I say (because we all were late here) that the sequencing lacked normal momentum. Growing light increasing and lower temps trigger chemical balances to your purpose inside every plant. Those we grow to maturity in a short 6 months are sensitive to the time of year. One cannot be 2 months off planting times around here and get normal pollenation much less growth when young plants are heat stressed and the pollen is melting. They want to be earlier is all. The phytohormone balances are key and are both heat and sunlight driven. Perhaps you might look that direction for support. I understand gibberillins are to do with senesence and thus maturity.
The problem is i can't put tomatoes in the ground when its still dropping to 30°F here over night in April and into May. We didn't get consistent 'over 60°F weather till the third week in May, last year was worse, we had snow flurries in early May and below 40°F temps overnight until the first or second week in June.
I find that tomatoes struggle to survive anytime before we have constant temps below 60°F.
Last year, they got a later start, and i planted only Better Boys, which did great but I didn't plant enough, having used up only the seed I had from the year before. (I was going to buy plants but when i went to the farm supply here all their plants looked diseased so i skipped them and planted my own late, but it didn't matter because of the late spring.
However, they produced consistently without issue well into Nov. or until the first frost. (We didn't see temps below 50°F until the third week of Nov. The few nights that were supposed to get cold i just pulled a clear poly tarp over the whole row overnight.
I had the yellow top issue years ago when i was doing a large variety of tomatoes, I had it with regular beefsteak tomatoes and with Early Girls too. That was the last year I bothered with anything but Better Boys but I did have a few bad years in the past with them. About 8 years ago the Better Boy plants did very little and suffered from all sorts of issues, but they did produce well into August before they started getting leaf spots and dying off.
This year I did twice as many plants in the larger cages, each cage is 6 and 7ft tall, and I've got 12ft cages in the other garden up front. The only Better Boy tomatoes that are growing are three plants that sprouted from two year old seeds I planted in March. They're huge plants but the tomatoes are small. Those are in a raised bed, planting box, filled solely with fresh soil, a mix of mushroom soil, peat moss, compost, and those are fertilized soley by Miracle Grow liquid and watered via a buried soaker hose. The raised beds up near the house are sort of my testing grounds for either new plants, older seeds, and duplicates of what's in the ground outback as a control of sorts.
The raised bed plants, which consist of 2 of the same Better Boy plants that failed outback, four Better Boy plants from 2022 seeds, and two Garden Monster Leader plants from the same planting as those out back.
In the front raised bed, I can't tell the difference between the Better Boy and Garden Leader plants or their fruit, both so far are only giving me small, 2.5" round fruit in clusters of three. Completely different than those out back which are giving me the odd mix of sizes.
All plants are still growing and still blossoming and putting on new tomatoes, but how many will actually mature is up to the weather. If the weather stays warm, which its supposed to for at least the rest of next week, I should see all that's on there now mature and ripen.
I did pick roughly a full bushel of tomatoes this morning, all about half way ripe. They will be red by Sun. and I suppose I'll be cooking a good many of them into sauce or canning them as whole tomatoes. The later production seems to be getting better as far as the yellow tops but not completely.
The Okra is also improving, putting on a two foot growth spurt over the past few days. production though is lower than in past years. Since the first larger picking, over two 15ft rows, I only get maybe 5 or 6 okras each day but there are hundreds of blossoms and as many smaller okra on the plant that are growing every so slowly. They usually proceed from blossom to full size faster than they have this year and they normally do better and shoot up during the hottest months, not as the temps are cooling down.
I didn't think the Garden Giant Leaders were heirloom variety plants? I thought because of the VFN resistance and the fact they were not listed among the Hybrid seeds that they were a hybrid of some sort.
They are listed as 'open pollinators'.
They say they should get to 17 oz, so far I've had a few 10 -12 oz but most are half that size. They aren't lacking for fertilizer and the PH is 6.2 to 6.7 using the test strip method and that agrees with the test I had done at the farm center at a local college. I starting using them years ago when I was planting a couple acres of tomatoes for a small stand a buddy of mine had about 15 years ago. I haven't done that now for about 8 years but continued to follow the same practices here at home.
I've downsized the garden over the past few years, mostly because its just me here now but in the past I planted the majority of my back yard, about a 35 x 47 ft area which I had fenced in top and bottom, but I had tons of ground hog issues, and still do. I used to do five rows of Tomatoes, five rows of mixed squash, five rows of lettuce, two spinach, two red beets, and 12 rows of peas in the spring that got planted as soon as the ground could be broken to plant the seeds.
I'd like to get back to doing a larger garden but to do so I'd need to fence it in heavier than before to keep out ground hogs.
This year was the first year that I had ground hogs eat tomato plants, they ate four of the new better boy plants down the ground a week after i put them in the garden. They never touched the Garden Leader Monsters.
The Garden Leaders are a different looking plant, they're a distinctively heavy. large vine vs a vining bush. The vine grows in first, then the leaves populate the vine, then it blossoms and put on fruit. They seem more tolerant of handling and directing throughout their growth. I haven't had to tie any of them, I just weave new growth through the cages and they stay and follow that direction. T
he Better Boy plants just fall back down, they have to be tied to force their upward growth. They seem to want to crawl along the ground as much as they want to climb the cages. Even larger diameter Better Boy stems have no ability to stand on their own without support but these Garden leaders shoot up, then the vines get rigid and stay where you put them eventually turning almost woody as the plant grows.
Just looking at the plants, even from a distance, the vines are clearly obvious, even though the foliage. That's not the case with the Better Boy plants.
