More on Tomatoes

I need to address the first question that my friend John asked me---is it too late to plant tomatoes? Tomatoes can take a long time to fruit, sometimes 90 days. I feel that you can plant anything any time, within reason (such as summer veggies while it's warm and winter veggies while it's cold), and you might be surprised! Keep a log of what is planted and when, then what happens to the plant. These successes I call serendipity's, or wonderful surprises. You never know what the weather is going to do or how long the season will really last. Years ago my neighbor bought and planted some summer flowers in the fall. It was way past the planting time according to "the garden books." We had a longer, warmer than normal fall and the flowers grew very well before our later-than-usual first frost knocked it to the ground. Since that time I have been more willing to plant earlier or later than "they say" and chalk the results up to experience---and serendipity!

If you are interested, Tom Chester, at http://tchester.org/analysis/tomatoes/index.html, who lives in Southern CA, logged growing tomatoes and the harvests they produced over a three year period. The weather in So. CA is a little milder than ours in the Central Valley, but the information will be similar for us. He plants at two times, early spring and early summer. These are his conclusions:

1. For the maximum tomato harvest time, tomatoes should be planted in at least two crops.
2. The first crop can be planted anywhere between 1 March and ~15 May, and in most years, will result in full production between 1 August and 1 September, independent of the planting date. However, early warm nighttime temperatures might produce a small number of earlier tomatoes.
3. Don't believe in any correlation between the advertised number of days to first tomatoes with what you will observe in Southern California for the first crop.
4. If you desire early tomatoes, either hope for a hot spell in spring, grow your early tomatoes in a heated greenhouse, or plant varieties that will set fruit in nighttime temperatures below 55°.
5. The timing of the second crop is tricky. In order to have full production between 1 September and ~1 October, it is necessary to plant the second crop between ~1 and ~15 June. Although the risk of low production is quite high for plantings at that time, one can make up for that by simply planting more tomato plants.
6. Planting after ~1 July probably guarantees a very low yield of tomatoes, and is not worth the effort of planting and caring for them.
7. The number of plants required to satisfy a given demand for tomatoes can be calculated for the first crop by assuming a yield of about 50 good-sized tomatoes per plant, with essentially all of them coming uniformly over a month.

Here in the valley, it's tricky to transplant anything in July because of our high heat. You can try, but be prepared to coddle the plants! Direct seeding of corn, beans and squash, among other summer vegetables, works fine as long as they get enough water.