I'm no expert, but I'd certainly try to keep some of the best of your spring tomato plants! Maybe do an experiment this year......

Linda

Ive been catching some of this sort of information in some of the gardening videos. Tomatoes included in your fall garden. It's supposed to have an advantage of when you spring plantings poop out.

I've seen it where the person started a round of seed to be ready for the second garden, and other talk of taking cuttings and rooting them out. And read an article or two about cutting them back to good suckers after the heat of day isn't so harsh to get a second crop out of the same plant.

I'm intrigued, but havent tried it. Yet :)

Here in Va I'll start new plants from seed around June 1st and a few more again around July 10th. My spring plants usually die off (>50% of them) by late Aug so these 2 extra starts can extend my picking season up until 1st frost if I'm lucky. I've never used plucked suckers to start more plants but that may be an option over seeding too? Please update your progress with using trimmed spring plants, sounds interesting.

So I have to assume that there isn't anything "better" about planting new plants, but it is just assumed that by the end of the spring season, your plants are toast. Nobody ever says that.

I live in SW MI, lived in Chicago, and in SE WI... for me once my spring tomatoes were planted out, ususally late May into June depending, they just keep going till frosts finally kill them. I haven't lived anywhere that gets warm enough or maybe a long enough season that the spring ones really poop out. Or at least the indets and some of the container ones don't- some of the dets and dwarfs seem to peter out once they set their big fruit flush, but I assume that's the nature of those rather than seasonal poop out.

I'm doing resets of beans and summer squash this year for the fall garden. And some roots and greens I haven't tried before. It was looking for some of that info that I came across tomatoes too and thought it interesting.

Well, down south, productivity wise, they all poop out. Temperatures here are FAR too high for tomatoes to set fruit, for several months. As a result, with tomatoes planted out at the beginning of March, we get fruit in May and June, and then nada. There are formally two tomato fruiting seasons down here, but the second is somewhat shorter than the first, which is at least partly why many don't bother with it.

There is absolutely no point in trying to keep huge tomato plants watered, sprayed, and fed through July, August, and September. The plants don't necessary poop out. They get killed by the heat. If kept compact enough, in principle, they can survive.

I would normally cut down my tomatoes right now (to about 6") and let them grow back and start flowering around Labor Day. But our triple digit temps arrived way earlier than usual and there's no relief in sight. I just can't justify wasting so much precious water on keeping the stumps alive for the next two months, so I decided to pull them out. :(

The drought is getting so bad, at this point it's all about saving the trees (peach, apricot, fig) and letting go of the rest.

Dan, I didn't plant slicing tomatoes this year, but I have in the past. Here in CA we have the same problem you do. I have always cut my plants to the bottom one or two growth nodes on each branch. They always grew back and I have had tomatoes at Christmas and into January. One year I even had a Boxcar Willie survive the winter and make it thru a second year.

Old plants might have lingering diseases/ afflictions? New plants might have a fresh start? Old plants have saved energy in the roots, giving them an advantage? How do tomatoes grow in the tropics?

To answer your question, do both, buy a few new plants, and compare.

If you cut them back, root the cuttings for new plants! they start to root very quickly in water…

If you have healthy plants, rooting cuttings from them for new plants seems like kind of an empty gesture. Again, unless new plants offer some advantage. This isn't about making more plants. When plants regrow, they are basically making new plants that happen to be attached to the old ones.

But it sounds like cutting back and regrowing is a strategy that can work. One can wonder about how far to cut them back, though. The idea would be to delay flowering until at least September. If you cut them back, they regrow, and immediately start flowering, that doesn't help a lot.

If it helps any from what I read about cutting back... don't cut back to stubs, leave some suckers. And try to do it when the daytime temps are going to be under 95, otherwise it's kind of moot.

I suppose a point of doing a new plant is that you would/could coddle it a bit against the harsh heat before settling into the fall garden?

Yes, definitely. Suckers are where new growth will appear, whether rooted as cuttings or attached to the original plant. I think the idea is trying to avoid coddling! I didn't coddle these plants when they got huge, so they shouldn't need coddling if I make them a lot less huge.

No, I meant the reasoning behind someone taking a cutting or starting a new plant from seed might in part be because we tend to coddle those littler or rooting plants more than we do the big established ones. Because of this, they may be likely to survive the harsher conditions that the ones out in the garden are experiencing.

I think with cutting back you still would need to be nice- you are chopping off a lot of the of the plant so that's going to be a bit of a shock. But I bet the root system is big enough to help boost what's left right along.

My point was that in getting a fall crop, I wasn't wanting to make work. Planting seeds, digging up the bed, planting them out, and coddling them is making work. In either case, though, you do have to do some hacking. I guess the question here is, how little work can you get away with in trying to get fall tomatoes. In any case, I am unconvinced that seedlings, exposed to brutal summer weather, are going to do better than established plants.

Robert,

How do tomatoes grow in the tropics?

They are sprawling perennials because they don't get killed by winter weather. So they take a break in the summer (when pollen gets sticky and they stop fruiting), and continue growing after the weather cools down.

I think there are 2 reasons for planting new tomato plants. First would be to keep the size manageable. Even cutting it back, the plant would push out a lot of growth. Staring with a new plant the tomato would growth gradually.

But the main reason would be diseases. Your plant may look healthy but it probably has some blight or other leaf disease on the vine, esp, with all the rain we have had. They may look healthy but are probably harboring diseases. Mine looked healthy in early June but after 20 inches of rain over one week, raining every day and they were either dead or almost dead. (50 plants). With new plants you could plant in a new area, with fresh, disease free plants. The problem is you would need to plant transplants between now and August 1st. No one sells them this time of year that I have ever seen. Usually they sell them in September, when there is not enough time to ripen.

That said I have not had good success with fall tomatoes, even planting early. A friend at worked wanted me to try again so I can give her the green tomatoes that do not ripen so she can make fried green tomatoes.

Yes, one can just presume that all tomato plants are infected with a disease that will kill them, but mine look tolerable. As I said, I've been diligent with the fungicide, and this year included a systemic (Tebuconazole) in my treatments. If I were to plant out new plants, I would have seeded them weeks ago. Exactly right that no one sells them.

I'm willing to accept that fall tomatoes are possible but, as I said, the issue is how much effort is needed to get them.

That was a good question about perennial tomatoes. It is indeed done, and that presumption clearly doesn't work for them.

Now, the fall tomato season (from when the temperatures moderate, to first frost) is shorter here than the spring season (from last frost, to when the heat sets in). That being the case, I'm not looking to make anything grow gradually.

I plant 2 more later tomato planting (from seed) to replace the dead or dying spring ones. As I mentioned above generally 50% of the tomato plants are lost by August but so far I have lost only 5 of 15 spring plants to what appears to be curly top disease, we do have leaf hoppers and other pests which degrade and/or infect the plants over time. Early Blight is what usually takes them out but since May was bone dry this year it looks like most of the plants avoided fungal related diseases. Still it's good to have a tomato plant insurance policy in place for some autumn harvesting.

OK, I cut my cherries back about two weeks ago. They were on a 6-foot trellis, and I had kept the vines trimmed to no more than eight feet log. All done for the spring. I cut them down to 3-feet. As of now, they are busting out with new healthy foliage growth. At the tops, they’ve almost gained half a foot. (And, I should say, that some of the old foliage is dying, which I just pluck off.) This isn’t little seedlings struggling to grow. These are full sized tomatoes with thick stems exploding. I think this is going to work.

In previous years, I've tried cutting back spring tomatoes more casually, and the whole plant ended up croaking. Never managed to get a fall crop by continuing my spring plants. I think the big difference this year is that I've been especially attentive to fungicide. Copper, chlorothalonil (Daconil), and tebuconazole (a systematic) in round robin, once-a-week. I am challenged by the fact that I cannot rotate my tomatoes, so fungal infections are always threatening. As a result, my tomatoes ended up healthy enough that they could continue. Keeping my fingers crossed. Of course, now the threat is 100F temperatures and, as noted here, that the fall season is effectively shorter than the spring season.