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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] pruning determinate tomatoes

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  • From: "William H Shoemaker" <wshoemak AT illinois.edu>
  • To: "'Market Farming'" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] pruning determinate tomatoes
  • Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 12:58:41 -0600

I’ve grown Celebrity lots of times. I’ve grown them pruned and unpruned. I’ve not seen anything like what you described, UNLESS they have been exposed to herbicide drift. It sounds like 2,4-D drift to me. Often, the drift is volatiles from an application somewhere nearby, floating on air movement to your site, sometimes more than a mile away. Tomatoes are very sensitive to it and the results are similar to your description. 2,4-D is in many turf herbicides, agronomic herbicides and roadway or right-of-way herbicides. You may want to consider whether that happened and where it may have come from.

 

Bill

William H. Shoemaker

Sr. Research Specialist, Food Crops

University of Illinois - Crop Sciences

St Charles Horticulture Research Center

535 Randall Road, St Charles, IL, 60174

630-584-7254, FAX-584-4610

wshoemak AT illinois.edu


From: market-farming-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:market-farming-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Curtis Millsap
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2011 9:42 AM
To: market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [Market-farming] pruning determinate tomatoes

 

I grew Celebrity tomatoes in the greenhouse last year, and began pruning them as I would other tomatoes (arbason, early girl, etc.), however I got some very strange looking vines.  Mostly I got vines that went nuts at the top, producing tons of sprouts and leaves, and eventually lots of small fruit.  I also had a lot of vines which seemed to stop growing upward, and so they had very few fruit.   I realize that the determinates are a different beast than the indet. , but I've never seen a reference to pruning them dramatically differently.  How do you all prune your indeterminates?  It is also possible that these problems were more related to the extremely early and prolonged heat we had last season, and not as much the pruning.   Ideas or input?

Thanks,

Curtis
 

Curtis and Sarah Millsap
Millsap Farm
Springfield MO
C 839-0847
www.millsapfarms.wordpress.com

 

 




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