Where Are My FUCKING TOMATOES???

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, for the first time in my life I understand what the curse of "crop failure" must look like for the rural poor, even though a lot of my career has been about studying development in rural countries.

I don't know what the fuck happened, but there were no tomatoes. I know, this should be in Gardening Group, but it's so weird it needs a broader audience.

There were no tomatoes this year. Usually, I have more than I can eat from a postage stamp sized urban garden. I still don't quite get what happened, though lots of people are throwing out theories. Maybe it was the cold rainy spring. I know lots of garden veggies died because of that, but ultimately I did have several tomato plants. Some say it was a blight that was spread by big box store nurseries. This was in the news -- that all the tomato plants sold by Home Depot et al were infected. But this year, I grew everything from seed. Maybe I was infected by the neighbors.

Some say it was the slaughter of the honey bees and other pollinators, but some other fruit bearing crops did quite well.

I have lots of immigrants in my neighborhood who plant veggies in their front yards, so I've had a chance to look at other peoples' tomato plants and it's surreal. Big plants, lots of blossoms, but the fruit just didn't set, or what did set never ripened.

It was a total crop failure. I've eat maybe 5 miserable little tomatoes compared to having bushels from a dozen or so urban tomato plants.

WHERE ARE MY FUCKING TOMATOES???

you might check a few sleazy motels out on Long Island. :P

I knew that pun was coming. Or should I say "cumming"?

my wild chile pequin plant in the yard just sat there. When it cooled off and the rain started a month ago, it is now covered in blossoms and I'm seeing baby peppers forming by the hundreds.
Those 95 days of 100+° were too hot for it.

I'm not gonna share either.:D

Our tomatoes were 4-6 weeks late this summer but we have many now and there won't be a frost here for at least another six weeks.

Most common reason for poor fruit setting is fertilizer levels but you're experienced so I doubt that's the problem. The next likely cause is too many nights with average temperatures outside the 50-75 degree range. Too cool or too warm and the fruit doesn't set.

cherry tomatoes which don't even taste good. The weather here was cool and dry all summer, which is not good tomato weather. The positive thing is that I got some very nice acorn squash, and I just finished eating a very nice Honeycrisp apple fresh off my new apple tree. It seems to be a good apple year.

I think it had to do with climate. I've never, ever been able to grow winter squash in 15 years of gardening. I've had zuchini but never once any kind of pumpkin.

I always try in one tiny area just in case. This year, while the tomatoes and cukes and summer squash all failed, for the first time ever, I got butternut squash. I was so jaded about squash I didn't even buy seeds and just put down a few seeds from a squash I bought in the supermarket and ate.

Best year for winter squash ever -- not a lot (about 5 big, hard butternuts) but since I was starting from zero, that's quite an improvement.

Why now?

Just for the heck of it, I bought a small squash plant this spring, and planted it in an area of my garden where I'd just added some fresh topsoil and several inches of mulch. The plant went crazy. By midsummer the leaves were a foot across and the tendrils had spread about 12' in all directions. It pretty much took over the whole garden. Last week, when the leaves got all gray and droopy, I decided to take it out, and discovered *seventeen* squash, hidden among the leaves like Easter eggs.

I was amazed.

but the hard part for me has been getting them to fruit. Every year I've grown some kind of winter squash, the plant has grown crazy like you describe, but the plant just blossoms and the blossoms fall away and there's no actual squash.

This was the first year I had squashes. Can't figure out what the difference was.

One theory I've heard is that hard squashes require both a male and female plant, and if you've only got one gender, you get vine, leaves, blossoms, but no fruit.

And my tomatoes were mostly a bust compared to last year. Cucumbers? Forget about it.

My neighbor who is also a gardener had the same problem. I didn't even have one good watermelon.

down on sixth street?

I quit trying to grow tomatoes about 4 years ago. Not enough sun, too much rain, blight, etc.

making tomacco :P

Only thing was, they had no flavor. Really blah. I still have a few green ones and a lot of yellow pear tomatoes (which I suspect brought the blight as they were the only ones I bought at Walmart.)

But--I planted 90 cucumbers (started from seed) and only got 5 little cukes. And I only got ONE zucchini! Go figure.

Mine too, Hamden. I got nothin' this year except a handful of beans. Cool and rainy for most of the summer, and then a blast of hot air at the end. Yeah, that'll work. Not. :eyes:

This year's shitty crop also made me think about the seriousness of crop failure for people who depend on gardens and farms to survive. What is it like to look at a garden in a bad year and realize that you won't have much to eat? Sure, I can go to the supermarket; what if I couldn't? It was a sobering meditation.

But for now I yank the nonproducing melon plants, stunted carrots, rotted tomatoes, brown beanstalks, and tree-shaped broccoli, not to mention the miserable little pepper plants that never grew, and fling them all into the compost heap. Then start planning next year's garden...

don't compost tomato plants that had the fungus. You should put them in plastic bags and in the trash. I'm not even going to plant tomatoes in the same garden next year, just to be safe.

The plants rotted because of all the wet weather instead. But I will throw the plants in the garbage instead, just to be safe.

To make things worse, I tried a new location for my garden this year, and it was a bust. I thought it would get more sun than where I had the garden last year, but it didn't. At least, I think it wasn't better. This year's special circumstances made it hard to tell. But I'm going to move it next year anyway, to a THIRD new spot that definitely gets more sun than both the previous places.

Yeah, I'm still experimenting!

you are so right about "crop failure." I've studied agricultural economics for years and studied farmers in field trips in Africa and China, and I've read about crop failures for decades. But for some reason, the reality of not getting even a few decent tomatoes after years of getting bushels, really makes the concept sink in. I couldn't imagine how I'd feel if I were an African farmer and this was my family's subsistence yam or plantain or maize crop! No wonder people did things like sacrifice to the rain gods.

tomatos are self pollinating plants. They have both male and female blooms and pollinate with even the slightest wind. You can even grow them indoors with no wind, but you have to gently shake the plants a couple times a day between 10 and 4 (pollination time).

Not to say that bees cant pollinate tomatos, because they can. In many instances bees overpollinate tomatos so you end up with smaller tomatos but more of them.

It is more likely the temperature. Tomatos have some very specific temperature needs. My father told me about it, as he is a farmer, but I dont remember the range, but it is very narrow for the temperature required to set fruit. Could be the temperature was off during fruit set, so the blossoms were sterile, even.

We got some tomatoes, at least.