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Greg Cuetara
08-14-2011, 8:54 AM
Need some help / advice from any gardeners out there. I have taken my first step at a small garden this year and decided to grow a few tomato plants. 205069This was a few months ago and now my plants look like this...205070

A few questions / problems I am having right now. I have 2 cherry tomato plants, 1 roma plant and 1 regular tomato plant. I am hoping to make homemade tomato sauce from everything but not really sure how to do that considering I will get maybe 1 or two tomato's a day and they only last about a week in the house. Can I freeze the tomato's until I get enough to make a big batch of sauce and then after I make the sauce freeze it?

The second problem I am having is that some of the vines are getting quite tall and with the tomato's on the end they are falling over and either kinking the vines or breaking off. Is there anything that I can do other than build a taller structure? Should I just cut off the vines which have kinked over?

Thanks for any advice.
Greg

Rich Engelhardt
08-14-2011, 9:42 AM
The second problem I am having is that some of the vines are getting quite tall and with the tomato's on the end they are falling over and either kinking the vines or breaking off. Is there anything that I can do other than build a taller structure? Should I just cut off the vines which have kinked over?

Yes - plant smaller 'maters..
Seriously. Tomatoes come in all sorts of varities/sizes. You can find one variety that's suitable for your planter among one of the myrid of hybrids.

In the meantime - use some strong stakes - furring strips work great - and pieces of torn up cloth to bind up the stems.
Cloth, loosely tied, won't cut into the stems and/or damage them.

Tomatoes need a lot of support. Most people make the mistake of using those tiny (like 1/4" dowel rods) stakes. They aren't anywhere near strong enough.

Don't cut them. I've tried to prune back damaged parts and it just ended up killing the plant in a few days.
Ones I left on to wither on their own - well, they killed the plant also but it took a few weeks.


BTW - nice design on the bed. I'd add some lattice to the back myself to support the plants and go with 1/2 to 1/3 of the number of plants per planter.
Can't help on the sauce.

Greg Cuetara
08-14-2011, 10:01 AM
Rich, thanks. I tried to go with the square foot garden concept and planted one plant per square foot but now I see that it was too much or I need to make a bigger bed. :) There will always be next year. I figure as long as i get $10 worth of tomato's out of it then it was worth it for this year and I am pretty sure I will get that out of it in just the cherry tomato's.

I am using the tiny tomato round things to hold everything up but I did use some stakes to help hold those up. Guess i should try to increase the height to help the plants.

Greg

William Burgess
08-14-2011, 10:34 AM
Greg,
You can certainly freeze the tomatoes. Best way would be to lightly score the skin, drop them in boiling water for 30 seconds, pull them out and put them in ice cold water for 5 mins. The skin should then peel right off. After that just deseed them and put them in a freezer bag until your ready to use.

Heres a good step by step guide.
http://www.pickyourown.org/freezingtomatoes.htm

As for holding up your tomatoes, as Rich said staking them is the easiest way. Some sort of frame would be nice, but looks like you could just attach some stakes to the box frame and just tie up the tomatoes to it.

Also, try lightly shaking the plant once a day if its not very windy. Tomatoes are self pollinating and shaking the plants will help pollinate them.

Heather Thompson
08-14-2011, 10:45 AM
Greg,

I do not think you will be making any tomato sauce this year, the roma tomato is best for that job but with only one plant you will not get the yield needed. In my last home I had 4'x20' of roma tomato's, once they started to yield I was making sauce every few days, my advice is to enjoy the fruit you have as they ripen. As far as breaking even on your $10 investment, a single cherry tomato plant will cover that plus, everything else is just a bonus. There is nothing better than picking a nice ripe fruit and slicing it up as it is still warm from the sun, yum!

Heather

Ken Fitzgerald
08-14-2011, 10:55 AM
Greg....if you have a large number of green tomatoes, reducing water to the plant helps them to ripen sooner. If you watered say 5 days a week, reducing the number of days to 4 or even 3 would accelerate the ripening. Just keep an eye on the plant...if it starts showing distress, increase the watering a little.

jason thigpen
08-14-2011, 2:28 PM
i freeze my tomatoes as i harvest them. just spread them out on a cookie sheet on top of some wax paper. once they are as hard as a rock, put them in a big ziploc and store them that way. when they thaw, the skins slide right off. works great, especially if you are only harvesting a few at a time.

Joe Pelonio
08-15-2011, 8:16 AM
One more tip. At the end of the season when you have a lot of green ones and the frost is coming, pull the plants up roots and all and hang upside down in the garage to ripen. An alternative is to place 3-4 green tomatoes in a paper bag with an apple, it gives off gasses that help them ripen.

Greg Cuetara
08-15-2011, 6:02 PM
thanks for all the advice so far. good tip Joe for the end of the season.

Jason do you make sauce and then freeze the sauce? I wasn't really sure about 'refreezing' the tomatos or if that would be a problem if I were to cook them into sauce in between.

Greg

Dennis Peacock
08-15-2011, 8:55 PM
Man....y'all don't ruin all those green maters.!!! Slice'em up and fry them green maters!!!! Boy they sure are good.!!!!!

Joel Goodman
08-15-2011, 9:02 PM
For next year the wire "cages" that you put in when the plants are very small work well. The plants grow through the "cages" and are supported without the effort of tying then to the stakes.

Joe Angrisani
08-16-2011, 4:44 PM
Greg....

I would say "Don't give up on the Square Foot Garden thing." I base much of my veggie garden on that old PBS-show method. The one and only problem I see is that you skipped the (VERY IMPORTANT) support system. You will get great yield with one tomato plant per square foot, but you MUST go up.

At the old house I had a 3' by 12' raised garden that produced enough veggies for the two of us. The north 12' side of it had a trellis frame, and under that 1'x12' strip I grew 8-10 peas then 4 cucumbers, 8-10 more peas then pole beans, and 8 tomato plants. I grew four tomatoes in the exact same space you're growing four. The key to growing Square Foot tomatoes is to support them, and just as important, to remove ALL side shoots (suckers) so it's ONLY the central growth that continues. You can't let tomatoes "bush" in a Square Foot setup.

I used 1" threaded pipe to make my frame. It spanned the 12' garden with support every 4', and it was about 9' high and 2' in the ground. I hung cheap 6" netting on that frame, then would just gently weave the tomatoes and climbing veggies straight up every few days.

On your setup you can probably do something with 1/2" pipe in the corners, and cross them at the top. Then simply tie a fairly heavy string taught, vertically above each plant site. Just coax the plants round and round the string as they grow. You won't need to tie them. You don't need the complexity of cages, which are far too short anyway for Square Foot gardens. My tomato plants grew 2-3' beyond my 9' trellis even in Colorado (average frost dates of roughly May 15 and Oct 1). You need height.

Finally, be sure to plant only INDETERMINANT tomato varieties, not DETERMINANT. Determinants grow a specific amount, produce all their fruit at roughly the same time, and are done. Indeterminants grow and grow (and grow and grow and grow) until frost kills the plant. Most romas, as far as I know, are determinant so you do get the crop around the same time. But they only made it to about 6-7 feet on the trellis.

Don Jarvie
08-16-2011, 9:53 PM
To amke sauce or "gravy" as my italian wife would say you need at least 4 plants, probably a few more. I would boil them as others have said and the skin peels off. Then cut them open and remove the seeds then freeze them. Once the harvest was over I'd pass them off to the Chef and she would do her thing.

There are quite a few different varaities of Roma tomatos so get some seeds next year and start them indoors. The need heat more than sun at 1st. Its a very cost effective way to grow your own. I like a company called "Seeds of Change". They have many varities.

Darius Ferlas
08-17-2011, 1:01 AM
No idea about the sauce, but the plants may grow up to 8 feet tall, depending on the variety, soil and climate. Support is not critical for the plant's survival and fruit bearing but it's good for the grower - better control over the amount of fruit and easier to harvest.

I had a chance to learn a little about tomato care from my sister's gardener. He is an older fella with decades of experience and the results in my sister's garden in Normandy are spectacular.

Tomato plants should be pruned on a regular basis and pruning will depend on the variety and the growth stage. Some of the pruning I do:


eliminate these are little offshoots trying to grow between the main trunk and a branch, starting around 2 to 3 weeks after planting
eliminate any secondary and tertiary trunks (ongoing from within days after planting). There should be only one trunk.
about the same time cut the bottom branches to help minimize infections and rot from soil dwelling "things"
about half way through the season, cutting off the tip of the main trunk and other major branches if they have flowers, those flowers won't yield fruit but require the plant to work very hard to keep them alive. Cutting the tips forces the plant to concentrate on the desirable fruit
ongoing (but no sooner than 3 weeks after planting) thinning the plant by elimination some branches. this helps direct the plants effort towards the fruit, allows for nice air flow and lowers the risk of fungal infection (I don't use pesticides of any kind). I thin about 10 to 15% of the green mass (branches with no fruit) every two weeks and I never had a plant die on my. I usually plant about 20 tomato plants.

The smaller fruit varieties (Tiny Tim, cherry etc) are usually best off when left to themselves, except for some fruitless branches which look like clear burden to the plant. Not an easy task since those plants tend to be bushy and it's pretty easy to make a mistake and remove a fruit bearing branch. Good support still applies.

Watering should be copious in the first week, then only if top 4 to 5 inches of soil are dry.

David Keller NC
08-17-2011, 9:12 AM
Greg - You can indeed prune back tomato plants from getting too tall and still preserve their fruit-bearing ability, but they need to be the "indeterminate" type to do this. You may have noticed that tomatos come in 2 types - determinate and indeterminate. Here is a good resource on tomato growing in general:

http://urbanext.illinois.edu/veggies/tomato.cfm

A couple of other tips -

You are growing a tropical desert plant at near the northern limit of the practical range - it may help you next year to use black plastic mulch to warm the soil up earlier (tomatos appreciate 80 degree plus temperatures for maximum yield).

Tomatos suffer from a problem called "blossom end rot" where the fruits develop dead spots at their end, which rots the whole thing. Cherry tomatos are much less susceptible, but cherry tomatos also aren't ideal for canning and slicing (they are primarily meant for eating as a whole, raw fruit). This may seem unrelated to the causative agent (which is a fungus), but blossom end rot can be controlled by heavy mulching of the plant. Rapid wetting/drying of the soil promots BER.

Tomatos should never be refrigerated, at least if you intend to eat them sliced or whole as raw fruit. The refrigeration takes away a lot of the flavor, though you will never get something quite as bad as the grocery-store fruit, which is picked green and hard as a rock, and artificially ripened with ethylene gas. Cooking preserves the flavor & acidity, so yes, freezing the tomatos until you have enough to can is a practical solution. But canning tomatos is a whole lot of work for a very, very cheap product, and unlike the whole fruit in the grocery store, canned tomatos are actually vine ripened. Assuming you get a brand that has no added sugar or other flavoring ingredients, there's not much difference in terms of flavor.

For that reason I give away the large overage of tomatos I grow every year to neighbors that don't have any (and generally insert some political commentary about not buying the franken-tomatos at the store). Usually one gift of garden-grown tomatos are enough to turn them off on the grocery store version forever. :)