highest production without cages

[chastom]

I am looking for production tomatoes to sell in the market ,anyone have ideas on tomatoes that i can stake ,but won't need to be caged ,determinate varities or bush types.I am in central texas,so the climate is hot.

thanks for your help

[Redbaron]

There is a determinate strain of Rutgers perfect for that.

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by chastom

I am looking for production tomatoes to sell in the market ,anyone have ideas on tomatoes that i can stake ,but won't need to be caged ,determinate varities or bush types.I am in central texas,so the climate is hot.

thanks for your help

I can't speak to your climate but for most of my tomato career I just sprawled them, no cages, no stakes, nothing else. And there were times after I moved to this new location that I grew the same varieties by both caging and sprawling, and I saw no difference whatsoever in yield.

So many say that when plants are sprawled that there's a lot of fruit loss from fruits touching the soil, but if one does sprawling then I think you'll find that almost ALL of the fruits are found nested in the foliage above.

As I said, that's what I did, and don't know how it would work for you.

And yes, for several years I sold fruits to restaurants and also consigned them to a large farmstand for sale,

Carolyn

[b54red]

If you are growing purely for production then look at Amelia. They are highly productive determinate plants with terrific disease resistance. They still need spraying for foliar diseases and actually need a bit of pruning they are so vigorous.

Bella Rosa is a far tastier determinate hybrid but does not have the disease resistance but the tomatoes are huge and good.

Lumpy Red is a heirloom that only requires minimal staking and is a large red delicious tomato.

Atkinson and Rutgers used to be the main production tomatoes around here and they are very good but the diseases just got too bad around here for the farmers to be able to count on them and most have switched to Amelia.

[Deborah]

I used to stake but then one year I didn't and guess what, a great crop, and no spoiled fruit !
I'd have to stake now but where I used to live I had a back yard. The tomatoes crawled all over the yard.

[chastom]

I have also heard the bella rosa was a good producer,i have never tried rutgers but may this year

[Cole_Robbie]

Carolyn, did you keep the weeds out of your sprawl? I didn't use supports last year and had a good yield, but I didn't have mulch and the johnson grass grew over everything. For a brief window of about 2-3 weeks, the shade from the grass worked well to prevent sun scald, but then I got stink bugs and disease, bacterial speck I think.

[Deborah]

I never had any pests. My tomatoes were in bags on top of white pebbles. I hated those pebbles and wanted a lawn, but I sure got great tomatoes.

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by Cole_Robbie

Carolyn, did you keep the weeds out of your sprawl? I didn't use supports last year and had a good yield, but I didn't have mulch and the johnson grass grew over everything. For a brief window of about 2-3 weeks, the shade from the grass worked well to prevent sun scald, but then I got stink bugs and disease, bacterial speck I think.

Yes, I did try to keep weeds out of my sprawled plants. The rows were 250 ft long, plants spaced 3-4 ft between plants within rows and rows 5 ft apart.

I'd use a Mantis tiller as a mechanical hoe and then someone with a Farmall cub would sometimes go down through and get rid of the weeds in between the rows.

For the longest time I was growing many hundreds of plants and varieties each season and there was no way that I could deal with any kind of mulch, plastic or otherwise.

Once the plants started spreading they'd shade out most of the weeds anyway.

Carolyn