I suggest re-testing it, rather than trying to amend it without knowing how it actually needs to be amended.

Hi Phil,

Wow! Nice work. I mean that sincerely. Great effort. Unfortunately PB is a determinate plant that should never be pruned. For that matter I highly recommend never pruning a cherry type plant determinate or not. All it does in my experience is weaken the plants and cost you fruit. Regardless of fruit size determinates are not to be pruned. So that plant is pretty messed up, a major setback that explains the shocking leaves and stem thickness.

You did something similar to Stupice by lopping off the topaccidentally, but at least it is indeterminate and will recover better after another setback. I would ignore the expected days to maturity and suggest a month long delay is probably reasonable.

Lemon Boy and Anna Russian are probably fine. Days to maturity is just a guide, a very loose one. Sometimes fruit is ready much earlier than expected and sometimes much later. I doubt nitrogen is the problem. Other than the unfortunate pruning and other accident, things are probably fine.

Bob:

No wonder! Well, I guess it's a good thing that I decided to leave the Principe Borghese alone after pruning it early on. I know pruning indeterminate varieties is controversial (but I am working in a tight space), and I know never to prune determinates. I got so wrapped up in everything else that I forgot to find out which type the PB was.

I actually set out intending to buy six Stupices based on recommendation that they grow well in this area, and was going to use the mycorrhizoidal inoculant on half of them to find out if it was effective, but here's how things went: The first place I went to said they hadn't gotten any this year. I went to a larger place and they didn't have them either and weren't sure if they were going to get any. So I looked for other relatively early indeterminate varieties, and ended up not getting quite what I wanted because I looked at the signs near the plants but not the labels on the plants themselves. The following week, I found a place that had Stupice in stock and *again* forgot to check the individual plants and ended up with two different ones. It was ridiculous.

I did end up experimenting with the two Annas, but then I screwed up and pruned one of them to two stems (received inoculant) let four or five grow on the other (no inoculant). The second one is fuller, taller, and darker green, but of course there's no way to tell if the difference is the inoculant or the pruning.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. I'll do better next year.

I thought about testing the soil again, but I'm not sure how to go about doing it because I have that bat guano layered between the soil I started with and the compost I put on top, and because these tomatoes presumably have some pretty deep roots reaching down below the area that I've directly affected. I don't want to hit any roots when digging a sample, and I want to get a sample that is representative of what the roots are drawing from.

I've never counted, but I don't think I have ever had more than 50% of the flowers set fruit on anything other than a cherry tomato variety. High nitrogen usually means less flowers over all. Anna Russian with too much nitrogen would be over 8 feet tall by now, probably 5-6 feet tall with balanced nutrition. My fruit count on Anna Russians last year at this time (also planted on June 1st) was around 24 fruits for semi-pruned plants in cages and trellised, and that was about average fruit set at that point in the season for over a dozen varieties of heirlooms. If you have about half that number of fruits on severely pruned plants you are probbly doing OK.

Perhaps I missed it, but what are your temps and humidity there. High temps and high humidity can certainly reduce or stop pollination. Of course, except for shading, not much you can do about that except wait for more favorable conditions.
Best wishes, Don

It doesn't sound like you over applied N at all, not from what you listed. I also don't think you can expect every flower on the plant to produce a tomato. If it worked that way we could all just grow a couple plants and be buried in tomatos.

I think you are doing fine.

try using a battery powered tooth brush to vibrate the plants twice a week. it is true that tomatoes are self pollinating but vibrating the plants help a great deal.

i trellis my tomatoes, tied up with bailing string. i just tap the top bar with a stick twice a week and i get a lot more tomato set.

what are your overnight temps doing. most tomatoes go to sleep at 50 degrees F and won't set tomatoes.

on large tomatoes i get 4 to 7 tomatoes per each branch that bears fruit.

i prune my sweet 100's up to 2' then i tie up the outside suckers to keep it contained. this keeps the plant off the ground. it does slow them down a bit but them six sweet 100 plants will feed the whole county. LOL

WM

Spiced_ham: Thanks. It sounds from your post like I might be overreacting.

Don: I'm in Seattle, where summer temperatures are generally mild. Until this week (when we had the hottest high temperature in recorded history at 103, and the hottest low at 71 or so) highs were in the 80s and lows around 60. I honestly haven't paid attention to humidity. I grew up in the Midwest, where the humidity is stifling, and it has been comfortable here.

Bob: I was mistaken. The plant whose growth tips were all pruned, then remained about 24" tall while it grew lots of huge leaves, is the Early Girl. The Principe Borghese -- assuming the tag in the pot was correct -- is growing fine and is about 5' tall now. I'll stop pruning it.

Yellow Boy tomato, 2009-07-31: about 4' tall:

Anna Russian tomato #1, 2009-07-31: about 7' tall:

closeup of Anna Russian tomato #1:

Anna Russian tomato #2, 2009-07-31: about 5' tall. This one, unlike the other five plants, did not receive the mycorrhizoid inoculant:

closeup of Anna Russian tomato #2, 2009-07-31:

Early Girl tomato, 2009-07-31: I mistakenly pruned all the growth tips from this one soon after transplant. The only pruning since has been a few very low-hanging leaves. It's about 3' tall now:

Principe Borghese tomato (center), 2009-07-31: about 5' tall. Unbeknownst to me until recently, this is a determinate variety, so I should not have pruned it, but have kept to 2 - 3 stems and pruned all other suckers. To the left is the Early Girl, and to the right is the Stupice:

closeup of Stupice tomato, 2009-07-31:

I am jealous of your Anna Russian production! I am also growing two AR plants, and I have one tomato a little smaller than a tennis ball, and three or four others the size of a grape. They were among my most finicky plants - finicky about the excessive rain and cloudcover in June and early July. They are 6 feet tall but didn't give any flowers until recently - very late this year.

I also considered whether I had too much nitrogen, but when the weather got better, I started getting pollination, so I think perhaps that was not the problem.

I flick my flower stems every time I see one to encourage pollination - not sure if that is making the difference, but it's easy to do and people say it helps.

Other varieties had much better fruit set, but I hear AR has fabulous taste, so I'm not sorry I'm growing it (so far - I've never tasted one!).

I thought that shaking the flowers was only necessary for indoor gardening, and that bees would take care of mine, but I'll start doing it.

Hey Phil, I don't have much wisdom to add to what the others have said, as I'm rather inexperienced at this too - only my second year growing heirlooms. But, I know where you are coming from because, I too, tend to go big when I get into something like this. Not sure I went quite as over the top with preparing, researching, planning, thinking and pruning, but I was close.

One thing I will share is, I've found sometimes doing less is more. For example, I pruned aggressively last year, really buying into the idea that any branch not flowering was wasting the plant's energy and needed to go. My plants suffered from this treatment and produced only a few fruits. This year, I hardly pruned at all and they are doing much better in terms of both fruit production, size and how robust they are.

Not to open up the debate about pruning here - my point is that you seem to have some really healthy looking plants (nice chard too!). I'd suggest not sweating the nitrogen level. Don't make a big "to do" and dig up the soil to sample and potentially treat. Let nature take it's course and be happy with how well you have done - I agree with the others that you put a lot of thought and work into your garden and I believe it will pay off.

Gardening is trying to teach me patience. For me, it's tempting to try and do something all the time to hasten/enhance the harvest but I think (within reason) sometimes letting alone is the best thing one can do.

Good luck!

P.S. I too flick flowering stems. Not sure it helps with pollination/fruit setting, but it's magical when you see the little golden dust emerge.

1st of all i have only indeterminate tomatoes and only one non heirloom plant.

for the last 5 years i have been mostly green housing. this year i returned to my outside garden. this was due to health issues.

in the green house the aggressive pruning really works but not so in the out side garden.

i still prune the suckers out because i do plant very heavy. i also prune some of the leaves because the leave overlap from the neighbor plants.

about insect pollination with tomatoes. in Seed to Seed it says that the blossom on most tomatoes are such that insect pollination is all but imposable thus the vibrating of the tomatoes helps.

what i think is that you can find all kinds of methods that people have tried and work for them and not for others.

there are some things that are universal. like weed feed and water. healthy plant give you the most production.

i flood a trench every other row in my garden. one of the benefits is less weeds because i am not watering them. two night ago i forget and left the water on all night and now the weeds think i love them. oh well them to crank up the old tiller and stop that kind of thinking.

i do enjoy my time in the garden.

WM

Theoretically, you can remove soluble nitrogen from the soil by feeding it to bacteria. This would involve supplementing the bacteria's diet with sugar.

This article,
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/EOARC/newsletter/october/oct06%20draft%204.pdf, suggests using 1 kg/square meter. 1 kg. is approx. 2.2 pounds.

As an experiment, I suggest that you water one plant with 1 pound of sugar dissolved in 5 gallons of water and see what happens.

Hey Phil - I don't know how far you're willing to travel for tomato plants or if you've tried it already, but I always see Stupice at Molbak's in Woodinville, if you want to look for it next year. Decent selection of other varieties too, and high quality plants. Another surprisingly varied source of tomato plants I've found is Top Foods grocery stores.

Your plants are looking great, actually.

MA

Phil, the tomatoes look fine. Like everyone else has said, I don't think you need to worry about excess nitrogen or other issues, the plants seem to be healthy, and setting about half of the blossoms is perfectly normal for most larger varieties as far as I know. A lot of that is simply contingent on the weather, over which we have almost no control.

If your soil tested low in N last year, I doubt that the bat guano would be enough to overdo it in a single application, and even if it was a bit much, it probably wasn't enough to make the plants perform worse.

As a side note, I've grown tomatoes in Seattle for three years now, and it seems as if the "days to maturity" for each variety is extended by 2 weeks here. I don't think it's the gardener's fault that they riped slowly; we just don't have warm temperatures early in the season, and it gets cool most nights. The only way to deal with this, as you know, if to give them an artificial environment (tunnel cover, greenhouse, etc.)

The trick is simply to not let yourself obsess over the poor plants, and, as you have learned, beyond limiting the number of suckers on a indet plant, just prune as much foliage as necessary to keep the plants from getting damp leaves or blocking each other's sunlight. Keep up the good work!

Thanks, everyone, for all your helpful input. It sounds like I should let nature run its course for a few weeks, and do another soil test before taking any action.

Struwwelpeter, I'd love to experiment with adding sugar to increase the quantity of nitrogen-eating bacteria, but I don't have two otherwise-similar plants to use as control and experimental plants. If it turns out that I do have a nitrogen excess, I'll dig into the OSU article you cited and consider trying something of the sort next spring.

Also, one of my plants, the Principe Borghese, has had a few leaves turning from yellow to brown. I started a new thread about it, including several images, in case anyone reading this would like to help diagnose the situation.

Phil,

Your garden looks beautiful, your plants look very healthy. I think that you have done a great job. By what I have read I believe if you have too much nitrogen in your soil your plants do not flower or flower very little. If you have lots of flowers on your plants I would not worry about it. I have not counted, but I don't think that close to 50% of my flowers set fruit due to the cold wet weather that we had here through June and early July. Now that it has warmed up more of them are setting fruit but still not close to all. I'm just begining to get ripe fruit and think that its going well.

Enjoy your garden and try not to obsess quite so much, it will be more fun. It gets easier as you learn more every year and there is always more to learn.

Good gardening, Mary