Biggest Tomato PLANT !!

[daylilydude]

Just for fun which indetermanate tomato plant that you have grown become a monster of a plant ? The reason i'm asking is i don't want to plant a monster plant in front of a smaller one and cause to much shade. Pictures would be great as we always see pictures of the fruit but hardly any of the plant.

[shelleybean]

I think the biggest plants I've grown are Yellow Brandywine, Aunt Gertie's Gold, Sainte Lucie and Neves Azorean Red. Dr. Lyle is pretty big too.

[carolyn137]

Richard, surely you're not expecting folks to list the largest plants they've grown with the hopes of your avoiding them b'c all sorts of variables are inherent in the size of the plants we grow.

But just for the record, the absolute largest variety I've grown to date is Boondocks, as grown several times, which is an indet PL variety, large pink fruit, that I got from Joe Bratka many years ago, and no, he didn't breed this one.

Runnerup would be the variety Pasture, the one that I say can cover an outhouse faster than Kudzu vine b'c it's so darn rampant. Red undistinguihed cherry tomatoes, and part of the series bred by Joe Bratka's father which includes Box Car Willie, Mule Team, Red Barn and Great Divide, none of which are cherries and several of them I think are outstanding.

[daylilydude]

Carolyn asks:
Richard, surely you're not expecting folks to list the largest plants they've grown with the hopes of your avoiding them b'c all sorts of variables are inherent in the size of the plants we grow.

Nope i don't want to avoid them i just want to make sure to place them in my garden to where everything has a better chance of getting the sun that they need to prosper. And it just so happens that i have the Red Barn and the Box Car Willie and now i know i just might want to put it on the backside of the garden because there's a chance that it will be a huge plant .Thanks for letting me know Carolyn.

[carolyn137]

And it just so happens that i have the Red Barn and the Box Car Willie and now i know i just might want to put it on the backside of the garden because there's a chance that it will be a huge plant .Thanks for letting me know Carolyn.

*******

Richard, actually I said that Boondocks and Pasture were the two biggies and I mentioned the others in passing when mentioning Pasture.

I don't think of either Red Barn or BCW as being huge plants but I like both of them, especially Red Barn, very much.

Red Barn goes into my fave large red beefsteaks list along with Red Penna, Chapman, Neves Azorean Red, Russian Bogytar, Milka's Red Bulgarian, Andrew Rahart's Jumbo Red, OTV Brandywine and quite a few others.

[barkeater]

Generally I'd say potato leaf and cherry varieties are the tallest, as that's their habit. And not counting cherries, like shellybean, Yellow Brandywine has to be my tallest, with AGG close.

I'll never ultimately know as I top all my plants on Labor Day to the top of their cages, about 7'for the tallest varieties.

[Andrey_BY]

All 5 De Barao varieties were tallest in my glasshouses so far. But they can easily grow up to 4-5 m in extended time conditions or in Zone 8-10, I think.

There are also many tomato varieties bred by famous Soviet (Ukrainian) gardener Fedor Tarasenko who loved huge, liane-type varieties very much. Most of such varieties had got his surname in their names like Tarasenko-2, Tarasenko-6, Yubileyny Tarasenko etc.

As Carolyn already mentioned that Russkiy Bogatyr (Russian Bogatyr) plant seeds of which I've got from Russian seed company Sedek can be grown almost as pole beets and bear fruits with excellent taste. This is one of local favorite Russian amateurish tomato varieties with indeterminate habit and very tasty red beefsteak fruits :wink:
There is also another Russian Bogatyr distributed by other Russian seed company, but with semi-determinate growing habit and smaller fruits...

[carolyn137]

Some of you are saying this or that vareity is the tallest one you've grown thus assuming it's the biggest, but that's not the way I judge how BIG a plant is, as opposed to how TALL it is.

One can have the stupidest rangy rampant plants that grow tall, but to me that doesn't mean that they are the biggest ones.

Get what I mean?

[shelleybean]

That's very true. I would say Yellow B-wine and AGG are tall, but not fat. The other three I mentioned, NAR, Dr. Lyle and Sainte Lucie were all both tall and wide. And I've had cherries that don't grow that tall but spread out very wide.

[montanamato]

Hawaiin current wasn't 4 ft tall, but the width was incredible...It was like crawling through a brush patch to find those tiny fruits....
Biggest others were Mrs. Benson, Chapman, and Costoluto Fiorentino. Honorable mention to June Pink and Yates beefsteak....

Jeanne

[Tomstrees]

Pink Potato Top
(I called it Limbaughs Potato Top all summer; sorry)

Grew to be about 8ft tall this season ~
Monster plant ? Monster Fruits ? Monster Flavor ~

Tom

[Ruth_10]

Black Cherry--just a big plant in any direction.

[Mantis]

Pink Ping Pong and Berekely Tie Dye and my rangiest so far this season.

[michael johnson]

Andrey- I couldnt find the variety (Explosion ) on your list this year -perhaps I missed it somehow, did you list it this year ,

My biggest ever tomato plant was a bit of a freak really- it was out of a bunch of five or six seeds I sowed of (park's Whopper ) at six weeks old, it stood head and shoulders above the rest of its siblings, at the halfway stage it sort of took off like a rocket with a stem easily as thick as a brush shaft, you could almost hear it slurping up the nutrients and water on a hourly basis, I grew it in my greenhouse, and it hit the roof at seven foot high at the apex,whilst the other tomato plants were only halfway at the same time.

After a while it went around the roof a few times and then out through the open ventilation high window light,then not satisfied with that it kept growing straight up in the air for another four feet at least, and prduced tomatoes on that outside stalk too, it looked utterly ridiculous -four foot of stalk hanging out of the ventilation light with tomatoes hanging on it,

It was a talking point for anyone that came to visit me for a while- most of them would say "gosh" what ever are you feeding them on, and I had to say that it wasn't me-it was just a freak plant.

Needless to say I saved a few seeds from it for future use and perhaps to cross with a weaker variety to give it a bit of a kick start, but I have never actually planted any since to see.

The tomatoes it produced was very heavy cropping all the time, good firm large tomatoes.

[Andrey_BY]

Originally Posted by carolyn137

Some of you are saying this or that vareity is the tallest one you've grown thus assuming it's the biggest, but that's not the way I judge how BIG a plant is, as opposed to how TALL it is.

One can have the stupidest rangy rampant plants that grow tall, but to me that doesn't mean that they are the biggest ones.

Get what I mean?

Carolyn, believe me if I don't cut all side-shoots on these De Barao plants they will be both big in height and width But I better cut these shoots, because I'm always into growing more plants in my glasshouses and don't really like to grow wide plants overshadow each other.

Michael, it seems to me you had missed Vzryv (Exposion) in my new list because I've changed the way of introducing original variety names from this year. Now I prefer not to translate them in English and show them "as is" in English/Latin letters. And I use "~" sign for English translations from name in original language.