Advice on how to grow big vegtables

[MissS]

From what I have been reading there are 3 things that are important to growing a large tomato, squash or pumpkin.

1) Pruning fruit to one fruit per cluster. Some say to prune to one fruit per plant.

2) Compost

3) Fertilizer use and timing

What are your tips to grow a big one? Let's open a discussion to help each other out here.

[MissS]

A funny YouTube'r

[pepperhead212]

I really have never had any desire to trim away every fruit but one from a plant, just to have one huge one, I probably won't be able to eat!

[MissS]

I really have never had any desire to trim away every fruit but one from a plant, just to have one huge one, I probably won't be able to eat!

They fill up the sauce pan nicely and they sure are fun to grow. I had so much fun with them last year. They didn't taste bad either.

[AKgardener]

Oh mercy haha

[rxkeith]

chicken manure, composted first of course. you can grow some 4 foot high kale plants with that stuff.
ferts, warmth, water, and sun will grow everything bigger. i want quantity, and quality over size.
my mutant hybrid squash that was over 33 lbs was the only one on the vine. so, yeah you can prune to
reduce amount of fruit for size if you want bigger, but i have never done it.


keith

[TomatoNut95]

I really have never had any desire to trim away every fruit but one from a plant, just to have one huge one, I probably won't be able to eat!

True I wouldn't want to trim away too many blossoms either. And true, I've had my share of tomatoes I didn't want to open either.
I had an Orange Accordian that was 5in across but didn't weight much because it was hollow. I gotta tell you though that was a yucky tomato.

[Paulf]

For the first year ever there will be one tomato plant in the garden reduced to one or two fruits just to grow a giant. Without ever seeing a fused blossom in fifty years of growing tomatoes how big the one will get is questionable. This will be part of a “grow a giant tomato” contest on another gardening site. No prize other than bragging rights. The guy in the video must have a knack. We have always grown tomatoes to eat and plant mostly large size varieties without intention to see how large. One plant can be spared for the contest.

[MissS]

For the first year ever there will be one tomato plant in the garden reduced to one or two fruits just to grow a giant. Without ever seeing a fused blossom in fifty years of growing tomatoes how big the one will get is questionable. This will be part of a “grow a giant tomato” contest on another gardening site. No prize other than bragging rights. The guy in the video must have a knack. We have always grown tomatoes to eat and plant mostly large size varieties without intention to see how large. One plant can be spared for the contest.

@Paulf, the tomatoes that I am offering are seeds of competition tomatoes. Competition tomatoes have a strong trait of throwing fused blossoms. Last year my plants had a fused blossom on almost every single truss. It was very hard for me to cull my fruit with that smorgasbord of fused blossoms to choose from. I didn't have the heart to limit the plant to one fruit. I had three. If you would like to try a competition strain, just give me a holler.

[karstopography]

Those fused blossom mega-tomatoes tend to be not so pretty. A giant, well formed tomato without zippers and such going this way and that is beautiful. Seems like the general www. contest tomatoes I see around these days are invariably the not so attractive fused blossom tomatoes. Not sure there could be a separate category for the mega-tomato fused blossom tomatoes and single blossom, not a monstrosity type of tomato category?

[TomatoNut95]

Does it really help out a lot to buzz your blossoms like the guy did with a battery toothbrush?

[Paulf]

For the first year ever there will be one tomato plant in the garden reduced to one or two fruits just to grow a giant. Without ever seeing a fused blossom in fifty years of growing tomatoes how big the one will get is questionable. This will be part of a “grow a giant tomato” contest on another gardening site. No prize other than bragging rights. The guy in the video must have a knack. We have always grown tomatoes to eat and plant mostly large size varieties without intention to see how large. One plant can be spared for the contest.

@Paulf, the tomatoes that I am offering are seeds of competition tomatoes. Competition tomatoes have a strong trait of throwing fused blossoms. Last year my plants had a fused blossom on almost every single truss. It was very hard for me to cull my fruit with that smorgasbord of fused blossoms to choose from. I didn't have the heart to limit the plant to one fruit. I had three. If you would like to try a competition strain, just give me a holler.

I have some Domingo seeds but will take another if it is OK.

[TomatoNut95]

I want to join the contest once I've been a member long enough if that's ok with you MissS.

[MissS]

Does it really help out a lot to buzz your blossoms like the guy did with a battery toothbrush?

Yes it does. I do it to all of my tomatoes. You can actually see the pollen pouring out while you are buzzing the blossoms. I have great fruit set. Although some of the mega blooms are very hard to pollinate. I will try to hand pollinate them this year and see how that goes.

[MissS]

Those fused blossom mega-tomatoes tend to be not so pretty. A giant, well formed tomato without zippers and such going this way and that is beautiful. Seems like the general www. contest tomatoes I see around these days are invariably the not so attractive fused blossom tomatoes. Not sure there could be a separate category for the mega-tomato fused blossom tomatoes and single blossom, not a monstrosity type of tomato category?

We could certainly have a second category here on the Junction for an unfused tomato. Great idea! Done. We now have 2 categories of large tomatoes.

The reason that the giants are ugly is because 3-8 large tomatoes fused together will weigh more than a tomato of a single type of blossom, or so the logic goes. All of these plants produce single blossoms and those fruits are really big too. You can just cull the mega blossoms off of them. Who knows, none of us are competition growers (yet) so maybe a single tomato will win the whole competition.

[TahoeQueen]

Wow! 5 pounders! I’m happy if my tomatoes get over a pound, but have never tried growing a giant one. This looks like fun!

[maxjohnson]

From my experience: Move to a place with moderate climate, lower humidity, less diseases and pests, and not have root knot nematode in your soil. Basically be lucky enough to live in a place that is easy to grow tomato.

[TomatoNut95]

From my experience: Move to a place with moderate climate, lower humidity, less diseases and pests, and not have root knot nematode in your soil. Basically be lucky enough to live in a place that is easy to grow tomato.

Root nematode is never a problem here. Humidity can be bad but not during the stifling hot summer when it rarely rains. Hornworm and BER are the main 2 issues I personally deal with.

[karstopography]

From my experience: Move to a place with moderate climate, lower humidity, less diseases and pests, and not have root knot nematode in your soil. Basically be lucky enough to live in a place that is easy to grow tomato.

Root nematode is never a problem here. Humidity can be bad but not during the stifling hot summer when it rarely rains. Hornworm and BER are the main 2 issues I personally deal with.

Bt and/or Spinosad are tremendously helpful against hornworms in case you haven’t looked into those products.

As far as I can tell from my own past successes and failures dealing with BER, BER has been mostly about appropriate levels of watering, don’t let the tomatoes dry out severely while beginning to fruit, soil moisture and the like must be closely monitored and also related to pushing too much nitrogen and the wrong sorts (Ammonium types) at the wrong time, flowering.

RKN, while present, have yet to take over any of my beds or cause non-protected non-resistant tomatoes to fail to thrive. I guess that isn’t true in other places with RKN as those roundworm soil pests seem to eventually make it impossible to grow anything that isn’t a target crop.

Look, If I can grow two 2 plus pound single blossom heirloom (Domingo) tomatoes from one plant in one season in my shade plagued, sub-tropical, humid and very warm Coastal Texas climate with RKN, hornworms, armyworms, leaf-footed bugs and about 1,000,000 gnawing rodents inhabiting the trees that are giving the garden all that shade then you people in these moderate climates with no shade, no bugs, no RKN, lower humidity, ought to be growing 4 pound tomatoes every year without even trying.

[pepperhead212]

Does it really help out a lot to buzz your blossoms like the guy did with a battery toothbrush?

Yes it does. But I'm going for numbers, not size, so I don't know about that. I do that every season with the first ones that show up on each plant, and they all seem to develop sooner than they did before I started this, and I never see any that don't set fruit, which I always had a few of before. Eventually, I stop, because there are just so many blossoms, I can't keep up with them. And I think, that even though tomatoes do "self pollinate", bees and other insects do help, and they seem to be absent, early on, when I do that.