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Old August 31, 2018   #12
DonDuck
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Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: Corinth, texas
Posts: 1,784
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I used to never attempt to grow tomatoes in the fall. I always grew Better Boy with spring plantings and they would produce well into the summer. In the hot summer, the plants lost most of their foliage and didn't bloom at all. In late summer, they produced new growth on the old branches and produced a new crop of tomatoes in the fall.


I then became interested in growing indeterminate heirloom tomatoes and have grown them for many years. One year I noticed Home Depot had some hybrid Goliath Bush tomatoes for sale in the hottest part of summer. I bought four and planted them in an empty vegetable bed. The first three or four weeks, they did nothing. They didn't grow or produce blossoms, but they also didn't die in the heat. Early in September, they started growing and producing little tomatoes. By first frost in November, they had produced a lot of red ripe tomatoes and then a lot of green tomatoes picked the day before the first freeze. The green tomatoes slowly ripened in my shop producing ripe tomatoes until a few days before Christmas. I'm not sure why, but I haven't grown Bush Goliath again. I've been down the heirloom road for a long time and I am slowly developing an interest in some of the newer hybrid varieties with heat resistance and some disease resistance with a decent taste and production. I'm only doing it because I enjoy it and the worst tasting home grown tomato tastes better than the greenhouse tomatoes sold in the grocery stores.
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