Seems that these tomatoes have been fertilized as they haven’t had their flowers fall off for weeks, but only 5 or so tomatoes on the whole plant. Just wondering if this is common, because I see many of y’all with vines covered in multiple. Variety in this case is Cherokee Purple, but also happens to my Beefsteak. I’m in zone 9a if that helps.
by JaxWangen23
3 Comments
They aren’t pollinated – or they aren’t setting the fruit after pollination, which happens when it’s too hot. Almost all tomato varieties just don’t set fruit when it’s consistently hot and/or it doesn’t cool down at night. Humidity works in here, too. They harbor their energy to simply survive.
Given your region, it seems likely to me that you are out of your early growing season. Fall might be better for you. I used to live on Galveston, (9b), and fruit stopped setting pretty early.
Breeders are working on this for obvious reasons and you can already find heat tolerant varieties.
Hope this is helpful enough. You can google for the deep science and also for good varieties. It’s been long enough the only heat tolerant variety I remember growing successfully is Amelia.
Adding high phosphorus fertilizer will help the plant create more blooms.
In my experience, any given tomato plant will only develop ___ or X amount of fruit at any one point and any amount exceeding that amount gets “frozen” in time. So, the plant might set more fruit than it can develop, but later on some of those undeveloped fruit will spring to life once ripening fruit is removed.
In other words, let those undeveloped fruit ride, don’t pluck them off, keep caring for your tomato plant, feeding it, watering it, defending it from pests and at some future point the fruit might develop.
This phenomenon happens every season in my garden. I get fruit development every season long after it’s too hot at night to set new fruit. I have had fruit ripening in well into August when our last potential fruit setting ended in May.