I am a complete novice but we had a light frost about a week ago and per Dawn I covered EVERYTHING. She also said to water well to protect the roots, which I did. I also have a million tomatoes coming in, and I plan to eat every last one.

I have a big old stack of blankets on the ready. Frost can kiss my shiny hiney! I will beat it ;).

Jo

Susan,

There's always tons of green tomatoes as frost approaches. That's the heartbreaking thing about fall tomatoes.....by the time the plants are just covered with fruit, the nights are getting chilly.

There are several ways to deal with them, and the choice is yours.

I usually move a couple of the containers to the garage where I drag them out into the sun during the daytime and drag them back inside the garage at night. I've kept plants producing until at least the end of December that way. However, as daylength and temperatures decrease, so does flavor and I believe that occurs because you need lots of heat and light to get the best and most full-flavored fruit.

If the choice is to cover up the plants, or to either pick the fruit or pull up the plants, I'd rather cover them up. Often, if you can cover them up well enough to protect them from the first couple of cold nights, you'll be rewarded with several more weeks of weather warm enough to ripen fruit before the really cold winter weather sets in.

For covering up tomato plants, you can use any sort of textile material----I have a collection of old blankets, sheets, bedspreads, quilts, curtains and table cloths I use. You also can use Reemay-type floating row cover material which comes in different weights. Be sure you understand how much frost protection your row cover is supposed to give you because there are very lightweight ones that only give you a couple of degrees of protection while the heavier-weight ones called Frost Blankets usually give you 8 degrees of frost protection. The specific one I have gives you 4 degrees, but I sometimes put down a double layer and while I am not sure it gives me 8 degrees of protection, it gives more than 4.

You can use heavy-duty 4mm or 6mm clear plastic but you need to suspend it above the plants because anywhere the plant foliage touches the plastic, the plastic will conduct the cold temps to the plants and that portion of the plants will suffer freeze damage.

If you happen to have a couple of big empty trash cans around, they can be used to cover plants, but when I do that, I always throw a big blanket over each trash can too.

You can pull up the plants and hang them upside somewhere in a non-freezing location and the tomatoes will continue to ripen over time. I have used the insulated but unheated garage for this, which works if the weather is only a bit below freezing and I have used the in-ground tornado shelter, where cherry tomato plants continued to ripen fruit for at least 6 weeks after I pulled up the plants. (I've done it with peppers too.)

You can pick all the fruit if a very hard frost or freeze is approaching and you feel like you cannot cover up the plants enough to keep them from freezing. Then, you line up all the fruit on the counter or in flat cardboard boxes or on a table or somewhere in a non-freezing location and out of direct sunlight. The tomatoes that are more mature (hopefully breaking color a bit by the time you pick them) will go ahead and ripen. The tomatoes that are nowhere near breaking color generally won't ripen, but every now and then they will. I usually either make fried green tomatoes or chow chow out of those, or give them to someone else who intends to use them for chow chow or fried green tomatoes.

If you have grown any of the longkeeping types like Longkeeper, Reverend Morrow's Longkeeper, Red October, Old-Fashioned Garden Peach, etc., those will hold a long time and slowly ripen....sometimes for 3 months or more. I believe George has had good luck with Sunray doing the same thing even though it is not specifically sold as a longkeeping type. To store longkeepers, it is better to store them untouching in a cool location, like a basement or unheated interior closet, where they are not subjected to a lot of variation in temperature and humidity. However, some people just line them up on a kitchen table or shelf and let them ripen there.

I used to go to a lot more trouble to keep my fall tomatoes going as long as possible, but noticed that the deeper into the season they ripen, the less flavorful they are. That's not to say they aren't worth having....but just that an Oct., Nov., or Dec.-ripened tomato is not the same high quality/flavor as one that ripens in June, July or August. Still, they're better than anything you'll find in a grocery store during that time frame.

Finally, if you're really determined to protect them as long as possible, you can use PVC pipe to frame a hoophouse-style low tunnel to protect them, and cover the PVC pipe with 6mm or heavier greenhouse plastic and then also put a layer of 8-degree frost blanket material over the plants inside the low tunnel. You even could put a small heater inside the tunnel, taking extreme care to be sure nothing is close enough to the heater to catch fire. Or, you could paint milk jugs or 2-liter soda bottles black, fill them with water, and use them inside the tunnel as solar heat collectors. In order for that to work well, the solar collectors should be in place for several days, soaking up all the sunlight and heat possible or, if you're just adding them at the last minute before a threatened freeze, fill them inside with hot water.

There's plenty of options---it is all a matter of how much time and effort and money you want to put into it.

People in some parts of the country top the plants (if they're indeterminates) and pinch off any new blooms a month or two before their expected first frost so the plants will put all their energy into ripening the current fruit. However, I generally don't do that since our 'first freeze' here can occur very, very late some years. I'd hate to top the plants in Sept. and then not have a hard frost or freeze until December.

Dawn

Thanks, Dawn! That's a lot of good info and I appreciate it! You, too, Jo!

I thought I recalled that you mentioned spray misting the fruits with a high phosphorous fertilizer, like Bloom Time or something like that. Do you remember that, Dawn?

Also, I don't have an enclosed garage or anything to move them to, but I do have a carport that is attached to the house on two sides, east and south. I could put them in there, park the car in front of them, and that would give them some protection, don't you think? Also, cover them up with sheets and blankets. A couple I may just have to cover because the vines are just too big to move around.

I could start removing the flowers on some of them. But, I'm kinda thinking with the La Nina pattern and all, we might get an extended and nice, warm fall.

Susan

Susan,

You're welcome.

I think you're remembering that I mentioned that one way to try to encourage tomato plants to form blossoms during intense summer heat is to water the plants with a water-soluable bloom booster-type fertilizer like Super Bloom several days in advance of a cold front that is going to temporarily drop summertime's high temps back down into the right range for pollination/fertilization to occur. If you can get the timing of it right and if the cold front lasts a day or two, you'll often get new blooms and good fruitset with that small bit of manipulation.

The carport likely will give them some protection. I have had plants on a covered porch avoid freeze damage much more than similar plants out in the yard merely because the porch roof and the plants' closeness to the house gives them a slightly warmer, drier microclimate.

I don't normally remove flowers either because is our weather is so unpredictable in general. our With La Nina we 'should' have a warmer, drier and milder autumn. Mother Nature may surprise us though since she seems to have thrown everything odd in weather terms at us this year. Also, a drier, warmer autumn overall does not necessarily translate to a later first freeze. Since our weather here in the middle of the country is so unpredictable, in the fall I just prepare for the worst and hope for the best. The reality usually falls somewhere in the middle.

Dawn

Thanks, Dawn - I think it is too late to encourage more flowering, and I don't want to take any energy away from the developing fruits, so I'll leave them alone. I did fertilize them well with Tomato Tone a couple weeks ago. Should I fertilize again or not? Sorry for all the questions, but perhaps I'll remember all this next year.

Still checking the plants daily; haven't had to water near as much, as with the shorter daylight hours, temps in the 80s, they are not soaking up as much moisture as they did during the summer. I also do the "finger" check to make sure I am not over- or underwatering.

My Rutgers is setting some nice size tomatos as we speak right now and continually is pumping out more daily. This has been a real workhorse in the garden this year - more than any other tomato I grew. Has that been your experience with it. Dawn?

Have to reveal a "funny" to y'all. I kept checking the Supersweet 100 and there was one tomato that kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I was thinking perhaps an aberrant growth spurt of some sort, but something was weird that I should have about a 3 oz. tomato on a cherry tomato plant. This went on for a couple of weeks, and I was so darned proud of that "big, little" tomato.

The other day I was out untangling some of the vines, and discovered that one of the branches from the Rutgers had become entangled with the Supersweet 100, and voila! there was my "big, little" tomato - attached to the Rutgers branch! Heeheeheeheehee on me! So, I no longer have a "big, little" Supersweet, but rather a pretty normal, still growing Rutgers. What a goof I am......

Susan

I wouldn't fertilize again as long as their color is good since they are outdoor plants.

If they were going indoors to a bright sun porch or greenhouse to be overwintered, I'd fertilize so they could set fruit now that would ripen indoors in winter time.

Rutgers is always very reliable, as are several others. In my garden, Early Girl is never early, but she produces all summer long and right up until killed by frost, so she's another very reliable one, as are Jet Star, Momotaro, Heidi, Azoychka, Arkansas Traveler, Brandy Boy, Mortgage Lifter, Ildi, Sweet Million, Bradley and Red Defender. Better Bush always produces well here and so does Bush Goliath. Some of the most consistent producers are not the absolute best in flavor, but they make up for it by producing tons of tomatoes with good, if not great, flavor. Some of the types that have great flavor may not produce as many fruit per plant, but the flavor makes growing them worthwhile too.

Three of my best producers this year were Rutgers Select, Heinz 1439 and Santa Clara Canner. They just about produced more tomatoes than I had time to pick, giving me lots of tomatoes for the making/canning of salsa. Black Cherry and SunGold always produce well and have excellent flavor. When I find a variety that tastes good, has good disease resistance and produces well, I tend to stick with it. The problem, though, is not that there's not enough great varieties....it is that there are too many and it is hard to narrow down the list to grow every year.

That's funny about your big tomato. My vines are always entangled like that too because the tomato beds just become a jungle by late June or early July. I try to alternate colors so that when two grow together, I knew which is which because, for example, one produces medium-sized yellow round tomatoes and the one beside it produces black striped tomatoes or pink oblate tomatoes or whatever. There's less surprises that way. I tried planting them in beds segregated by color, but didn't like that as much because if two vines comingled, I couldn't use fruit color to decide which was which.

Tess's Land Race Currant is one of the few tomato plants that I've grown that consistently produces more tomatoes than I can pick. There have been days I've spend 3 hours picking little tomatoes off Tess's and have finally just stopped picking and said to myself "The birds can have the rest.."

Every year I try to cut back on how many tomatoes I grow but it is hard because I want to grow (and eat!) them all.

Dawn

Just curious, does Tess's Land Race Currant reseed for you? I know some of the currants and cherries do, so was just wondering if once you plant it, it comes back, and if so, does it come back true?

Thanks for the list. I had Bradley on my "maybe" list. Is it a small or medium red? Having to limit my list to 8 varieties is pretty daunting really because of the fact that there are so many varieties to choose from.

I think perhaps the smaller varieties, including cherries, do better in containers and that is the only way I can grow them.

So far I have 2 cherries - Black Cherry and Sungold

After that I want 2 small to medium reds, and one will be Rutgers; a couple of small to medium blacks, and a couple pinks and/or yellows.

I was really surprised that the Rutgers indeterminate did so well in a 5 gallon bucket. After I discovered it was in a smaller container than it should be, I decided to be lax about caring for it, not even mulching, very little fertilizer, because I really expected it to decline, stop producing, and die. But, it only seemed to get better. Is that odd? I only watered it every other day during the heat this summer, so I didn't "coddle" it at all, thinking it was going to probably die anyway. It ended up being the best producer. It fought disease and pests like a true soldier, ignored my neglect, and then bounced back with a vengeance when the weather began to cool down. So, if I can't rely on anything else, it seems I can rely on Rutgers. That I have to champion.

Susan

Susan,

Tess's reseeds everywhere, but usually not where I want it to be and I tend to just pull and toss the seedlings because by the time they pop up sometime in May, my raised-from-seed plants are already growing. Sometimes I dig up a couple of Tess' volunteers and move them to the western fenceline of the chicken run so they can shade the chicken run area and drop tomatoes for the chickens to eat. Tess's has to be sited very, very carefully because it will grow very tall (mine climbs to the top of an 8' cage and then cascades back down all the way to the ground) and will get 4' to 6' wide, so it has a tendency to smother everything around it and also to block pathways. Last year I had it too close to a path and just had to keep hacking away at it with pruners so I could get past it to reach the rest of the garden. This year I planted it 4' back from the pathway and it wasn't as much of a problem.

Bradley is a medium-sized pink, and sometimes the fruit are as large as 10-12 oz. earlier in the season but smaller later in the season, maybe 6 to 8 oz. It is a Univ. of Ark. release from long ago and is a very tasty tomato and very drought-tolerant.

No, it is not odd that your tomato produced better with less attention, it is exactly what one would expect. I say this all the time...many gardeners give their tomato plants too much water and too much fertilizer and get tons of foliage and not as many tomatoes. Remember what the purpose of a tomato plant is.....

The purpose of a tomato plant is NOT to set fruit for us (that's our goal for them, but it isn't their goal), but rather to set fruit/seed in order to perpetuate the tomato species. If a tomato plant is babied and coddled and is living on easy street, so to speak, then it can relax and poke along and enjoy the good life because it does not feel any urgent need to set seed. On the other hand, if the plant has a little bit more of a hard life with not so much fertilizer and not as much water, it feels more of a sense of urgency to hurry up and form fruit so it can perpetuate its species before it dies. (You and I know that we aren't going to willingly let our tomato plants die even if we're keeping them slightly dry and a little bit hungry, but the plants don't know that.) So, you almost always will find that a slightly dry, slightly hungry plant produces a higher yield than a very pampered plant.

I have to treat my plants quite different, depending on if they're in the ground or in containers.

With plants in the ground, I don't fertilize unless I am trying to manipulate the bloom cycle in advance of a mid-summer cold front. I just enrich the soil with compost and chopped/shredded leaves in late fall/early winter and plant in the spring and let the soil feed the plants. As long as we have an average weather year, that's all they need. I am sure you remember some previous tough weather years, like 2007, where constant excess rainfall impeded nutrient uptake and I had to resort to foliar feeding to bypass the water-clogged roots, but that is rare.

With plants in containers, because the constant watering necessary in hot weather leaches out nutrients, I have had better luck if I put a pelleted slow-release fertilizer in the soil mix to make up for the fact that almost-daily watering leaches nutrients out nonstop. Even with that, I sometimes give them a feeding with a water-soluable fert., (usually compost tea or liquid fish/seaweed emulsion, but sometimes Miracle Grow or something similar) once or twice a month. So, it is somewhat harder to treat the container plants in quite as 'callous' of a way as I treat the in-ground plants because they can't reach out farther into the soil like in-ground plants can in order to find more moisture or nutrients.

I have noticed that with in-ground plants, I tend to get the heaviest fruit set in May/June (even April if I can plant them early in a good weather year) and those fruit are my main June/July harvest.

With container-grown plants, I tend to see the heaviest fruit set in June and early July (if temps allow) and the main harvest from them is more of a July/August thing. Is it an accident that heavier fruit set occurs on the container-grown plants just when they are really starting to struggle with the heat and drier summer weather? I don't think so. It is just exactly what you'd expect from them when you remember that they must form seeds to perpetuate the species "in case" they don't survive the tough times.

I don't pamper much of anything in my garden, and I pamper the tomatoes less than most other plants. It drives a couple of my gardening neighbors nuts because that think I neglect my tomatoes whereas they pamper theirs.....and guess which plants produce the best? I rest my case. (smile)

It did take me quite a few years of growing tomatoes to learn that I needed to treat them less kindly instead of more kindly. In terms of tomato plant productivity, I always prefer a hotter, drier year to a cooler, wetter year and that doesn't make sense to some people, but it is based on many years of observing what kind of yields I get in various kinds of weather.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Photo of Bradley tomato here