It's not just you, lots of people are having the same problem.

Me too! Take care of the plants. If they're healthy, you'll be covered up soon.

That's so frustrating. That's what happened to my tomato plants last year. Luckily, for some reason, they're setting fruit this year. Dunno.

Maybe yours will start soon. When did you plant them?

It is so bizarre how erratic tomato production is this year. Some people have had huge harvests, including lots of folks here in Love County, as is evidenced by the fact that there's lots of tomatoes at our Farmer's Market that are locally grown, and they started showing up there fairly early in the season. We probably benefitted from a warm March and April that allowed good fruitset on plants that were put into the ground early.

In some parts of OK, though, some folks have had very few tomatoes. Or they've gotten none. None at all. It is almost beyond my comprehension that tomato plants in so many scattered areas didn't manage to set a single fruit yet, but then we all had very erratic weather as far back as January when it was hot during times that normally are cool and later turned cool during times that are normally hot.

I suspect how well a person's tomato plants performed in any location this year depended a great deal on what their weather was doing in April and May. June is fairly late to get fruitset even in a year with good weather, or at least it is down here, so April and May weather control the summer tomato harvest. I would say the majority of the fruit I harvested in May and June actually formed on the plants in March and earliest April. Now the fruits I am harvesting in July are from fruit that set in May. There's plenty of cherries that set in June, but not much else.

One of my fall tomatoes has set 3 tomatoes so far. It is a heat-setting type and has tons of blooms daily but the heat and humidity are too much for it and those blossoms fall after going unfertilized after a few days. With the heat cranking up, it seems likely those 3 fall tomatoes on that one plant are going to remain stuck at 3. A fourth fruit may not set in the next month or longer. That's life in Oklahoma where our gardens always seem like they are being held hostage by the heat.

Thank you all so much. I had no idea a about heat and humidity and thought I had put in too much goat/chicken poop compost-even though I only added small amounts. It makes such sense now that I think about it.

Dawn, my fall tomatoes are tiny. I'm late again.

I'm starting to think that "late season" tomatoes aren't the thing to plant here. The plants with the longest DTMs have the fewest tomatoes. When and if they finally set more fruit, they may not have time to ripen it before frost. I try to find varieties that have done well in Texas, that way I figure they can handle our heat. I have a KY landrace I thought would be good, but it's been slow to produce. So has Marianna's Peace, which is supposed to be heat tolerant. In the future, I'm thinking I go with more tried and true varieties and fewer unknowns. Of course, when starting out, they are all unkown.

I tasted a Healani this week that was better than the first. It's a determinate that's supposed to deal with heat and humidity. But they're what I would call salad sized. I got one Czech Bush, off that sad plant in the hay bales. It had good taste. Maybe determinates would be good in a Japanese Tomato ring. See, I'm already planning more unknowns.

Shaer, You're welcome. It honestly is not you. Not at all. Even very experienced gardeners in many parts of the state have been bemoaning the lack of fruit on their plants. It is just one of those years.

Amy, The conventional wisdom when I was growing up in Texas and gardening there as a young adult was that you needed to plant proven varieties that produced ripe fruit in roughly 75-80 days max (and shorter DTMs were much preferred) and that produced what we nowadays would think of as a mid-sized fruit to medium-large. You know, stuff along the lines of Champion, Early Girl, Jack Pot, Carnival, Mule Team, Homestead, Whirlaway, Merced (since discontinued), Better Boy, Super Fantastic, Roma, Porter, and even further back in time than those we had Dona, Spring Giant, Big Set, Carmello, Fantastic and the old reliable Big Boy, which didn't produce a lot of fruit most years but sure made big tomatoes. And, yet, because the tomato growing world didn't revolve around Texas, many of the varieties that produced in our heat there (and in OK as well) now are long gone, leaving gardeners in our hot climate here with the same problem as gardeners in Texas and the entire southern USA---how to find tomato varieties that don't shut down production the minute the heat starts cranking up.

The big seed companies are always looking for new, improved varieties that can be marketed across a wide swath of the country and that means a lot of proven performers that actually function in our heat just fall by the wayside and disappear because the companies are looking at fruit they can market from New York and Pennsylvania to Washington state, even if those varieties aren't worth much down south. It is sad. One of the lines meant to replace the tomatoes we once grew is the BHN line, like BHN-444 or whatever. Well, so far the BHNs don't impress me much. Do they produce a roundish, red thing that looks like a tomato? Yes they do. And maybe someday they'll produce something that tastes like the tomatoes of our younger years, but I am not going to waste a lot of my time waiting for that to happen. I grew both Bella Rosa and Tasti-Lee this year hoping to find a tasty tomato. I think they would satisfy most people who just want a red tomato, but all ours ended up in salsa because we have better-tasting heirlooms to eat fresh. Big Beef, which I think was introduced in the early or mid-1990s, is better than anything they've introduced since then.

I've sought refuge in the heirloom tomato world for years, even though the heirloom plants do not necessarily produce as heavily as the hybrids. The heirlooms, at least, have the flavors and textures I crave. Finding varieties that produce well in our heat is difficult, but some of the best producers for me the last few years have included varieties that produce larger fruit and that do, technically speaking, have estimated DTMs that are longer than 80s days but that produce well here if planted very early. In fact, I can get great production from just about any variety if I plant it early enough to beat the heat in all but the hottest of years. That's led me to believe that the variety doesn't matter very much as long as I can plant it in March and get fruitset before the end of May. After May, it is so hot that I don't care if more fruit do set. I'll be happy with whatever set from March through May, as they likely will continue to be harvested through late July or early August of most years. I've gotten huge yields from Brandywine Sudduth the last couple of years just by planting it as early in March as I can instead of waiting until April and planting when OSU says we should. Hmmm. I can't say it will produce in a year when we get hot early and stay hot early but it is producing well in an average year, which it didn't when I planted on time, so I've learned a lesson from that.

One variety I've grown recently and really liked is Marion. The fruit are huge early in the season and get smaller as the summer goes on, but the flavor is good. It is sort of like Rutgers--the old Rutgers, before they improved it so much. Carmello and Dona are back again after being missing for a long time. That's pretty cool. Breeders are trying to jump on the heirloom craze and breed new hybrids that have the flavor and hopefully the texture of heirlooms, but I haven't even bothered trying many of those yet. Of the ones I did try, the quality and flavor still don't compare to heirlooms. I think I probably am extraordinarily picky about flavor and texture though.

If all I wanted was a bunch of red tomatoes, I'd just plant Early Girl, Better Boy, Super Boy and Fourth of July and be done with it, but I hold myself and my garden to a higher standard than that. : ) In fact, my taste buds demand that I do so.

I expect next year will be hot and dry as we get further away from the El Nino conditions, so I'm going to be extra careful about variety selection for 2017 and I'm going to push harder than ever to put the plants in the ground early.

Dawn

Yes, you've convinced me that early is better, but being further north, I'm going to have to figure out how to keep them warm when needed. However, fewer plants producing well, would be better than many plants not doing anything, which has kind of been my story the last 2 years. I'm sad my dwarfs didn't do well. I think they would do better in the ground. But production would have to be a lot higher to justify that footprint in the beds.