First time planting tomatoes, planted 8 in total and the first tomato I planted grew about 5 feet tall. The problem is it's having flowers but not producing any fruits.
I made sure to tap them to pollinate the flowers but the flowers just dies after. The other tomato plant produced fruit but this and another one didn't. They all are watered at he same time and gets the same amount of sunlight but produced different amount of fruits.
What am I doing wrong? Thanks!
by JanRui
4 Comments
Tomato flowers only have about a 50 hour window to be pollinated. If it is too humid, the pollen might not stick even if you hand pollinate. If it is too hot, there are viability issues and the fruit still won’t form. If the plant is stressed, it might decide “this is not a good time to reproduce, let me focus on survival”. Finally, some plants (especially heirlooms) are just pissy little divas that do not set fruit well. I am growing Cherokee Purple and was amazed when it set one single fruit despite managing to produce 10 or so flowers (all of which I hand pollinated). A few feet away I have Chef’s Choice Red and they are so loaded with fruit I keep having to add ties and clips to support the heavy branches. I haven’t bothered hand pollinating those and they still form just fine.
My best advice is give them some liquid soluble fertilizer high in P and K (something like 10 30 20 is good) which will push it to produce more flowers. Hand pollinate them at the least humid part of the day.
Get a small child’s art paint brush. Brush pollen from flowers to other flowers. It’s simple.
Flick the branches to release the pollen.
get a massage gun.