Tomato Growing 2024

I don't have any actual tomatoes at all yet just foliage and flowers. I assume it's due to the cold weather in spring but can I do anything to boost them a bit or is it going to be a lost cause?

 

My plants are half the size in a normal year and only a few have flowers @Jess91 They are in the ground in beefed up soil in a polytunnel with green shading netting which we put on a month or more ago when we had 2 hot sunny days. Since then it's been mostly cool and grey till this weekend. I'm hoping warmth and extra sun will boost them.

@Goldenlily26 Even here, where sunlight levels are stronger, we just use a green mesh net to shade our polytunnel so I think your blue sheet is too much.

 

Plenty of time yet, and things have warmed up recently.
If you have flowers things are moving.

 

To me it is the beauty of growing things is to see them move on each day. The seed that becomes that bow in the soil, then unfurls to a stem, then leaves x10 size of the original seed. It will produce toms, watch, wait and see.

 

"Aminopyralid contamination in manure ...I bought bags labelled 'organic".

You're correct JKW. It seems that all it needs to be labelled 'Organic', is for it to have travelled through an animal's alimentary canal. And, on it's coming out the other end, it magically becomes organic. No thought about what is going in at the mouth end. Some of us can remember DDT - a 'forever-poison'.

Just how do we eat organic?

Probably best not to mention The Green Party, especially at this time. I admit, I thought they took over when Screaming Lord Sutch (of The Monster Raving Looney Party'), died.

 

I noticed that I've got a lot more flower, and fruit setting than I did last year, and that the plants recovered from their 'you've planted me in mainly manure so I'm going to turn yellow" much quicker this year...
I'm wondering if it's connected to having increased the wood ash in their mix...?

 

I have fruit forming on all my tomatoes in the GH but they have been slower which I put down to the weather as have a similar situation with some other other veg
Plenty of others have found the same thing this year but if we get some decent weather, we still have 3 months - roughly speaking - for the fruits to mature and ripen.
It's a case of Fingers Crossed I think

 

Can Tomorite go off? just had some delivered (production date 02/24) and it has expanded the bottle, it's tight as a drum and practically barrel shaped!

 

Picked and ate the first three Sungold tomatoes this morning.

 

Maybe its fermenting in the heat?

 

Thanks @pete and @JWK that's really useful ​