In a fit of panic, I threw away half of my seedlings because someone put a bug in my ear that they had Fusarium Wilt....they didn't....ROTFLMBO!! Live and Learn :)

my worst mistake was not learning more from an elderly neighbor I once lived near. He grew the most amazing tomatos!every year without fail
I regret that I didn't have the interest back than, like I have now.

This is only my second year trying so I have a few :P

1) BER stinks I bought a moisture meter and it's helping this NOOB out

2) When the local nursery gives you tomatoe tone and says put sprinkle of pepper on EASY left curl stinks to

3) When you do put to much fert. down apparently don't over compensate by pruning your lovelyÂs so much that you still don't have fruit set.

Ouch but still loving and learning it.

Vanessa

Had 4 tomato plants in my dining room-under flourescent tubes. They were fine with small green fruit. Than all 4 died practically over nite. Took one roots and all to the county farm agent. He sent it to the state lab. The results came back they died from excess salt. The results said that I had been using Miracle Gro, which I had, frequently, and it is very very high in salt content. Very disappointed.

In early May, took the walls-o-water off the Caspian Pink and Koralik I planted at the end of February, because they were 2-3 feet high and I thought they were big enough to survive on their own, and I needed the wows for a couple new transplants. Intended to go back to the garden that evening and wrap them in plastic, since the wind was picking up and it was in the 40s. Didn't make it until a day or two later, and most of the leaves were brown and curled. Sigh. All the other tomatoes, which were much smaller but protected by wows or bubble wrap, were fine. The CP looked so bad that I pulled it up a week later, but the roots were so healthy that I decided to give it another chance and transplanted it. They've both revived, but still don't look happy.

And a couple weeks later we had a heat wave with temperatures in the 80s-90s!!

Dumbest thing? Aggressively pruned them.

Learned that lesson the hard way years back. ;)

Dave

Bought a yellow pear plant that had two stalks coming up. It also had a third, much smaller tomato plant in the edge of the 4 inch container. Planted them all (the small one separately) and waited. The YP's took off like crazy and the smaller one seem like it was only lagging behind. My neighbor comes by and wants a few plants, so I give him some, including the little guy. Now it's 6 weeks later and my YP's are fine and my neighbor is bragging about how healthy and productive his "BRANDYWINE" is looking. (It's probably a PINK.) Foghorn Leghorn would have called me "about as sharp as a pound of wet leather."

my husband is the gardener in our family. He buys healthy plants, at least 12 inces high, Our soil is very sandy so he adds good dried horse manure and peat, mixes it all up, waters them 2 times a day for about 2 weeks and then after that, once a day he "irrigates"... No pinching or fertilizing, or other additives. I do go out early in the am and make sure the horn worms are taken care of but other then that nothing.. We have tons of tomatoes every year. He says "That how we did it on the ranch".!
Maybe every one is trying too hard?

Impossible to try too hard, silly!

Dave - What do you mean by "aggressively pruned them"? I'm using twine trellises and pruning to avoid having too many vines....

Many years ago I had "sudden wilt" on a hybrid plant - I think it was a Better Boy or something like that. Advice I received was that aphids were causing it and I should spray with soap solution, which I did, and it killed the plant. I tried to wash it down with the hose afterward to remove the soap, but the damage had been done. What had really happened to make the plant wilt, I now believe, was the roots were being gnawed by japanese beetle grubs in the bed, and the vascular system was being challenged. The beetle invasion of that year helped me to figure it out eventually.

The first tomato plant I ever grew I bought on a whim at a random garden center. It had no label, and I had no idea that there were so many different kinds. In my mind it was just a "tomato".

It grew and grew, with no help from me (I had no clue what it might need), and I waited for tomatoes. They started ripening while they were still small, so I figured out they were cherry tomatoes.

That plant was a monster who threatened to swallow up my house. I wrestled with it nearly every day trying to keep it supported. It never occurred to me to prune the damn thing. I just kept propping it up with anything I could find, including upside down rakes, poles, branches, whatever. You should have seen this hilarious set up by the end of the season. I wish I had pictures.

The tomatoes were sure good though. The rest, as they say, is history. I was hooked.

When I first moved to Sacramento, I had over 40 tomato seedlings I put into my new garden, many of them new varieties I was trying, with my handmade name tags arranged like little soldiers in their rows. When I finally started getting tomatoes in mid-summer, I had a particularly scrumptious one, and I checked to see what it was. My tag was blank, because the Sacramento sun had faded the ink away. Checking them all, I found nothing but blanks. Of course, I hadn't made a paper map of their layout. From then on, I made sure to tag AND map all my tomatoes! (and went through all types of "sun-proof" pens, settling on grease pencils)

Carla in Sac

I did something similar to Sausesmom. Had 40 different seeds, collected from heirloom tomatoes. Each seed was labelled by my DH. I drew a grid and wrote down the type of seed as we stu ck them in a seed starter exactly 8 by 5 openings. That's fourty. Then I put the grid I drew in a "safe place". Problem is, I can't remember where the "safe place" is. So we're now growing 40 unknown tomato plants.

Let a heavy planting of plum tomatoes sprawl. Couldn't get at them when they started to ripen and they'd fall off the vine if I tried to drag them clear. What a mess. Finally dawned on me to use a rake. DUH.

I have done so many 'dumb' things but this was the dumbest:

Set up a huge table on my patio and had many trays of 8" tomato transplants--probably around 70 plants in this particular location.

One day spotted a few whitefly--yikes, never had this happen before. Very bad down here as they can carry TYLCV virus. Picked up every single plant, turned it over and got rid of all the whitefly I saw. Whew, good thing I caught that early. Next day, same thing. More whitefly. Again looked at every single plant and dealt with it. Couple more times and I started looking around. I had a huge pot planted out in flowers with an ornamental sweet potato cascading down the side right next to the table. Every thing looked normal but I turned the sweet potato leaves over and there were BILLIONS of whitefly. I was growing my plants right next to whitefly factory. I would take them off the tomato plants and a bunch would immediately hop on over from my sweet potato. Very bad 'companion planting'.

Over watering, over fertilizing, planting too early or late, too small of container, you could pretty much name it and I've probably stumbled my way through it but the dumbest thing I've done with tomatoes is NOT growing them.

When I moved to a sloping, wooded site 25 yrs ago I picked the sunnyest, flatest lrg spot I had, tilled her up and made garden same as I'd done all my life. After 3 yrs of the deer, coons, possums and squirrels getting ALL of it I quit, the job kept me awful busy anyway and electrifying a fence wasn't an option back then, still isn't for me and that well couldn't keep up with the competition the trees put on it either.

For whatever reason, it never dawned on me that I could at least have some veggies in containers and do what it took to protect them. Thankfully that was, although a long time coming, a temporary situation and with the advent of motion detector spotlights being readily availible, I'm in ground again too and loving it!

Adapt, Improvise, Overcome!

Thanks to all who contributed here...it was a good way to learn!

thank you penserosa, for showing me that i am in good company! i still think i win the prize for overpruning. i wish i had a picture. right now it looks completely bare with just the three spots where i have flowers. other than that there is one small leaf branch. hmm. guess i missed that one! it was my first prune. now i'm scared to touch the rest.

Not realizing the plant was determinant and wondered where the tomatoes went.
I would say mixing up which plant is which all the time is a close second. If it were not for the darker green I probably would have a dwarf under a 6 foot trellis.

Have done many of the above...unintentionally broke branches right off trying to make the plant more "comfortable." BTW, I'm afraid that I might be making one major mistake right now! I'm leaving a cluster of almost fully ripened Early Girls out there (usually I would have harvested them by now), even though it's early in the season and it's been trying my patience waiting for them to turn. It's just that they look so beautiful, and I've documenting the growing season with photos so I'm thinking to myself, "Just another day until the bottom ones color up a bit more, and I will take one last photo before bringing them in." We'll see if the neighborhood squirrels agree with the decision to press my luck!

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=850461&l=ab102&id=589258201

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=850461&id=589258201#pid=850462

Wenderina- wow, those are some absolutely beautiful tomatoes. I'm the same way though, I would leave them on until the animals get them just to see them all perfect. Good luck with them!
Joy

"Dumbest thing you've done with or to your maters?"
Do you mean all time or recently? :-) It's hard to pick one thing as dumbest.

- My first year I didn't anchor the cages with rebar. They blew over.

- Every year I will invaribly knock off or cut off 2 or 3 green tomatoes by accident.

- Triple stacking the cages. Getting out a ladder to pick tomatoes is not fun.

- I let a plant get too big in a WOW and couldn't get the WOW off without damaging the plant. I had to leave the WOW for the whole growing season.

But I consider the following the dumbest thing I ever did because I was experienced and should have known better:
Seedlings were growing too quickly and leggy so I moved them to total darkness for a week to slow them down. Then I introduced them to light (florescent mind you) too quickly and cooked a lot of the leaves. Most of 'em made it through it, but they were a sad looking bunch for a while.

Randy

I just topped my previously dumbest things...this evening I went to pick an abnormally HUGE fruit from my Cherokee Purple. It was growing at the bottom of the plant and the stem/vine attached to it was really thick; I tried but couldn't just snap it off at the spot where you usually pop the fruit off the vine (you know what I mean, where you press down and the fruit detaches easily). I twisted it really carefully, partially obstructed by the cage for five minutes and still no detachment, so I grabbed a pair of scissors and cut *carefully* through the stem. oh the heartbreak--I cut through a nearby stem and THUD! along with the reddish one I meant to harvest, two beautiful, fist-sized though completely GREEN fruits dropped to the ground! I thought I was going to be sick. I know I actually whimpered. oh the regret, but ah, such is life.

BTW, thanks Joyful, glad you liked the picture...those guys made it past the squirrels ok!

I used some 10-10-10 lawn fert.
Only after applying did I notice the weed killer on the bag.
:(
I had the plain and weed killer types.
Grabbed the wrong one.

Lost many toms.
Trouble was 2 were F1s from a X I tried.