2015 Tomato Growing

Just a quick questions if I may. For those non-greenhousers, are your toms flowering?

I know Jenny is well ahead of me as above, some of mine are just starting to flower. As this is an unsual year for me what with one thing and another, I was wondering, is this about normal time (if there is such a thing!) for flowering to begin with outdoor toms in the ground?

Cheers
GG

 

I have half of my tumbling toms outside and half in my conservatory. The ones indoors flowered much earlier than the ones outside, but my outside ones have little fruits on them now and seem to sprout new flowering shoots every few days.

I have some standard climbing ones though and they are outside but haven't flowered yet.

 

I had a disaster on Thursday. I came home from work and one of my tumblin tom plants was completely flopped over and all the leaves wilted, one of the main stems was so heavy with toms that the weight just made it fall at the very base.

I lifted it up and saw the base had a big split in it too. I did an emergency repot, removed a few more of the lower stems and planted it deeper so that the split was under the soil. Gave it a massive water and hoped for the best. 2 days later the leaves are all back to normal and looks like its holding up. Fingers crossed because this plant has loads of toms on it.

 

Toms flower at any time, it depends when you sowed the seed.
Some years I've planted out in late May with the first truss flowering, other years much later flowering.
I do prefer to plant out before the first truss flowers.
To me its a bit like planting out bedding plants in flower, once they start to flower, the plant thinks its made it, so tends to stall for a while.

 

hi everyone, once again what was supposed to be gardeners delight have turned out not to be, the ones I bought as GD have turned out to be striped and I would say they are more tigrella than GD so I now give up on trying to source original GD

regds Alex

 

Update on my conservatory toms.

 

Thanks John. I keep telling myself to grow small versions as it looks like a jungle out there. I have one plant (variety unknown ) that is only about 3 foot tall and git's loaded with flowers/fruit. I shall be saving some seed from that for next year. I have Pomodoro, Roma and Gardeners delight, plus the unknown.

 

Here's one of my teton de Venus fruit. They are supposed to have that long tip!
(Image small as out of focus!)
And here are the effects of the biological control (parasitising flies) on the greenfly in my greenhouse. Unfortunately I waited too long and they'd got out of control before I bought the parasite. The brown ones are dead!

 

Hiya JWK,

Yes, they've reached the population where the tide is turning against the green meanies! The blurb on the website said that these were to be introduced early on in the infestation, and that predators (ladybirds or lacewings) were better for severe infestations. These guys are little trackers-down of aphids (tiny flies, you hardly catch sight of them in the greenhouse) to keep things at a very low level for the rest of the season.
http://www.greengardener.co.uk/product.asp?id_pc=4&cat=4
I'd set my heart on these so didn't want to buy two different species (+expensive!), although I really was infested by the time I ordered them.

I've been using homemade garlic spray and washing up liquid to tip over the worst infestations. But being lazy I've been known to make it up too concentrated and damage the vegetation (plus it can't be good for the soil. My poor echinops in the front garden has lots of brown patches from washing up liquid.

 

Couple of Minki Marvels coming on