Thursday, May 8, 2008

Visible Tomatoes and Planting Dates

Here's a list of tomato plants with visible tomatoes and their planting dates:

Patio (container) – February 26, 2008
Garden Peach – March 1, 2008
Husky Cherry Red – March 1, 2008
Red Currant – March 1, 2008
Taxi (container) – March 15, 2008
Micro Tom (container) – April 6, 2008
Red Robin (container) – April 6, 2008


Tomatoes planted in March that have no tomatoes:

Big Rainbow – March 15, 2008
Aunt Ruby's German Green – March 22, 2008
Zhezha (container) – March 22, 2008
Salisaw Cafe – March 23, 2008
Zhezha – March 23, 2008
Green Grape – March 27, 2008
Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter – March 29, 2008

Do I have a problem with some of these tomatoes? In my opinion, not at all.

Micro Tom and Red Robin are novelty tomato plants. They are actually so small, they're windowsill plants. So I discount those two plants for the purposes of analysis.

Big Rainbow has a very long time to mature, over three months. Aunt Ruby's German Green, Green Grape and Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter have similar maturity cycles, about 80 days. Two of these are large, beefsteak tomatoes.

That leaves the two Zhezha plants and Salisaw Cafe. These plants were from the first batch from seed. When planted, they were much smaller than the plants bought from nurseries (and if you've been reading, we almost lost the Zhezha in the ground). Their lack of size at planting time probably adds two to three weeks to their normal time to maturity.

In short, it appears that everything is fine. However, I may not see a tomato on a new tomato plant for a while.


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