I have seven cherry tomato plants. For the forth week in a row now, I have harvested what I estimate to be 100 cherries (each time). My legs are actually sore from stooping! (I would say "make it stop!", but I'd be lying.)
But I can't grow a regular tomato for my life This years' regular plant actually had a tomato on it. (It was on half price close out). So I thought, Yippee! this one is going to fruit a lot. But NNNNOOOOOOOOOOO! It was the one and only fruit. And it did not grow any bigger than a golf ball. The love of my life teases me about the $2.50 tomato.
i dunno, around here we do well but it takes a long time to get a large tomato from the time i put the plant in the ground until we can harvest.
did it start out growing well and stop or has it always been growing?
we plant the end of May and we do not get harvested tomatoes until mid-to-late August. so that's 75 days of plenty of water, sunlight and proper temperatures for pollination.
i suggest you step up gradually as you develop your topsoil. i.e. get the next size up from cherry tomatoes in the plants you select and see if those will work, but of course, never use just them and keep some cherry tomatoes as at least then you know those work.
did you ever see more flowers?
my guess is that the temperatures get way too hot in the mid-summer and your subsoil is very tough. with those temperatures and aridity those plants are going to be sucking up large amounts of water just to stay standing upright. you may need partial mid- day shading, you most likely will need several cubic feet per plant of relatively decent soil and that plenty of water... did i mention a wind-break? you probably could use that and plenty of mulch (not touching the stem, but otherwise enough to keep the soil from getting too dried out.
transplant shock followed by different conditions than it was used to.
also, what variety was it? some are determinant.
maybe too hot too pollinate or lack of pollinators. did you ding some of the flowers?
several cubic feet per plant?
...
no, i just meant getting a different variety a little larger than the cherry tomatoes.
no, not too likely.
not sure, could have simply been the variety or a pollination issue (some do better when crossed during pollination), but the cherry tomato plants would have likely been different enough so i kinda doubt that was it.
I switched to all cherries years ago. I don't even trial anything bigger than "plum" any more - too much wastage, not enough yield. If you have Sancho Panza to aid you and want huge tomatoes, go on dreaming the impossible dream. I'll be eating cherry tomatoes. When a cherry cracks and becomes a slimy mess, it's a small fraction of the overall crop. When that happens to a 2 lb. tomato, it might be a third of the crop on that plant. I don't even want to try anymore - the windmills kept bending my lance, and Sancho wasn't around to help, anyway.
I'm at 1400 feet elevation in upstate NY, and if I get my own heirloom plants in on time (mid-may, Goddess willing) I get lots of medium to large tomatos late July-frost. Of course, I save my own seed from the best of last season, and don't go near the big box stores for free imported blight.
Mom is stuck on her favorite variety and won't budge. beefsteaks. we do well with them, but they look rather sickly from late blight from mid-august onwards. as they keep producing well enough i never have cared to fight it or spray. i do crop rotate and that is it.
average fruit per plant per season is 20-30lbs. this year was less.
still we've put up 86 quarts of tomatoes from 14 plants and given some tomatoes away or eaten them fresh.
if it were just me here i'd not grow them at all since i can no longer eat them, but they have been an important crop for us for a long time. one year we managed over 300 quarts.
we down scaled this year on tomatoes and so i could plant more dry beans. :)
y.w. :) cherries are excellent so imo no loss in growing them only. the nice thing about growing larger tomatoes is if you are canning them and want actual tomato chunks to use.
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