Can I get tomato plants from seeds of store-bought tomatoes?

Boron Elgar wrote: ...

what kind of season do you have? it seems that ours is too short for most volunteers to do much.

if i were going to grow a lot of different OP and heirloom varieties i think that would be more interesting and have a better chance of getting decent results, but i've been banned from trying other varieties now. we have too many tomatoes in storage ATM so it is likely we're skipping a major planting of tomatoes this year and will just put in a few cherry tomato plants.

as for diseases, our location seems to favor certain types of late season blight, but if we can get a crop through the mid-summer it doesn't matter what the blight does. it doesn't ruin the fruit. last season was unusual for us in that the disease took 90% of the crop just in the last few weeks of ripening. greenhouse people said it was last seen in this area 80 years ago. likely weather and growing medium related, but hard to prove without a lab to do the work and ways to trace things...

songbird

Northern NJ. Spring has just sprung the past couple of weeks. But I also direct sow tomato seeds every year, though, and that makes them later than volunteers, too. I can usually harvest well into October.

I do not can tomatoes. I consider them edible seasonally and delightful at that.

As I have mentioned, I have my tomato plants very, very close together in the plot. The thing is so dense it is difficult to harvest at times. I have to lift plants out of the way to see ripe fruits at any real depth.

I have gotten blight or other fungal problems with tomatoes at times. I gave up on rotation planting, as that did not seem to solve the problem. I think weather is a big contributing factor with my disorders, none of them too serious. I also grow in large tubs on the deck, where there is no crowding. That doesn't eliminate the problems, either, but I have never had huge losses.

Boron

Fungus with nightshades is a result of wet leaves over night. When needed water in the AM and not the plant, water the ground only... tomatoes are best watered with buried soaker hoses, never overhead watering. Tomatoes also benefit from good aeration, do not crowd. I'm fortunate in that my vegetable garden is situated alongside a small natural spring, I plant tomatoes closest to the spring, I never need to water as that ground is always ideally moist.

Brooklyn1 wrote: ...

can't keep the fog/dew off the plants here. overhead watering happens only very rarely (when it's really hot and the plants stop setting fruit) and usually they are dry again pretty quickly.

last year was wet consistently enough that i don't recall ever spraying the tomatoes at all or even doing much watering (maybe twice the whole summer).

songbird

Just as over in RFC, you are a cut and paste idiot here, too.

No one controls the rain or the dew.

Tomatoes *can* be grown quite successfully in VERY crowded conditions as my photos show. This is only mid July, too. You should see the bed a month later. And this bed is rarely watered. The shelter of the plantings keeps the soil shaded and moist and also keeps the weeds down.

A lot of kitchen gardening can be done intensively, if one puts a mind to it.

Now, back in the bozo bin, where you have spent virtually all of the past 14 years.

Thought you, and, perhaps others here, might find this interesting. I am not sure how well it works with all tomato varieties and climates, but it intrigues me.

Boron Elgar wrote: ...

there's nothing wrong with trying something out to see how it goes. i do know that when i've watered the tomatoes too much they do taste watered down.

a normal tomato crop here is 20-40lbs per plant for the beefsteaks and probably 10-20lbs of cherry tomatoes per plant.

songbird

Just how many acres of tomatoes do you grow that you can average your yield accurately in a 50 percentile range, or do you just have a couple three plants... I'm serious... I put in about fifty plants of various types and often plants right next to each other have a very different yield. However with ~fifty plants I always harvest way WAY more than I can use, I give plenty away, feed those bitten by rodents and bugs to deer, and at end of season I harvest many more green tomatoes than I feel like frying/pickling... deer eat green tomatoes too. I long ago gave up canning tomatoes, salad tomatoes are too wet and besides I can buy canned romas by the case at the big box stores and use those to make sauce for a whole lot less money, time, and labor. The only time I may weigh/photograph is when I happen to find an exceptionally large/unique specimen. I've actually never bothered to weigh/count any of my crops, there's always more than I can possibly use... in fact a few years ago I decided to donate a third of my 2,500 sq ft garden to growing blueberry bushes.

I find a measure of unpredictability and variability, even when I have grown the same varieties over several seasons.

I see this in many of the kitchen garden crops, though. It is not unique to tomatoes. Some year I get a lot more of a particular bean variety, or huge broccoli, or more cukes than I can shake a stick at and another year even a tried and true favorite may do poorly.

Obviously, one can only "control" for so much in these observations, as my garden is outdoors and subject to the elements, but I still love to try to outsmart the critters, the bugs, the weather and the rain each season.

Brooklyn1 wrote: ...

between 16 and 50 plants depending upon what we have for space and what we need to put up. it is easy to measure output in the rough because a full pail of tomatoes runs about 22lbs and when canned that usually ends up around 7 quarts. do it enough times and you get an idea of what the yeild roughly is.

yes, that is true, i just measure it roughly as a whole and we keep track of what we can so that gives us a lower bound (i don't keep track of what we eat fresh).

we put them in the garage on a table and they eventually ripen, they are not as good as fresh but they are better than nothing or most of what we get at the store. a few will rot, but while i love fried green tomatoes i can't eat that many of them.

to me the whole reason for growing veggies is to cut down on food expenses and i like knowing what goes into the food i eat. canned store bought tomatoes taste like metal to me.

the silly thing of it all is that i'm getting reactive to tomatoes. after 50something years of eating many lbs a year and now i start reacting to them?

i'd like to put in blueberry bushes too, but at the moment i'm having fun with what is here.

as we grow many flowers in addition to the veggies and a lot of our space is just wasted IMO we don't get a huge over production, but when we do Ma will turn it into something and take it around to the families or we'll can it or i'll make jam.

songbird

Boron Elgar wrote: ...

well sure, but after ten years of growing them you should have some idea of which kinds will produce.

yeah, last year a lot of our crops were eaten by animals and the weather wasn't very sunny. that along with the rot in the tomatoes meant a pretty varied and lower harvest of a lot of things than all of our other years. still, we had enough of some things and more than we could eat of others.

sure, it helps to plant a diversity of crops if you have the space for it. it also helps to have different soils to try things in.

i'm enjoying things too, it's a lot more fun than many other things and i like the schedule. part-time and when i want to, leaves time for reading during the winter and best of all the boss, once in a while, actually listens to me...

songbird

I am too adventurous (the older I get) and try many new varieties each year.

I am an inveterate seed saver and off-season seed buyer. Whenever I see an unusual tomato or other yummy cultivar, I grab the packets and stash 'em.

I brought back two tomato plants from California this past Monday. Happened to pass a sale at an arboretum and saw some tomatoes I had never noticed here in the east or online in my usual haunts. What the heck...we will see how they do.

As it is almost every year.

I have very little space. Other than asparagus, garlic, blue and blackberries, everything I grow is in tubs up on my deck. Even then, it is hard to keep the groundhogs away.

Yup.

Boron

i'd like to, i'm getting reactive to them now so i'm cutting back in how many i eat. Ma has boycotted me planting new varieties because she says they are too much work to put up.

:) good luck!

yeah. life goes on. we're not in danger of starvation so i don't get worried about such things. it's just life.

those are indeed the critters. up until last year they had not climbed into the fenced gardens to raid. they are still around, but i did get rid of the den site they'd dug out in one of our drainage ditches so they are not as quite as close. i'm hoping they'll not return as i don't like to get out the airgun. they get two warning shots...

i think there are now reasonbly good electric chargers for fences that are solar and i'd be going that ways as soon as i can when i can. the existing fence here is not very good, but it is what you'd call a sunken cost (or more like leaning at the moment :) ).

we have all the other usual suspects too. i try to accept that they do some damage and plant the most sensitive things in the fenced gardens. doesn't always work. the other thing i do is plant some areas a ways away and hope that will decoy the animals away from the closer gardens. not a sure bet, but it takes some of the pressure off.

songbird

Well, in addition to the 24 large-sized fruit tomato plants that I bought, I have about two dozen cherry tomato plants that came up from the seeds I planted. Enuf to fill all the remaining allocated garden space. Thanks, everyone, for the encouragement.