SuzukiSavage.com - Print Page

SuzukiSavage.com
/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl
General Category >> The Cafe >> Tomatoes --- plant varieties
/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl?num=1558135367

Message started by Oldfeller on 05/17/19 at 16:22:47

Title: Tomatoes --- plant varieties
Post by Oldfeller on 05/17/19 at 16:22:47

After a 20+ year hiatus, which was caused by the wife constantly reminding me she could simply buy veggies a lot cheaper than the water and fertilizer it takes me to grow one in the NC Sandhills area --- I am back to growing tomatoes for salad and sandwich consumption at her request.

Why? The wife was remembering fondly walking out to the vines to find a just now ripe tomato to cut up for a BLT. And yes, that ugly home grown ripe from the vine tomato tasted a lot better than the pink cardboard tasting tomatoes you buy from the store.

I have bought 12 plants, 12 cages, mulch, tomato fertilizer, and have just this afternoon rooted 4 suckers off the original 4 plants that if they root successfully will start me towards the fall crop (should they actually survive the heat of summer).

In the 20 year mean time, the varieties I used to grow have all gone "heirloom" on me and the DNA assisted supersweet low acid hybrids are all the rage now at the Lowes and Walmart garden centers.

I bought and planted different 3 kinds, but hands down the best of the lot so far is the Better Boy tomato. If you fertilize it and water it once a day the plants just explode into those long clumps of 4-5 tomatoes you sometimes see in the grocery store still on the vine stub.

I have plants that aren't quite 3 months old now that have 18 tomatoes on them that still the vine hasn't gotten up as tall as the cages yet. I look to see 25 plants from a vine, easy, which is really good compared to what I got in years past.

I have planted Better Boy sucker cuttings a variety of ways and I can say compared to Roma and Paste and Cherry tomato plants the Better Boy is a much much tougher sucker to kill. I have seem my Better Boy sucker cuttings go totally flat, get crispy on the leaf edges from sun burn and still come bouncing back if they get a good watering.

Good genetics or genetic meddling? Hey, they work --- I don't care all that much about how.

I am now propagating my herd of plants by cutting and rooting the very best plants copious suckers, intentionally selecting the individual plants that are setting 6-7 tomatoes per node layer instead of the slightly slacker plants that only set 3-5 tomatoes.

Which tomato varieties do you guys like, and why?

Title: Re: Tomatoes --- plant varieties
Post by SoC on 05/17/19 at 21:11:20

So in my house we love tomato's. When I tell people how much we spend from Oct. through July for a few decent tomatoes it is mind boggling. All through that draught, I buy a huge quanity of tomatoes and try to bring them along to some stage of ripness. Maybe 1 in 5 or 6 make it. The rest just turn to rot after 3-5 days. We welcome summer for that reason as much as any other.

Title: Re: Tomatoes --- plant varieties
Post by zipidachimp on 05/17/19 at 22:16:38

sorry to jerk your thread, but can someone tell me why US strawberries on sale here in Canuckistan are the size of apples? Wotinell fertilizer are you guys using?????
cheers! 8-)

Title: Re: Tomatoes --- plant varieties
Post by Oldfeller on 05/18/19 at 03:36:33

Strawberries have been fiddled with, as have tomatoes. And yes, they are larger and sweeter than they were before.

They used to call it "hybrids" which were made by intentionally cross breeding specific strains of normal plants to make a one-off sport generation that did not breed true but was accidentally bigger/better, but if you planted the seeds you got one of the parent generations about half the time and the other parent the rest of the time.

Going back to tomatoes, the old style hybrid seed was called Big Boy as done by the Burpee seed company. How they came up with Better Boy, that I do not know.

Sucker, the little spuds that erupt from the angles of branches and such on tomato plants carry the entire genetics for that individual plant. So you can endlessly clone a specific lucky plant as the hybrid genetics cannot be held by folks like us without using tricks like that.

I am reading on line about folks keeping a "lucky genetics" high yielding good tasting particular plant going over the winter months in the house as a houseplant. They start putting suckers from it into small planting pots and growing them up over the winter, then harden them off in the early spring and plant them.

Title: Re: Tomatoes --- plant varieties
Post by rl153 on 05/18/19 at 11:40:39

I'm planting big beef. Supposedly they grow with less than perfect light, I have some shade. Last year I had a good crop growing but the squirrels attacked them . This year I'm going to have 5 foot chicken wire cages around each plant.

Title: Re: Tomatoes --- plant varieties
Post by Oldfeller on 05/19/19 at 04:15:12

Squirrels near my tomato plants get reported by the wife as "needing weeding" --- she does like her BLTs better than her tree rats .....

Then out comes the .22 air rifle ;D one squirrel per plant, down by the roots about 6 inches deep --- furry fertilzer --- ;D

Title: Re: Tomatoes --- plant varieties
Post by rl153 on 05/19/19 at 04:38:24

Good idea!