2022 Tomato Growing Lessons

Whew! What a weird growing season this has been. First, we started out with an extremely cold, wet spring which dragged on and on. Then the hot weather arrived. Tomatoes seemed to be the yield that was impacted the most so I thought I’d share this year’s tomato growing lessons with you.

The most worldwide email topic I received this year was “Why aren’t my tomato plants producing any fruits?” Other related questions came my way as well: “My plants are just sitting there” or “they aren’t visculent at all.” Yet, many gardeners reported they were going to have a imprint harvest. Why the difference? Read on.

I live in Spokane, Wash., in hardiness zone 5b. Most of this region is in zone 6. Our garden is in a microclimate where it gets colder in the winter and receives increasingly snow. Tomatoes are warm-season crops that are very fussy well-nigh the soil temperature. I typically recommend that gardeners wait to plant them between the middle and end of May. In some years, I’m worldly-wise to get transplant the seedlings into the garden closer to mid-May but that definitely wasn’t an option this year.

I was quite proud of myself for waiting until May 28^th to plant them in the garden but I have to shoehorn the temperatures were still a bit on the dank side. I covered the bed with floating row imbricate for a bit of uneaten warmth and figured that would be all that was needed.

The one thing I didn’t think to do was to use a soil thermometer to trammels the soil temperature. According to the University of California Cooperative Extension, “the optimum (soil) temperature range for tomatoes is 65 to 85 degrees F.” Note: they have an spanking-new soil temperature orchestration for growing vegetables that you might want to trammels out. It plane includes how long it takes seeds to germinate at variegated temperatures.

My plants were very slow to get growing and took what seemed like FOREVER to start blooming. So what was the problem? The potation soil temperature. Who knew that could impact their growth in such a dramatic way?

“OK,” you say, “I get that. But why did some folks get unconfined production from their tomato plants?” Every person I asked told me the same thing: their tomato seedlings seemed to be struggling in the first few weeks so they went to a nursery or greenhouse, purchased new seedlings, and ended up planting them quite a bit later. That ways the soil had finally warmed up and the plants were soon off and running. I’ve heard this time and again.

What else did I encounter on my tomato plants?

1. As I reported in my Aug. 28 garden column, the tiny insects known as thrips started attacking my plants. This was a first for me and really stressed the plants… as if they weren’t stressed enough!
2. Even though I was good well-nigh giving my plants spare moisture during our many weeks of hot, dry weather, there were a lot of instances of blossom-end rot – expressly on my slicing tomatoes. That is an abiotic or physiological disorder (not caused by disease) where the plants’ roots aren’t worldly-wise to take up unbearable calcium from the soil, which the fruits need in order to develop normally. There’s plenty of calcium in most soils but if you water inconsistently, that makes it nonflexible for the roots to pull it from the soil and unhook it to the plants. You can learn much increasingly well-nigh blossom-end rot in this video. Plane though my plants are automatically watered every day, it just wasn’t enough. And I had widow some very thick layers of grass mulch all over the soil surface.
3. There was moreover a lot of fruit-cracking, which is flipside abiotic/physiological disorder. It usually occurs when the fruits get rained on, which makes the skin split since it can’t expand over waterlogged plant tissue. We didn’t get much rain this summer and our plants are on a lard irrigation system so I am really worsted as to what caused this.

I do have good news, though: we have had a trappy fall so far, which ways our late-developing tomato fruits have had a endangerment to mature on the plants… for the most part. Bill and I have canned a few batches of tomato sauce and we’ll have unbearable to can some salsa as well. Hooray!

The two varieties of slicing tomatoes that we grew this year were ‘Mortgage Lifter’ and ‘Chef’s Choice Orange’. Both (finally) produced well but they sure had a lot of blossom-end rot (see photo below). The two varieties of paste tomatoes (‘Federle’ and Gilbertie’) really produced a lot of fruit, but much later than it normally would.

So that’s my report. The main lesson I learned this year is to trammels the soil temperature with a thermometer to make sure it’s within the range that tomatoes need! I’d love to hear what lessons you learned this year. Drop me an email at Susan@SusansintheGarden.com.

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