Black Beauty

[gorbelly]

Originally Posted by PureHarvest

I think providing fertilizer in the right form at the right time will do more for flavor than how you prune.

My understanding is that nutrition (in soil and via fertilizer), watering, and total sun on the whole plant are the most important factors for flavor. This is one of the reasons why I try to keep pruning to a minimum--only for airflow and to control disease--since the leaves produce the sugars and dry matter that go into the tomatoes, so I like to maximize the potential for production of those. Because I'm just a home hobby grower, things like ease of harvest, uniformity of size, etc. are low priority for me, so I have little motivation to prune.

I was just wondering whether the amount of anthocyanin expression in these blue/black tomatoes have any relationship to flavor. If so, and a blacker tomato tastes better, it might be one of the rare cases in which pruning would make sense to me.

As for fertilizer, I switched from Jobe's Organic Tomato and Veg fert to Texas Tomato Food this year. Curious to see whether there's a difference, but it will be hard to compare because I have most of my tomatoes in new beds, so that will also affect results.