Iam making free tomato plants from a tomato plant that is a very good producer by cutting the suckers as the get big enough to plant enough of the stem to gr…
Question by ted j: Potted tomato plants won’t produce tomatoes?
I have two tomato plants on my deck. They are about a foot tall, look healthy and produce a lot of flowers; however up until now I only have one tomato. It is about the size of a golf ball and grow well.
The other plant does not have any tomatoes at all on it.
Do I need to manually pollinate them?
Thanks
Best answer:
Answer by Marlo
Possibly not a tomato plant. Grow weed instead.
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I manually pollinate my tomatoes with a cheap electric toothbrush..right before each flower opens completely and has that swollen bulb sticking out of the middle..simply turn a electric toothbrush on and “tickle ” each flower and you will see the pollen fly..start at top and work your way back down..even on the opened flowers tickle them daily too..tickle the unopened flowers first then the open ones..this will self pollinate them..look in my profile you will see 190 pictures of nothing but veggie garden in the 2 links there…I start vegiies indoors..but even my ones outside i still use my electric toothbrush on daily..
I manually pollinate all of my tomatoes with the tip of my finger. I go from bloom to bloom “tickling” them, and I get fruit from nearly every bloom. We don’t have a lot of bees around here anymore, so I do it just in case.
You can manually pollinate them with one of the methods already described, but there are other reasons tomatoes won’t set fruit. If the daytime temps are consistently in the lower nineties or higher or night time temps fall to around fifty or so the plant can drop blossoms without ever producing fruit. Lack of or too much water or nutrients can also stress the plant which will drop it’s blossoms as a survival reaction.
Potted tomato plants have a drawback. They are root bound and won’t perform as well as garden planted ones. I would not worry too much with tomatoes that haven’t set fruit just being one foot tall. Most vegetables first blooms are male flowers and don’t make fruit but to satisfy the plant you must give it enough sun, nutrients, and water. If the bees are not active in your area, get yourself a small camel hair brush and hand pollinate. This works exceedingly well. Don’t give the plants too much nitrogen. Nitrogen will encourage foliar growth but not fruit. I would definitely encourage hand pollination. Good advice have been given already on how and when to do this. Happy gardening.
If they’re only about a foot tall, they may not be big enough to produce yet. When did you plant them? We planted 150 tomato plants in mid-May, and even though they’re over 2′ tall, we’re just starting to get a few small tomatoes. We have blooms on almost all of them, though.
i pollinate my tomatoes by tapping the cane they are tied too