Oxheats - Wes - BER

[edweather]

The best explanation of BER that seems correct to me, is that it's not due to lack of available calcium. It's due to the inability of the plant to distribute the calcium all the way to the end of the fruit. Not exactly sure what stressors contribute to this, but it seems that when the plant is pushing maximum growth in the early season, and forming fruits at the same time, it makes sense that there might be a short fall in the calcium distribution. That makes sense to me in my experience since BER usually occurs early, and then corrects itself, as the plant's growth rate stabilizes. There are a couple of articles explaining this, just can't put my hands on one at the moment. There could be other stressors as well, and every plant doesn't get BER, but I like the explanation.

This article is a bit above my pay grade, but I think it says something like I was trying to say :-)

http://ucanr.edu/sites/placernevadas...iles/86509.pdf

[carolyn137]

I wrote this above;

(And yes, the variables at work with BER are very well known and I can give you a link if you want me to.)

I can't say there were lots of folks who asked me to provide that link, actually no one did,but I'm going to do it anyway since there's lots of information in it that hasn't even been mentioned here.

http://www.webgrower.com/information/carolyn_ber.html

Mike Dunton at Victory Seeds had asked me to write it, and I included the info from 2002 and updated other information.

And I'll update it even more right now.

I forgot to mention the difference between external BER, where you see that black area at the blossom end,from internal BER where there's no evidence at all that a fruit has BER until you cut it open and see all the rotted black areas.

I also left out info for folks who use Earthboxes and those who use only artificial mix to grow their tomatoes.

I can add that info if anyone wants me to do so.

I hope the above helps.

Carolyn

[SharonRossy]

Thanks Carolyn for the link. I’ve been lucky this year with BER because I managed to not overfertilize and to try to keep watering on a regular schedule, as much as humanly possible, given the crazy heat we’ve had. Interesting point - one tomato looked like BER was starting - a couple of small dark spots, but never spread. I decided to leave the tomato on the plant - ISRL - and it continued to grow and the spots did not increase. It’s on my counter hopefully ripening - I had to bring it in because the stem it was on split. So how it fares will be interesting.

[JosephineRose]

Originally Posted by GrowingCoastal

Oh well, always a first time for everything. I got three fruits with BER on a container grown Dotson's Lebanese heart yesterday. Planted in a Promix HP and mushroom manure mixture.

I use promix as well and had some trouble with BER on several plants. But without question, the plant most severely affected (to the point of me almost culling it) was EM Champion - a heart.