They are different from one geographic area to the next and one garden to the next. With that being said an horticulturilist for K-State and the extension service once said the SW corner I live can be as difficult as anywhere in the US to garden in. I feel it is the culimination of issues that many times ends up causing enough stress that a plant falters and dies. If you just had the heat, or the wind, or the wide temperature swings, or the lack or rain you could adapt your management practices to account for the issue and be ok. But the combination of 3 or 4 issues many times is too much. And that is what we have had the last 3-4 years. I wasn't going to plant any sprawlers this year but after the last week think I'll drop a few in. Many times they will perform much better in this type of weather than a caged plant. For one the blooms aren't as exposed to the wind and heat and they tend to set better.
I'm not sure whether I'm strong willed or just hard headed. LOL.Like any farmer of livestock owner you have to be an eternal optimist. I always think next year will be the year I have the bountiful harvest. This year I haven't touched the main garden with a tiller. The only time I've used a tiller all year was to work manure compost into the area where I installed the raised bed. Jay

Larry, Your wife is very well-trained. We tend to treat fried green tomatoes as an end-of-the-season thing when we have to harvest everything on the last day before a killing frost is expected. Some of the green tomatoes are far enough along they eventually will ripen, but others won't. We'll use those for fried green tomatoes or will give bags and bags of greenies to a friend in Texas who will eat some of them as fried green tomatoes but also will make a lot of chow chow from them. Often the end of our tomato season occurs a little while before his annual family reunion, so he gets to treat the whole extended family to fried green tomatoes, which they really enjoy.

Jay, I hope the knee surgery goes well. It is amazing what a difference it can make. My friend, Fred, here has had at least 2 knee replacements (one on each leg) and (and maybe hip replacement surgery...my memory is blurring) and back surgery, right after I first met him, and he still is ranching full-time and gardening full-time at the young age of 90 years and about 9 months of age. I think he would have kept on ranching and gardening anyway, but with the surgeries, he can do it with a lot less pain. There's nothing wrong with letting medical science fix a few things that Mother Nature has let go awry. Fred still works harder than anyone else I know and he is the youngest 90 year old person I've ever known.

Having a surgeon you trust is so important. The surgeon who did my cancer surgeries (3 iof them in a 6 or 7-week period) had performed surgery that had saved my dad's life about 15 years earlier, so I had a very high degree of trust in him, which made facing those surgeries a lot easier.

I was afraid your leaves might get roasted and toasted with the same conditions that led to the issuance of the Red Flag Fire Warning. That kind of wind and heat combined is just brutal. I hope the plants bounce back well from the damage. It looks like summertime has arrived, and it arrived much too close to the end of freezing cold temperatures since they hung on almost forever.

I want to plant more flowers, but the heat is making that harder than it otherwise would be. Maybe it is time to slow down and just focus on the harvesting part of it all. I just about worked myself to death last summer and promised myself an easier summer this year, so am trying to slow down, relax a bit more and not work so hard.

Our soil is currently holding moisture well, but then most of this year's rainfall has fallen in the last 4 or 5 weeks, so the soil is super-saturated. I hope the moisture lasts longer in the soil than I think it will. You know how clay is....it stays wet, wet, wet, wet, wet forever and then, mysteriously, one day it suddenly is dry and as hard as a rock. I want for the wet soil to last forever this summer, but know it won't. So far this June, I've watered less than any other year since 2009, but the month still is young.

Bre, I hate to even think about 2011. It was worse in some parts of the state than others, but it was pretty bad everywhere,especially relative to the type of weather any given area normally had. We were excessively hot beginning in March, so the gardens didn't have much of a chance. By June, the garden was irrelevant anyway because we were fighting wildfires, house fires, barn fires, car fires and RV fires day and night and night and day. I tried to water well when I was home, but I wasn't home much at all. Once the temperatures starting hitting 115-116 degrees, our chickens started dying. There was nothing worse than arriving home from a fire, all hot and tired and almost sick from the heat, and finding dead chickens lying on the ground. It was so upsetting and I think I could have prevented their deaths if I had been home and could see they were getting overheated. After finding chickens dead, I started turning on a fan and a mister for them and leaving them running when I was gone, even if I was likely to be gone for 10 or 12 hours. Luckily, the mister doesn't use a lot of water so running it almost constantly didn't add much to the already ridiculous water bill.

I remember well the insanely hot summer of 1980 in Texas when we were over 100 for almost 60 days and thought I'd never see anything like that again in my lifetime. Here in our part of the state we were over 100 either 66 or 67 days in 2011, and over 110 far too many of those days, and I think about 42 of those days were consecutive, including the entire month of July. It certainly seemed worse to me than 1980 long before we actually officially surpassed 1980 in the record books.

On the first day in mid-August that we finally had rain again, we had been at a major vehicle fire (a large moving truck on fire on the highway with all the family's possessions inside of it, including a vehicle inside the moving truck) on I-35 for about 4 or 5 hours, one young firefighter had been very ill with heat distress (and what I now suspect was a heart attack because he had a mild heart attack a couple of weeks later at another fire) and everyone got far too hot at that fire.....and, as we were headed back to the fire station....it started raining! Yippee! We were so excited. We stood outside in the rain and thunder and lightning and let that rain fall on us....and then our fire pagers went off, requesting our assistance at a ranch on fire on the Texas side of the Red River. Lightning from our glorious thunderstorm had started 2 big fires over there, and most of that county's firefighters were quite a distance away at the first fire, so the few that were left needed help with the second fire, where the lives of many expensive horses were endangered. Mother Nature was so cruel that day, giving us some cooling rain but in a thunderstorm that also started more fires. Some summers you just can't win for losing. I hope we'll never have a year again that surpasses 2011, but I think that we will.

The heat in 2011 was pretty bad, but the low rainfall was even worse. When they did the end of August report, our county had had less than 10" of rain through that point in the year, but many other areas in western OK were much worse off. In the August report, they described areas that had had less than 6" of rain in the previous 11 months. Rainfall that low is hard to comprehend. (That is even worse than Jay's rainfall for 11 months in some years.)

I think 94 is pretty cool for this time in June, at least at our end of the state. We don't refer to it as "hot weather" until it is over 95 degrees. Until then, it is just "warm". (grin) Yesterday was hot (98) but today is only warm (95) but they both feel equally miserable to me. When I was in my 30s I'd work outside all day every day in this heat and think nothing of it. I am in my mid-50s now and I try to do the bulk of the work in the early morning and evening hours and find jobs inside the house to do during the heat of the day. I find I have to pace myself better the older I get. The heat last year, of course, did not stop me from spending 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day harvesting, but that was an unusual set of circumstances where the early last frost (March 8th, I think) combined with early planting, left us with a tremendous vegetable harvest in June and July. I cannot harvest at night because snakes are out, so I would harvest all day and can all night. My son would come out to the garden periodically to urge me to come in and cool off, always starting off by saying "I came outside to see if you were still alive", but we weren't laughing a few weeks later when a neighbor of ours was found in someone's yard (not his own) in very bad shape from heat stroke.If another neighbor driving home hadn't seen him lying on the ground under a tree and called 9-1-1, he likely wouldn't have survived. We then got paged out a few more time as first responders on heat illness-related medical calls and I started trying to get indoors out of the heat earlier each day, mindful of how many people were falling sick because of the weather conditions. We have had some very bad wildfire years here (2005, 2006, 2008, the first four months of 2009, 2011, parts of 2012, the first three months of 2013) but 2011 was so much harder on our firefighters because the worst part of the season was in summer. Normally, in our part of the state, the winter fire season, when everything is dry and dormant, is the worst part of the fire season so at least the temperatures are not unbearably hot when fighting winter fires.

Susan, You know, there is a huge difference in OK just like in KS when you look at the eastern part of the state compared to the western part. The first time Owiebrain or Mulberryknob mentioned how high their annual rainfall was, I almost fell off my chair. It was about twice as much rain as we get down here in a good year. I may envy their normally high rainfall, but it comes with a high price---often dangerously high heat index numbers. At least when we are hot and dry down here and the rain isn't falling, the dewpoint and relatively humidity also are relatively low. This year, of course, they are high right now, but they'll drop fast as the moisture in the soil dries up.

Jay, I've never gardened in conditions even close to what you face there because we have at least some shelter from some of the wind in our creek hollow. Even on days I think we have the worst winds, they're only gusting in the 50s or 60s and it doesn't happen very often---usually only with thunderstorms in the summer months. Your plants seem to face a barrage of wind throughout the entire growing season.

I think maybe you are both strong-willed and hard-headed. (grin) It is so true that you have to be an eternal optimist. I usually have a really good idea in March about exactly how bad the summer will be, but I go ahead most years and plant just as much as always....or, sometimes, I plant a lot more than usual in an effort to get the same harvest in a shorter period of time. If I had any sense, then some years's I'd "go small" in my garden planning and planting, but I don't. I garden by the philosophy of "go big or go home".

I hope the no-till pays off by helping your soil retain whatever moisture it has, and I hope it helps the microbes, since they weren't disturbed. Our new garden area out back was rototilled in order to break the ground, but it is going to be no-till forever. I want to see how soil does when it isn't routinely disturbed in that way. Maybe someday the big garden will be no-till as well, but it is hard to give up the reliance on the Mantis. I love working the organic matter deeply in the soil with it, and I love double-digging the beds every now and then. I'm getting too old to do all that double-digging without paying for it with many aches and pains afterwards.

For me, last year was the bountiful harvest, which leaves me worried about this year. It is rare our weather allows us to have two great years back-to-back. This might be the year it happens (and I hope I am not jinxing myself or my garden) because so far, so good.

Dawn

Dawn BRUTAL is the only way to describe the last two days. There are leaves that are toasted that are on plants that have been out for some time. I debated whether to water the main tomato rows or not. The soil feels fine and every plant except one Sungold seemed to survive ok. And it has been out for a few weeks. I do have some I can replace it with. The plants I moved to the hot frame even though up against the west end which is taller than they are got the tips burned today. It was 105 when I got home from work. Watered for 45 minutes before I did anything else. I then waited till almost 7 to start doing much.

Dawn thanks for the thoughts. I feel it is my best choice. Yes I thought about using a surgeon close to Elkhart but decided that I wouldn't feel comfortable unless I used the one in Amarillo. Right now I can do anything I want at normal speed. Up till the last month I walked about half speed. With pain every step. But the part that really made me decide I had to do something. I never know when it will lock up.
I got some shade cloth out to put up for a wind break for the plants in the raised bed. They have done well considering the beating they have took for the last 2-3 weeks. Jay

Mom,

How are your maters doing? I picked my first one last night and had it eaten in no time. It was still just a little bit under ripe, but felt a bit soft so i went ahead and picked it. It tasted a tad green, but ohhhh my goodness, the flavor! I have 2 more that started breaking color day before yesterday.

Dawn, you know that husky plant you and i have been discussing via email?
That is the one i picked. It was the size of a tennisball. Now heres my connundrum. The rest of the tomatos are about the size of a campari, and a few are breaking color at that size, so i STILL dont know what kind of plant i have, if that makes sense......

Im just thankful to have a plant that is yielding so high. I have probably 20-25 on it now and its loaded with blooms.

Mom, yours should be breaking color soon, of they arent already, i dont think you were far behind me.

Emma

Emma- All I have are 6 tomato plants with lots of blooms and probably 100 green tomatoes(that includes the cherry ones). I have had ones on my celebrity for weeks now that isn't even blushing and is between baseball and softball size. In fact there are about 5 or 6 on that one branch, all in a cluster, and the dang thing is so heavy its sitting on the ground. I toyed with it a bit Saturday to see if I could get it tied up and off the ground, but its just too heavy, I am afraid I will break the branch.

I don't know what to think at this point. I keep telling myself not to worry over it, and repeating what Dawn and Mulberry have said..a watched pot won't boil, and by the 4th of July. But honestly, I am starting to feel a bit like an expecting father from the days long ago...pacing, nervously, waiting. I keep going over it in my head, did I do something wrong to keep them from turning.

I am glad you finally got to enjoy one of yours! Soon you will have ripe tomatoes coming out your ears! Thanks for thinking of me. At this point, I just hope they are all toying with me, and all break at the same time.

Bre

Bre, it will happen soon and when it does they will turn fast.

You have to get those tomatos off the ground or they will rot, i think....

Can you at least slide a piece of cardboard underneath the bunch? Not sure if that will work or not. I cant bear the thought of your first bunch of tomatos going bad. Just cant bear it!!!

Emma

Emma- I know, I kept looking at my husband and was like, I am going to loose them to insects or rot. Right now the only one on the ground is a smaller one, so if it goes, and I keep the great big one, I will be happy, happy, happy. They have mulch under them. And I might go out and mess with it a bit more. I was doing it Saturday as the storm rolled in, and didn't feel comfortable being in the garden while it was lighting.

Bre

Emma, That tomato plant is so bizarre. Maybe it is a Teenage Mutant Ninja Tomato. Who knows what it is or what you're going to get. However, often the first few tomatoes harvested from a plant are larger than fruit that sets and matures later on. That's because in their early growth, they were the only tomatoes on the plant and were gobbling up all the nutrients. The later tomatoes were competing with a greater number of fruit for those nutrients, so often are smaller.

Bre, If you looked at that timeline of a tomato truss I linked, you might have noticed that even once the first tomato fruit formed, it still took it about 42 days to reach its full size and ripen. That's six weeks, and some tomatoes take longer than that. Think about when you first saw little green tomatoes on your plants? Was it six weeks ago? That would have been pretty early in May when the weather was still pretty cold a couple of nights a week. Earlier in the season, with lower temperatures and less sunlight per day, it can take even longer and then, of course, in significantly hotter weather with full, intense sunlight they can ripen more quickly.

Remember, too, that it has been cloudy a lot this spring, and that cuts down on how much sunlight the plants are getting. People in some places (San Francisco for instance) often have so much fog and clouds that it can take their tomatoes forever to ripen.

Are your tomato plants getting at least 6-8 hours of direct sun a day? If they get less than 6 hours or they only get dappled shade/sun, it can take longer for fruit to ripen....but I really think that your tomatoes are behaving pretty typically, unless you put them in the ground really, really early. Those of us who are harvesting fruit in early June likely planted pretty early, chose varieties with shorter DTMs and covered up plants a lot on cold nights. In Oklahoma, it is pretty typical for the first fruit to not ripen until late June or early July in the typical garden. To get earlier fruit, some of us go to extraordinary lengths. I'm not happy if I'm not picking ripe fruit by April, but that is from container plants. My first fruit from an in-ground plant usually ripens by Memorial Day in an average year, but it takes extra effort (and some luck too) to get tomatoes that early in our erratic spring weather. In a year when the last freeze is extra early, like it was in 2012, the tomatoes often are ripe early everywhere if folks planted early, but 2013's spring was very different from 2012's.

Just go away for the weekend, and every tomato you have will break color while you're gone. I cannot tell you how many times I've had friends here waiting for the first tomato to ripen and then they went away for a full week of vacation and came back to fruit that was almost overrripe. I think tomatoes have a cruel sense of humor sometimes. (Well, really, they don't---they are plants....but it seems like they have one.)

Dawn

Maybe there is something to be said about "a watched pot never boils" or in this case "a watched tomato never ripens" or at least is taking its own sweet, red time. I picked my first Bloody Butcher a few days ago, and another today - it was cracked, but ate it anyway. Too much rain! We got another 1" overnight.

I have so many tomatos on the currant. Although we've had some real heat, so far we are still getting enough good weather that production hasn't altogether halted.

The tomato seeds have all germinated, so soon I'll be moving them to interim containers.

MOS, I sure hope you get some ripe ones very soon.

Susan

Dawn- I really would think they are getting enough sunlight. I wouldn't say it gets shady back where they are until at least 4. I don't think I would be as antsy about it if I hadn't made a stinking calender that tells me they should be ready for picking come this Wednesday! But, its only been about 4 weeks since I noticed it there, so I guess I have about 2 more weeks of waiting.

I wish I could go away and come back to ready to eat tomatoes! That would be awesome!

I guess I did get 2 cherries that were just blushing. I actually didn't notice them, Josh did. They were barely breaking color and he picked them right off! Then he turns to me and says that it looks like he will get to eat the 1st tomatoes out of my garden. I told him if he ate them, I would be collecting on his life insurance policy sooner then I thought.

I know in my head since I still have lettuce that we are eating off of, and I still have onions and beets growing and thriving that the timing isn't right for those tomatoes, but its hard when I see how big they are and think of how wonderful they will be! I feel like a kid at Christmas!

Susan- I would have ate it cracked too! That's another fear, that as soon as its ripens, its going to crack bc of all the rain. Or it will get so hot, it will just fry everything.

I am learning. I have never put so much thought and hard work into a garden before, and this being the 1st year in 2 that we have grown anything, I think I'm just expecting too much too soon.

Bre, Well, if they get sun until 4 pm, that is plenty in our climate.

You'll have tomatoes soon. If the first cherries just ripened, then most slicers would run about 2 weeks behind the typical cherry, so it seems to me that your tomatoes are pretty much on time and on track. I know the waiting is hard.

It used to drive me crazy to wait for the first ripe tomato even though I routinely get them right around Memorial Day even in a "bad" spring. So, I started putting purchased transplants in pots in mid-February, and that gives me ripe fruit in mid-to late-April. The price I pay? I have to remember to carry them inside every night or risk losing them to cold temperatures. If I forget to do that one single time, I can lose all the plants. I did this even before I had a greenhouse because I couldn't stand to wait until May for a tomato. I've also grown winter tomatoes inside the house in a sunny window, and carried them outside on sunny days, and I've grown winter tomatoes on the sunporch and in the green house. In the case of winter tomatoes, to me their flavor and texture aren't good enough to make it worth the bother in general. They are only marginally better than grocery story tomatoes, though they certainly aren't worse than grocery store tomatoes. Any fruit that ripens after October is going to have significantly less flavor due to the plants being exposed to a lot less heat and sunlight than summer tomatoes. I will try to carry a couple of fall plants in containers as deeply into winter as possible by carrying them into the greenhouse, but they're pretty much done by the end of December because I don't heat the greenhouse.

I started growing in pots originally in order to give me some tomatoes to fuss over so that I wouldn't try to rush my spring tomato plants into the ground and risk having frost hit them. It is amazing how much more I have been able to relax and enjoy spring because I'm not trying to push my baby tomato plants into the ground too soon.

You need something to distract you from fretting over the tomatoes. Don't you have some other plants needed all your attention? Maybe some squash plants to check for squash bugs or something?l

I am glad Josh is still alive. Tomatoes really aren't worth killing anyone over. They way we do it is that if Tim is at home when I find a ripe tomato, I offer it to him and usually he says "no, you go ahead and eat it". He is not as much of a tomato maniac as I am. He is a real corn and lettuce maniac though. If he is at work and I find a cherry tomato in the garden, I eat it. He doesn't care. Sometimes I try piling up all the tomatoes on the counter so he'll eat them early in the season, and he just doesn't want them, especially the cherry types, but when the first big slicer is ready to eat, he is frying the bacon for sandwiches (BLTs for me, BOLTs for him since he adds onion, also from the garden) while I am out in the garden picking that first tomato. And, by tomato, I mean a big heirloom slicer. We get a lot more excited about a JD's Special C-Tex,, Pruden's Purple or any other heirloom than a standard red hybrid type. To me, most red hybrids taste about the same, but for knock-your-socks-off flavor, it has to be a big heirloom slicer.

If the rain keeps falling, I'd pick the tomatoes the minute they reach the breaker stage. Once tomatoes reach the breaker stage, they will ripen faster indoor off the vine than outdoors on the vine. That also will keep a sudden rainstorm from flooding the plant and fruit with water and having it crack and get a bacterial rot when it is very close to ripening. I hate it when it rains hard when I have fruit right on the verge of breaking color, but you cannot rescue them until that color breaks.

Dawn

Dawn,

So if i take the 2 small ones that broke color a few days and ripen them the rest of the way in the window sill, will that change the flavor much, if any?

Because we are getting a lot of rain.

Im going to email you a pic of the one i picked yesterday and the ones that just turned. Huge difference in size, and none of the other 20+ tomatos look like they are going to get anywhere near that big. If i have some rare mutant plant and i get to name it, it will be called Chameleon. Ha!

Emma

Dawn- Oh he is alive and well, but I wasn't happy. After all the hard work I have put into that garden, with him mostly just standing there chuckling at me, telling me that I am being ridiculous to do all this work, I want to be the one to get that 1st tomato!

I will have to remember that the heirloom tomatoes are the ones to go for!

I think that is exactly why I plan on potting a few to bring in, or I will get impatient next year. And I will need something to tinker with.

No squash here to check for bugs..I don't think any of us would eat it, and I am not really all that sure how to fix it outside of a few basic ways. I do have things I could be doing..like pulling weeds, burning some brush or digging and finishing the rock/fairy garden that I have to rebuild..but, then I find myself back in the main garden, staring at those dang things wondering. Or I could just go make those muffins!

Well, Emma, I staked up the tomatoes that were on the ground. Its not the most wonderful job, but I worked with what I had on hand and made a hammock so I don't loose any tomatoes. They are about 3 inches off the ground now. What you can't see is basically just one huge one is sitting in there getting them up off the ground, until I can pick the big heavy ones and stake the whole branch.

Emma, Once they break color, ripening them inside won't affect the flavor. All my favorite tomato experts in Texas (folks from Texas A & M, professional horticulturalists, garden writers, garden radio show hosts, etc.) recommended it when I was growing up and when I started gardening, and my dad always did it. Still, I always preferred letting them ripen fully on the vine until we moved here because I was convinced they tasted better. If I try to ripen them all on the vine here, the birds, squirrels and other pests get as many ripe tomatoes as we do. They ripen faster inside because they are not stressed. Try it and you'll see. It works fine, and in a blind taste test between 2 tomatoes from the same plant----one picked at breaker stage and ripened indoors and one ripened on the vine---I cannot tell one from the other.

Your chamelon is just a normal plant. Variation in fruit size as the season goes on is normal. Odd shapes can occur because of incomplete pollination.

Bre, I'm glad he still lives and breathes. It took Tim a long time to understand my gardening obsession. Now he embraces it, as long as I don't expect him to work as hard in the garden as I do. i do not understand why a man who can ride a riding mower for 4 hours and mow down every square inch of grass would think it is tedious to spend 4 hours in the garden performing a wide variety of tasks. To me, gardening is more interesting and more fun than mowing. It all works out though, because he catches the grass clippings in the riding mower's triple grass catcher and delivers the fresh grass clipping mulch to me in whichever fenced garden plot I happen to be working at the time. If he enjoyed being in the garden as much as I do, I might have to mow my own grass to catch the clippings.

It is good to get the tomatoes up off the ground. It helps prevent rot and it keeps ground-dwelling insects, as well as turtles and other small pests, from eating them.

If y'all have some so low to the ground that you cannot tie them up to get them off the ground, you can slip something underneath them, like a plastic berry basket turned upside down, to hold them up off the ground.

I have been busy with harvesting all day but finally came in to take a break and eat lunch. So far today I have harvested tomatoes, garlic, jalapeno peppers and sweet corn. I still have squash, okra, more tomatoes, and more corn to harvest this afternoon, and poatoes to dig. It's that time of the year. I pretty much never get all the harvesting done. I just plug away at it day after day in an effort to stay caught up.

It does make meal planning easy. The meal of the day is whatever sort of meat we fix to go with whatever veggies we have harvested recently.

Dawn

Dawn, thanks for the info. The two small ones that broke color on Saturday, i think, look almost ready, so im taking them in the house tonight before, like you said, the birds get them.

Bre, i have studied your picture, and congrats on that little hammock, that is creative!!! Now that biggest tomato, i will bet you a 2 dollar bill that it breaks color within a week. It has that look to it, at least it looks like mine did before it changed, still dark at the top but lighter at the bottom.

Now, dont be surprised after all the waiting if you are slightly disappointed. I was. My tomato had the most awesome flavor, but it had a lot of core and was just ever so slightly mealy. But oh the flavor. I just cut it in quarters, and stood over the kitchen and sucked all the juice out of it like the tomato fresk that i am. Hahahahahaha!!!!! Everyone says the first one is usually like that because they stay on the vine so long.

Give it one more week, i think your gonna see color and when you do, it will turn FAST!!!!

P.s., i am going to send you an email from my phone so that we can share pictures, i cant post them from my ipad, and getting my laptop out seems too much of a chore. I will put "tomato crazy" as the subject.

Emma

Edit: just saw I can't emaill you. I will try and break the laptop out tonight and post a few pics

This post was edited by Erod1 on Tue, Jun 18, 13 at 19:00

Hey Dawn and Emma...I'm watching the voice with my 7 year old so I will reply in detail later. Emma I will email you my email address.

Mom. I think your tomatoes look great. My plants have not been kept tied up, so I am trying to take care of that now. They look like they are being lynched as I am tying cloth around them and trying to pull them up to the trellis. I also have a lot of disease. I picked 2 more slicers yesterday, but over all they are producing poorly. This is the second time I have tried the "no till" method on tomatoes and am not happy with it. I think the ground stays too cold to get the plants off to an early start.

I started between 80 and 100 tomato plants this year and gave some to my neighbor, my son and my step dad. All the plants I gave away have better fruit set than mine do. My soil has been amended much more than the others soil had been.

My peppers are small also, but have good fruit set. Next year I will try to let the soil warm before I mulch. I will show a picture of my tomatoes, plant size is okay, but only about 30% of the fruit that I should have.

Larry.

Larry,

You need to stop lynching those tomatoes. No wonder they don't want to make fruit...they are mad at you. : )

Maybe your soil is too well-amended for fruiting plants at this point? Is your nitrogen high? For more fruit set, you could manipulate them into flowering more with a Bloom Booster type fertilizer, but your air temperatures need to be in the right range for pollination in order for it to help.

I'm inclined to think your persistent rainy weather might have set them back. I always plant far too many plants than a sane person would. Then, even if they are producing poorly, we still have too many tomatoes. If I get tired of those tomatoes, it is easy to yank out the excess plants and compost them.

Dawn