How To Grow Tomatoes In Florida During The Summer

Hey friend, it's actually really common this time of year here in Florida that our tomatoes will stop fruiting and flowering, but I have learned a few tricks over the years to kind of keep them going as long as possible. Take a look at this cherry tomato plant right here. We're going to harvest this one along with a slicer that I've been growing and we're going to talk about why this happens as well as what you can do to prevent it. All right, I have an iced coffee. Dropping my iced coffee. I have a bowl and a basket for all of our harvest plus a glove, because I don't know if you can see, but right here there's like a bunch of spiders and bugs and I don't really want to touch that, so we're going to use gloves today to pick these off. You're wondering why I'm using the bowl. It's because some of these split because we had like a really big rain the other day and they're just not going to hold, so I'm actually going to use these to save seeds and I'm going to do it two different ways. I'm going to throw just some of these tomatoes in some of my open beds and then the rest of them I'm actually going to take inside and save the seed, but this is going to be good for that. They're not necessarily so good for eating at this point, but while we do that, let's talk about why tomatoes don't necessarily flower or fruit this time of year and it's a very unique combination of effects and it has to do with the fact of whether the temperature and the humidity combine together. So here in Florida, if you're not familiar, we get really high daytime temperatures. We get really high nighttime temperatures and we have very high humidity during the summer. We are a tropical to subtropical climate, which means it pretty much rains every day as well. It's very moist here. There's a lot of that in the southeast of the United States. When you head over to the west side, you get high temperatures during the day, like much higher than us, but you have lower temperatures at night, so the differences between your day and night temperature is a little more varied. You also have dry conditions and all of that, those combinations, lead to whether or not a tomato plant will flower. So just having high temperatures during the day is not enough to cause a tomato plant to stop producing. It may stress the plant out. They might show wilting leaves. They might curl around themselves, those kinds of things, showing signs of stress and that might lead to them slowing down in flowering. That is a possibility, but as long as they're flowering, they will still set fruit at those types of situations. And by that, I mean, you know, 85 to 90 degrees. That's where things start to, you know, be affected. When you get above 95 degrees and it's consistently above 95 degrees, you might start to encounter these situations, even if your nighttime temperatures are good and even if you have low humidity like they do in the west coast. When you have nighttime temperatures that are above 70 degrees, so you have the daytime temperatures above 85 degrees and you have nighttime temperatures above 70 degrees, the plant has no time whatsoever to basically recover. When you are in a climate where the nighttime temperatures drop into the 60s or the 50s, like that nighttime temperature gives this plant a chance to recover, a chance for the flowers to open and pollinate. You just might actually see all that stuff happening at night versus during the day, which is a little bit odd because we're used to it the other way around. But hey, I don't care, right? If it produces tomatoes, I'm happy. Now the third element of it, which is the humidity factor. This is the part where your tomato can be big and beautiful and lush and flowering and then all of a sudden none of the flowers are taking hold. They're all just breaking off and falling and that is because the humidity level in the air causes like a thickness or like a wetness, a moistness inside the air and it's very unique with tomatoes. Well, not just tomatoes. It happens with eggplants as well, but the flower of a tomato is what's considered a perfect flower or a complete flower and it just means that there is both male and female parts inside the same flower. And at the top of the flower, like when you see a flower like this, at the top of the flower there is the male parts and at the bottom open side of the flower is the female parts. And the way to get a flower to pollinate is to tap it from the wind blowing or from a bee coming and like buzzing it and it vibrates it and it causes the male pollen to drop and disperse and it disperses like a poof, like a poof of powder and when it does that it spreads across the female side of the flower and that's what causes pollination. I feel like I'm talking about the birds and the bees. Kind of is, right? Well, what happens is in super humid climate when that buzzing or that wind or whatever that jostling happens, that pollen breaks free and it drops but instead of like doing that poof of powder pollen everywhere it just kind of does clunk and it just clunks and that little clunk doesn't disperse the pollen properly across the entire female side of the flower which then causes it not to pollinate. Now that we know what the problem is, how do we actually solve it? How do you make it cooler and less humid? It's not a simple approach to doing that so let's talk through everything and then you can decide whether you want to do all that to keep your tomatoes going because personally I don't necessarily do that but I did find one way that actually works with limited amount of effort for me which is how I like to roll. So the first thing to make it cooler is to create more shade. I think this tomato has done so well for a couple of reasons and the first one is is that it did get really really big. It has a super ton foliage like it has a lot of foliage on it and so I think that itself created like shade for itself. Like the top parts of the plants if you notice way up high, they don't have any tomatoes on them. I feel like that is the part where it's like taking a lot of the heat and then everything that happens under here is like shaded so the flowers are getting pollinated. You could also grow plants right next to it so right down here I don't know if you can see it but I have other plants. I have sweet potatoes, I have long beans, my Puerto Rican black beans all hanging up this trellis which is creating shade on that side which is good because the sun kind of peaks from this way over here so this side is almost completely shaded and then that side is shaded by the other plants. So growing plants around it will help it be shaded and then another thing that I really love to do for all plants not just the tomatoes is going to be mulching heavy. Right now underneath here I have some broken down lemongrass. I use dried leaves. Grass clippings is really great this time of year because it creates like a really thick mat that almost just doesn't allow evaporation. Now you don't want to necessarily do that during the winter because it's a little too good at its job but dead leaves, hay, well straw, wood chips, all of those things are really great options but something down at the bottom base of the plant that's at least three or four inches thick of mulch to keep the roots cool because you don't just need the top of the plant cooler you need the roots cooler as well and then your last option if you really want to go like full throttle do the extra work is to do shade cloth. Now I say do the extra work because I have been avoiding it for so long because I want to make sure that it's something that I can get up and get down quickly in case we have a storm. I want to make sure that it doesn't damage my plants or my area. I want it to look good because I do have a channel so I want things to look nice and be appealing so I'm I'm working on a solution that I'm going to put into play this winter. I'm going to build like a structure where I can hook to it in a quick easy fashion and have shade cloth next year at least over some of my beds but you could just drape it. It's not like you have to be a perfectionist like me over here. You can just drape the plant with shade cloth. It is best to have it kind of lifted up but you know you can do that with an ampharine trellis. You could do that with a couple t-posts. You could do it with a couple poles. Now this plant right here is the only other plant that I have going and it has tomatoes so we're going to clip these off. These are the last tomatoes that are of a decent size and they have a lot of disease issues. There's mealybugs right there too. Look gross. Yeah their mealybugs are taking over my garden right now. Ew they're all in there. I'm gonna have to let me show you. Pests are another thing. There's not much we can do about pests this time of year but look at these things. Look at the amount of mealybugs. That's even with my little bags. They still get in there. That is crazy. Anyway it's actually pretty surprising to see tomatoes this size this time of year and that is for a special reason. Make sure to hang out because we're going to get to that but I want to talk about first how do you deal with the disease pressure because of the humidity right. So humidity part of it is the pollen dispersing but the other part of it is getting a plant to survive. As you can see behind me this plant has a lot of blight. There's a lot of blight situation going on here and it's very different than that plant over that. That plant over there that we just looked at with all the cherry tomatoes doesn't have significant disease. It has a little bit of blight on the bottom but it's not really having an issue. So why is that? Well there's a few reasons. I think the first one is I never pruned that tomato plant and I think most people would tell you need to prune them to give it airflow so that it doesn't get any disease and I do believe that but I think it's like a delicate balance. The minute I start pruning I feel like the disease spreads more quickly. I don't know if it's because I'm creating trauma with the plant. Maybe I'm not cleaning my pruners well enough although I do clean them with alcohol between each plant. I'm not really sure but I have noticed that the minute I start pruning them they start having more and more issues. That tomato plant over there that cherry tomato plant that thing never got pruned. I am just now going to start pruning it so that I can get in there because the pests are wild and I know that that's going to be the downfall of this plant but I'm kind of leaning towards never pruning my plants like not even a little bit which is crazy because I am shocked by that tomato plant this year that with zero pruning and that extensive heavy foliage that is not allowing any airflow that it's actually still okay. Very odd but you can prune. I would just say prune less aggressively. Prune minimally. Allow the foliage to get very big so that you create shade and that you limit the amount of trauma that you're bringing to the plant by cutting it. Another thing that you should do is preventatively treating for it. This is much more important preventatively than curing so once you have powdery mildew or blight you have it. That's it. Your plant is going to succumb to it eventually. I've never actually seen a plant recover but you can prolong it or like starve it off a little bit longer by making sure that you are using a preventative treatment. Down here in Florida it is like almost necessary guys because we have so much humidity so many fungal spores just we just it's a hot humid sticky climate it's like perfect for diseases so you know we have to treat preventatively and a couple things that you can do is copper fungicide that's an organic treatment you can do hydrogen peroxide mixed with water one cup to one gallon some people like baking soda mixed with water other people like milk mixed with water but you do this on a weekly basis and you spray your plants that are most impacted by it for me that's tomatoes squashes and cucumbers and you get ahead of it and you start that spray right when they turn like seedling stage and then you continue on through their whole life cycle and when they get blight and disease you take them out of the garden once you've gotten what you want off of them you take them out of the garden you don't put this in your compost bin you dispose of it another way through a burn pile or you can just trash it another thing that you can do to reduce disease which i think is even more important than the two that i just mentioned is going to be reducing the amount of overhead water and i got so many comments and so much slack on my facebook post that i said like don't overhead water because it's going to cause diseases and people are like oh but the rain i don't know if you've ever noticed this but when it rains our plants get nice and big and full and it's like oh they're so happy and then like a week later they start showing up with diseases well that's because the rain causes fungal diseases too just maybe in a different way it's basically if you can keep well if you keep the plant leaves moist and wet for an extended period of time the spores are allowed to replicate or or expand across different plants much more quickly so we can't do anything about it when it comes to watering or rain coming down you can't you can't stop the rain i mean you could grow in a greenhouse but if you're growing outside you can't really stop the rain so there's not much you could do about it you kind of lean into your preventative sprays to hope that you can starve it off a little bit longer but you can certainly not add to the problem by overhead watering and i totally get it i was a gardener for the first five years of my gardening and i was like i'm not doing drip irrigation i'm just gonna use a sprinkler i had micro sprayers and it was just spraying water everywhere and then on top of that i was watering like every day the plant leaves never dried and that is what caused crazy amounts of fungal disease in my garden you gotta figure out a way to reduce how much water you're putting in your garden and you have to find a way to reduce how much of the leaves are getting wet when you do water hand watering is one option down at the base you can use a hose you don't have to use a bucket but everything needs to be like really down at the base drip irrigation has been my saving grace in my garden when i switched to drip irrigation from my micro sprayers it was total game changer i still get stuff right i still get blight but i'm here for it it is expected it is required almost we just it's a high humidity environment plants are going to stay kind of moist but the drier that we can get them the better off that they're going to be and then last but not least to try to prevent disease you have to have healthy plants to have healthy plants you have to have fed plants to have fed plants you have to have fed soil you know you could go with a synthetic fertilizer that just feeds the plants that will work if you want to really get into the depths of organic fertilizers and feeding the soils like compost is amazing biochar you do organic fertilizers amendments soil tests you can really go as deep as you want but at the very minimal make sure your plants are fed i i often see people say oh i don't want to add chemicals to my garden um looking at organic fertilizers as that chemical but organic fertilizers are derived from animal products if you don't want to use those absolutely fine you can derive your own but that's going to be in the the mechanism of getting the individual elements that are needed like blood meal or kelp meal or seaweed or compost and breaking it down just getting it and putting it in your garden is not going to break it down so you have to like get it and put in your compost and then allow it to compost through that process and then you can take that and put it in the garden i just find it easier to buy the stuff but if you don't want to that's absolutely fine cover crops are a great way to feed your soil you can grow a plant that's going to push food down into the soil and then you cut that plant down and lay it down and it's food so if you can keep them fed and keep them healthy the disease is not going to progress at the same rate now all the ways that i've mentioned so far have been things that require quite a bit of time effort preparation maintenance from you now let's talk about something that doesn't require any work from you that could work you know and this one is it's the easiest way to grow the tomatoes it's the hardest thing to do i think which is getting the right varieties and it's interesting so this is this is where things get a little bit complicated because what do i mean by the right varieties this is a volunteer that last one we saw is a land race and then the most commonly known tomato that grows during our summer is everglades what do all of these have in common they all have in common that they have adapted to our environment everglade tomatoes have been grown here in florida for i don't even know how long some people say that they are native most people say that they are not but they've been here for so long that a lot of people will just assume that they are like some form of a native tomato and they have adapted to the point that they will grow flower and fruit in high heat day and night and high humidity which is so crazy because i just nothing no other tomato can do it until this season this season was the first time that i thought maybe there's another tomato other than everglades now if you love everglades grow everglades those are like the easiest way to do it my favorite place to get them from is the urban harvest but jira's garden has them seed the stars has them i think codyco farm even has them there's actually quite a few people that now have them that you can get them from and if you know somebody with one just get like oh the easiest way because they're hard to the seeds are hard but they're hard to germinate but if you can get like a little rotten tomato from their plant do that that's actually how i got mine i got a little rotten tomato from my friend jacklyn over at the wild floridian and i started it from that and it works you just throw those tomatoes in the middle of the beds and they will just keep growing over and over and over they reseed themselves and you never have to do anything you just have these tomatoes that just show up which i'm like score a lot less work for me but this year these tomatoes are not everglades and you can kind of tell because they don't grow like an everglade this they they look like they remind me of like a super sweet 100 they taste amazing i absolutely love them i think they taste better than the everglades um they're bigger they seem like they're bushier so that they have more tomatoes on them than the everglades and there are bigger tomatoes so a little more substantial so you could do more with them whereas the everglades are a little smaller and a little harder to you know use in things like canning recipes and such but how did this one come to be well this one came out of me growing and allowing volunteers to continue to pop up in my garden and by allowing these volunteers to pop up in my garden and whichever one has done the best and produced the most and you know had the best foliage and the best disease resistance and the best yield and produced into fall or summer the longest that's the one that i then save seeds from and i also disperse the tomatoes these got cracked in a storm that happened recently really dropped like three inches of rain and these all split and they're starting to rot and this is gross normally this would go in my compost but i'm actually going to bury these in different parts of my bed in hopes that i can get this one to come back but i'm also going to take some of these instead of burying them and i'm going to save the seed because when you save the seed over and over and over again what you're doing is you're creating like an acclimated variety i may never know what variety this is i don't think i ever will i suspect it's either a grocery store tomato that has now been a hybrid that has over the years become you know acclimated to my climate or it's a super sweet 100 that acclimated to my climate something like that and i'll never know what they are but they are going to officially become my patrina summer tomato and i'm going to save the seeds and i'll keep growing them over and over and every year when i grow these seeds i'm going to pick the best plant that survived the longest with the best fruits and i'm going to let them basically rot on the plant and save the seeds to have this plant over and over again the other plant over there with the bigger tomatoes that one was given to me by somebody her name is donna she's a friend of the channel she had been i i talked about having some struggles with purple tomatoes and donna sent me this purple tomato and i believe it is a variation of a cherokee purple it is some kind of cherokee purple that has been able to adapt to florida climate over and over and over she got the seeds from a farmer's market where the farmer had been reproducing this tomato and mixing it with other varieties it's basically a land-raised cherokee purple that has now been able to acclimate and that seed is just works longer into the summer season now there are certain people that are doing this and it's very it's it's kind of difficult to find these seeds you really need to kind of be doing this talking to the community those kinds of things but i've seen david the good and seed the stars who are really getting into this land race situation seeds that they are basically breeding across different varieties to acclimate and they're doing it year over year over year over year and taking the best of the breeds over and over and over to try to acclimate them to florida specific climate and what you're ending up with is this land race tomato from them and you don't know what kind it is you're probably never going to be able to replicate it you know what i mean but it is something that the locals have been using for a while and now that tomato plant will just grow and that's what we need to be focusing on so if you can't get your hands on a land race you can actually create your own land race by letting the plant that did the best in your garden saving the seeds from that putting some of them in your compost burying some of your in your bed and every single season letting that plant come keep growing and keep saving and keep composting and keep you know composting in place or burying in your beds and you're going to create that acclimated seed and eventually your tomatoes will just pop up on their own and they will just grow with no help and that's what we're going for here is an acclimated tomato that really loves to grow in florida it's going to take some time it's going to take a little bit of effort on your half of just letting some things grow and take up space in your garden but i think in the long run it does help because i have noticed this has helped my garden when all of my other tomato plants are are just giving up they already are out i've already got a cover crop in they stopped producing like a month ago this one is still producing and that one was still producing although that one's quit now but i'm telling you what i'm saving these tomatoes from that one and we're going to save the seeds because these were the ones that lasted the longest these particular tomatoes set fruit when it was very hot so i'm going to save the seeds from those so while growing tomatoes here in florida can be a little bit of a challenge there are ways to get them to set fruit longer into the season and i hope this gives you some ideas of how you might run your garden in the future when it comes to growing tomatoes if you're interested in learning more about what i've learned about growing tomatoes here in florida make sure to check out my book the homegrown florida gardening guide it's on my website homegrownfloridagarden.com thanks so much for hanging out with me today i've got still a lot more to pick so i'm going to get at that and then i'm going to trim down this plant because it's it's i think it's a little bit wild and i can't even get in there but i want more tomatoes thank you guys for hanging out with me today happy gardening