Tomato growing tips - Page 2

We grow Ferline and Legend from Thomson and Morgan quite successfuly, we tried spraying with Bordeaux mixtutre on the others with partial success

For great tomatoes, save time, money and effort, and do your bit to stop urban decay; go to your local greengrocer, assuming you stil have one, and buy locally-grown ones.  

hello,

yes i had a very bad dose of blight this year,mainly with out door ones.

my garden is in france ! but we travel there evry month and so  grow all our veg etc there.monty said about 2 varietys that are blight resistant,RED PLUM and CRISTEL.can't find the cristel seeds yet anybody?

cheers norm.h

NORM.H wrote (see)

hello,

yes i had a very bad dose of blight this year,mainly with out door ones.

my garden is in france ! but we travel there evry month and so  grow all our veg etc there.monty said about 2 varietys that are blight resistant,RED PLUM and CRISTEL.can't find the cristel seeds yet anybody?

cheers norm.h

2 clicks and 5 seconds later

http://www.thompson-morgan.com/vegetables/vegetable-seeds/tomato-seeds/tomato-cristal-f1-hybrid/718TM

That is just one -try a google search

Hi Norm, T&M sell Cristal seeds - I think you probably just mis-spelt it?

Have had really bad blight on the allotment three years in a row on both potatoes and tomatoes.  Have abandoned potatoes forever, but this year grew the tomatoes (Alicante in the greenhouse and Gardeners Delight outside in pots and in raised beds).  Alicante got it late on and I have to say the flavour wasn't anything special - think perhaps lack of any sunshine until it was too late.  Outside the GDs all got blight, however I literally hacked and burned anything that seemed even remotely suspect and got a pretty good crop - enough to freeze, sauce and chutney, but so late that really the fresh ones were not tremendous.  Poss my fault for growing the 'old favourites'?  Time I tried something new I guess.  I did plant some Tumbling tom red in hanging baskets and they were not bad, although again got the dreaded lurgy mid summer.  This is so tough on new gardeners - I so wish that there was a decent treatment short of moving to the mediterranean!

I get fungal problems here in Central Italy, cathy, though vastly less than I used to get back in humid old Sydney. It gets mighty hot here but it's mainly dry heat.

Oh well, the med would have been nice!

Absolutely, supporting your local greengrocer is so important but sadly very few stock more than two, sometimes three varieties, so I'll continue to buy tomatoes from the greengrocer for most of the year, and in the summer I'll grow a few plants of the varieties I can't buy in the shops. 

My local greengrocer grows a lot of his own - including some of my varieties now, too - but a lot of his stock are the dreaded hydroponic stuff. Incredible.

I truly wish you better luck with your tomatoes than I've ever had, people!  This year, off six bush plants, I've got a total of less than 400gm of green marbles.

I always grow sungold tomatoes which have the best flavour and disease resistance of any I've tried. Living in the south of England I sow the seeds in February on a south facing windowsill so that I have really strong, healthy plants to put in my greenhouse by the beginning of April. To protect from blight water carefully so that you do not splash the leaves and check the plants every day for the first signs of the disease. If you remove this the plants remain healthy and you'll still be picking in November.

I only grow heirlooms and must say that it is hard to pick just one or two faves. I grow both in garden and in greenhouse and had no problems with blight, however, we had a cool and wet June which really set us back. Would have to say that Martino's Roma and Ludmilla's Plum were my fave pastes, Black Cherry remains the best cherry out there, and my fave slicer this year? Tough one, probably Green Zebra, though not a true heirloom, or Black Seaman.

Just finished picking to ripen this week two types from the Greenhouses, Gardeners Delight & Moneymaker. Must admit been lucky this year, no blight on indoor crops. Outside plants caught blight later in season, but had done crop rotation, so hopefully may have had some influence. Never known toms to last this late though !!

A bad year for growing Tomatoes in the uk this year due to climatic conditions.

I have been growing Tomatoes since 1994 when I first started to research the best way to grow them and found the tastiest variety to be "Gardener's delight". I grow them by the Hydroponic method in a greenhouse, and would myself never consider any other method. Yield is far and away above conventional methods and, blight has never been a problem, but it is essential to keep ventilation going through the autumn.  Attached find my final harvest picture in mid November 2012. another bonus with Hydroponics is that the pile of green tomatoes that we are all left with with at the end of the season will ripen over the next few weeks if layed out on trays, probably due to the nutrient balance in the feed, In the past I have been able to have a few Tomatoes left into January the following year. A retired friend of mine in the mid nineties asked me if my Tomatoes had a chemical taste due to the hydroponic feed? I gave a bag full the next week. His comment later was that they tasted like real Tomatoes used to taste!

method

if you looking to monty or adam for advice you will be failure

the secret to growing tomato  getting an early start. planting  out under protection(cloche,wall o water or hoop house)  growing in raised beds,watering at ground level and good air circulation. And spraying for blight long before there is even a warning that it is the area(starting 2 weeks after transplant.