Garden Update – Tomato Explosion!

It’s the end of March, and the tomato plants are growing and blossoming and producing LOTS of tomatoes!  But along with my successes, I’ve had a failure as well.  Come on and let’s take the tour!

Big Beef Tomato

Big Beef – Wow!

My Big Beef tomato plant has gone through some tough times, what with multiple multiple transplantings, an ant invasion and losing some foliage.  It did set a tomato shortly after Big Boy and Early Girl, and it has far outstripped those plants!  It’s got the biggest tomato in the garden, and it is getting bigger every day.

Big Beef is a hybrid tomato, and produces red beefsteak-type fruits.  I can’t wait to taste it when it ripens!

Black Cherry – Finally Hit Its Stride

Black Cherry Tomatoes

My Black Cherry tomato plant took quite awhile to do anything.  For several weeks it just sat in its pot and didn’t grow – not until I gave it a drink of worm compost tea.  That perked it up, and now it’s flowering and producing cherry tomatoes with abandon.  Black Cherry is an open-pollinated tomato plant (although sometimes it’s classed as an heirloom).

I’ve tried growing Black Cherry in the past, but one year almost my whole garden was decimated by hornworms – including Black Cherry.  Another year I got rained out before I really got the plants started — that was my fault for starting so late.  I am very much looking forward to the cherry tomatoes, as they are supposed to taste heavenly!

Better Bush Tomatoes

Better Bush

This is such a pretty plant – I love the rugose foliage and deep green color of the leaves.  Better Bush is a determinate – the only one I have in the garden at the moment.  It’s not a large plant at all, but it’s loaded with fruits.  The tomatoes don’t get to be very large; maybe in the 3 to 4 ounce size range — but they are abundant.  Better Bush is a hybrid.

I’ve  grown this tomato variety in the past and it never fails to give me a nice harvest. It might not look it in the photo, but the plant actually has lots of tomatoes.

Maybe they aren’t the biggest tomatoes, but nevertheless they taste great when fully ripe.  Yum!

Red Beefsteak

Red Beefsteak Tomato Plant

I have two of these open-pollinated tomato plants, and they are gorgeous at the moment — big and lush and full of both tomatoes and blossoms.  One is doing slightly better than the other, but not by much.  Even though they are container-grown, these should give me some 12 ounce to maybe a pound beefsteak-type red tomatoes.  A lot of them.  😉

This plant in the photo, as well as its sibling, have reached the top of the cage already, and I have about 6 to 8 weeks of decent growing weather left (after which it gets super-hot).  I expect that it will keep growing during the summer; I just don’t know how well (or if) it will produce fruit then.

BTW, having grown both in-ground and in large containers, I can say it’s a fallacy that you can’t get a good harvest of big tomatoes from a container tomato plant.  But more about that in another post.

And the Big Disappointment….

Big Boy and Early Girl ran into a problem a couple of weeks ago — they got waterlogged.  Between me getting a little over-zealous with watering, a plastic mulch cover that kept in the moisture and cooler temps, the plants were almost swimming.  I corrected the situation, but they looked really sad — even though they both still had tomatoes.  Both plants are hybrids.

Since then, Early Girl has perked up some; she’s put out new suckers, started flowering more and also setting more tomatoes.  She still looks spindly but seems to be coming back from her near-drowning experience.

But Big Boy…I don’t think he’s long for this world.  Almost overnight it’s developed what looks like rust on its leaves.  Granted, we have had a lot of rain in the past week, but none of the other plants are reacting this way.

I’ll try some mild organic fungicide, but if it’s not showing signs of improvement in the next few days — out Big Boy comes, tomatoes or not.  I have plenty of other tomato plants at the moment, so losing one isn’t the end of the world.

What’s Up Next?

In the next garden update, I’ll talk about the trials and tribulations of Juliet, and how Cherokee Purple and Husky Cherry Red are doing.  Plus — I have the Isis Candy Cherry “wannabes” in the garden, and they are growing like there is no tomorrow.  I’ll talk more about the experiment I plan to run on two of them, to see if some new organic supplements live up to their claims.