Tomato blooms die

[gunrunner]

Hello All

Every year my tomatoes set lots of blooms but only a few make a tomato and the rest die. Can anyone tell me what if anything I need to do?

Thanks
Mike

[zeuspaul]

Try an electric tooth brush to assist with pollination.

[slugworth]

too hot or no bees or too humid

[seaeagle]

I think it depends on the variety of tomato. A lot of plants with large tomatoes will have 7, 8 or more blooms but will only set 3 or 4 tomatoes. This is normal. I have noticed before that sometimes the bloom will set a tomato ( I think it is a tomato) but it never gets any bigger than a pea. Maybe because the truss already has the amount of tomatoes the plant thinks it should have.


A variety like Danko can set what looks like a hundred blooms but only a small fraction will end up a tomato.


Or it could be another problem like was already posted related to the weather.

[ScottinAtlanta]

Fertilize once a week. A plant will not set up more fruit than it can handle.

[SteveP]

It seems to happen to me with the early blooms. Once the season kicks in it seems like more blossoms set fruit. Early season I try to assist pollination by flicking my finger several times on the blossom stem. I used to used an electric toothbrush. Does it help? I don't know, but it doesn't hurt.

I also think a healthy plant and consistent watering also helps. You want as much fruit set as possible before it gets too hot.

[D.J. Wolf]

I think it is the plant isn't mature enough to bear fruit yet, so the early blossoms don't set fruit. Think of it as a like 13 year old human getting pregnant. Can they? Yes. Are they actually mature enough to raise offspring? Probably not. Seems maybe the plant kingdome does a better job than the animal kingdom in this regard...

[gunrunner]

Thanks to everyone for the reply. We do have lots of heat and humidity here(Memphis) and this area has a shortage of bees and bumblebees. I try to fertilize once a month with Jobe's tomato and vegetable hope thats often enough. How often and for how long should I shake the bloom stems?

Thanks again
Mike

[Milan HP]

A strange thing happens to me, quite regularly. I grow tomatoes at home over the winter. Which means the conditions (especially light) are not optimal. And I get what I call "token" flower buds. They appear quite early but don't develop for months to follow. And when I put the plants out on the balcony and the weather is favorable, the plants start developing them into full fruits. The fruits aren't usually the biggest ones, but a decent size anyway.
My conclusion is that Mother Nature has given all living organisms a sort of "limitation awareness" Even my favorite plants.
Milan HP

[slugworth]

I get the usual amount of blossoms in winter with just 12 hours of light per day (december)
The only pain is using the electric toothbrush on the blossoms.
The tomatoes are never as big as when the bees do all the work but I get to taste real tomatoes when other people forget what they taste like.
The indoor/outdoor transition on the lakota had many blossoms that did nothing.But the temps may have been too low in april here.It took forever
from green to red on the tomatoes but I blame the variety.
When they did turn red the birds pecked them.

[zipcode]

Originally Posted by Milan HP

A strange thing happens to me, quite regularly. I grow tomatoes at home over the winter. Which means the conditions (especially light) are not optimal. And I get what I call "token" flower buds. They appear quite early but don't develop for months to follow. And when I put the plants out on the balcony and the weather is favorable, the plants start developing them into full fruits. The fruits aren't usually the biggest ones, but a decent size anyway.
My conclusion is that Mother Nature has given all living organisms a sort of "limitation awareness" Even my favorite plants.
Milan HP

This is a common thing, I've seen it often, although less in open air gardens. When the plant is to vegetative at first, and the fruit reactivates so to say, sometimes after months. It's no wonder the professional growers insist so much on this generative/vegetative balance, it is the way to get a good continuous production which will ultimately get the highest total yield. It's not really possible imo to keep this balance without clima control.

[b54red]

You are having the same problem that I had for years before I figured out how to optimize my fruit set to the point that it is often too heavy.

First you need to mulch the plants heavily to keep the moisture levels stable and slow down loss of ground moisture. I have found that a heavy layer of cypress mulch is optimum for my garden as it keeps the ground cooler as well as holding moisture better than any natural mulch I have tried and I have tried a lot of them over the years.

Second you need to limit the number of stems so that the plant doesn't get overloaded with blooms. I now grow most of my tomatoes as single stems in a lean and lower system. However some years I will plant a bed of tomatoes on a trellis and will try but often fail to keep them to two or three stems. I did that this year and had several plants with 20 or more set fruit by the time they were around three to four feet high.
I think that limiting the number of growth tips allows the plant to put more energy into setting fruit and making larger fruit.

Another thing that has helped with fruit set and also with tomato fruit flavor has been using Texas Tomato Food to fertilize my plants every 7 to 10 days if possible. I have tried numerous types of fertilizer but none have helped fruit set like TTF.

Prepare your ground well and add compost and fertilizer per soil test recommendations.

Use a good fungicide like Daconil and a copper spray every week or two to keep the leaves healthy and as disease free as possible down here. Prune off all lower leaves so there is at least a foot of air space above the mulch to the first leaves and prune off any diseased leaves or leaves chewed badly by insects. Also act quickly to remove pests or spray for them when they become a problem because they can really make a plant suffer in the heat down here.

Most important of all is never let the plant get to dry when you are trying to get it to set fruit. Blooms will drop like flies if the plant gets slightly too dry and nearly all of them will drop if it gets really dry in hot weather.

Bill

[Milan HP]

Hello Zipcode,
you're right. I don't remember any token buds in my garden. Not even when the weather was far from optimal. In that case they just slow down their development. I believe it's caused by unbalanced temps and light at home on the window sill in the middle of December and later. They grow too fast to bother with the buds.
Milan HP

[sjamesNorway]

I often have blossom drop in my greenhouse because it gets too hot.

92°F is the temp at which pollen starts clumping and blossoms begin to drop.

Some varieties do better in the heat than others. The variety that does best at keeping it's blossoms in the heat in my greenhouse is ISPL (Indian Stripe Potato Leaf).


Steve

[slugworth]

In the 1960's my mother had a small aerosol can of tomato blossom set spray that had β-naphthoxyacetic acid as the main ingredient.
They used it on strawberries also,to make them bigger.
Probably not available anymore.