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Old September 14, 2017   #10
bower
Tomatovillian™
 
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Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
Posts: 6,793
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I agree, beyond a certain size of fruit they will bow down. And 'self pruning' is a bit of a misnomer in my opinion. Definitely when working with determinate/indeterminate crosses, there is a whole continuum of growth habits, and how much support they require. Our conditions in the field here don't promote an excess of growth, we used plastic mulch for a field trial and those silly little cages which are never big enough, and yes they did sprawl on the ground from the weight of fruit, in spite of the cages.
With regards to the really small determinates which handily fit in those cages, all the ones I've grown were pretty fatally flawed. Cold Set and Siletz split just about every fruit and were extremely prone to foliage disease once they had fruit on them. Beaverlodge Plum was not especially healthy either, and the fruit were bland.
Our best tasting determinate in the field trial was Alaska, a small round red. Other performance measures were not notable ie I guess there was no obvious flaw. I would grow them again for the taste, if I wasn't burnt out on red tomatoes.
A larger red which I personally liked was Altajskij Urozajnij, but I didn't field trial it and Cole wasn't impressed when he grew it. I grew it outdoors one (cold) year and only got a few, fantastically sweet and rich exceptional fruit. Then I grew it in the greenhouse and got a huge load of fruit which were still sweet but... not so exceptional. Cole has commented that sweetness is often sacrificed to fruit load.
I've been working to develop early and determinate non-red fruit for our climate here... I have several black determinate lines going forward but it would be premature to say they are missing any obvious flaws, at least for my purposes. In fact the best selections for overall traits have been the indeterminate siblings, or the larger semi-determinates. Not growing huge numbers of plants, but the compact determinates that have cropped up in my best lines have mostly been rejected for their fatal flaws. The more compact growth habit has either been associated with fruit quality defects or susceptibility to foliage disease, most of the time.
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