Would you like to pick the first tomatoes from your plants 1 to 3 weeks earlier than your neighbor?
Red, ripe tomatoes are meatier, firmer, larger, better colored, and better tasting? And many of them absolutely seedless?
All you need do is spray the tomato flowers with a hormone blossom-set solution using an ordinary sprayer.
Many thousands of home gardeners and commercial growers do every year to ensure quality crops of delicious tomatoes that ripen up to 3 weeks earlier than normal.
If you’ve never used a blossom-set spray on your tomatoes, be sure to try it this year.
It’s a real adventure in modern gardening, and it’s lots of fun.
It means the money in your pocket, too, because you’ll be picking ripe tomatoes from your own plants when you normally pay high prices for them at the grocery.
Blossom-Drop Of Tomatoes
The first blossoms on tomato plants drop off in many areas without setting fruit.
This “blossom-drop,” as it is called, is most often due to a lack of pollination and fertilization.
This, in turn, is usually caused by unfavorable climatic conditions such as short, cloudy days with insufficient sunlight and cool night temperatures, particularly those below 59° degrees Fahrenheit.
It has been definitely proved that when night temperatures during the blossoming period are below 59° degrees Fahrenheit, tomato blossoms will not set fruit.
And such conditions of inadequate sunlight and cool nights are general in many areas when those first blossoms appear.
If you live in such an area, this is probably why your tomato plants lose their first cluster of blossoms.
In most cases, a blossom drop can be prevented by spraying an explicitly developed hormone chemical.
The hormone makes those first blossoms set fruit and stay on the plant. They grow into tomatoes that otherwise might not develop.
Here is the explanation.
For a tomato blossom to develop into a fruit, pollination and fertilization must occur.
As a result, hormones are released in the ovary, which causes fruit-set or blossom-set.
These hormones prevent blossom-drop by strengthening the attachment of the blossom, or embryonic fruit, to the plant.
They direct the plant’s food reserves to the embryonic fruit so that it actually gets priority for the available food supply over the other parts of the plant.
If the natural fruit-setting hormones are not produced (due either to lack of pollination and fertilization or too low night temperatures or both), the blossoms will fail to set fruit and eventually wither and drop off the plant.
A complete loss.
That’s where science has come to the rescue by developing chemicals that take the place of the natural fruit-setting hormones.
Plant Growth Regulators
These chemicals make the blossoms set fruit despite low night temperatures and lack of pollination and fertilization.
These chemicals are called plant growth regulators by scientists or, more simply, plant hormones or blossom-set hormones.
In solution, they are sprayed onto the flowers after the blossoms have opened up.
The hormone penetrates the reproductive parts of the flowers and causes the blossom to set fruit, much as the natural hormones would do.
Therefore, the tomato flower is made independent of nature’s method of setting fruit, a technique that is often haphazard and incomplete.
As a result, more blossoms set fruit on hormone sprayed plants than on unsprayed plants.
And much bigger yields are obtained because of this, especially in the first pickings.
Comparison Tests Between Hormone-Sprayed And Unsprayed Plants
In tests at the University of Massachusetts, 3 times as many blossoms set fruit on hormone-sprayed plants as on unsprayed plants.
There was an average of 3 ripe tomatoes on each hormone-sprayed plant and none on the unsprayed plants by the first picking date.
In other words, if you had 25 plants that had been sprayed and 25 unsprayed, you would have picked 75 tomatoes from the hormone-sprayed plants and not a single one from the others.
At a Georgia experiment station, sizeable yields were picked from hormone sprayed plants for 3 ½ weeks before the unsprayed plants began to yield significant amounts.
Actual figures for 2 small test plots were 30 pounds from the sprayed plants and less than 1 ½ pounds from the unsprayed plants!
Because of results like these, commercial growers regularly spray their tomatoes with a blossom-set hormone.
As one farmer put it, “I sold tomatoes 3 weeks before anyone else had ripe ones and got top-notch prices.”
Hormones are used on tomatoes by market gardeners who raise relatively small acreages, such as in Michigan and New York, and big growers in Texas and California who raise many hundreds, even thousands, of acres.
They realize more profits because they get earlier yields and bigger and better crops.
Advantages Of Using Hormone Spray
There are other advantages, too, including:
- Fruit-set is more thorough and uniform.
- The tomatoes are generally larger and more uniform in shape.
- Fruits are meatier and firmer for slicing.
- There is less watery, jelly-like material found in the seed cavities of un• sprayed tomatoes.
- They possess better color and have a superior flavor.
Just hold an unsprayed tomato in one hand and a tomato from a hormone sprayed blossom and take a bite of each.
How you’ll miss the luscious taste of those wonderful sprayed tomatoes after the gardening season is over!
Seedless Tomatoes
Last, and quite important to many gardeners, is that many of the early hormones sprayed tomatoes are entirely seedless.
Since fruit-set is brought about chemically, not by natural pollination and fertilization, there are absolutely no seeds in many of the tomatoes from the early clusters.
Later in the season, when conditions are ideal for natural fruit-set, sprayed tomatoes will contain some seeds, although many will be seedless even then.
Who wants seedless tomatoes? You’d be surprised!
When the author grew them in his own garden (at that time, in Pittsfield. Mass.), the local paper wrote a story about it which eventually found its way into Ripley’s “Believe It or Not.”
Letters came in from all over the country as a result.
Wrote one gardener, “Seeds are really the detriment to tomato eaters who have false teeth (because they work up under the plates). Now I can eat them without trouble if I can grow seedless tomatoes.”
According to another, “My doctor said it wasn’t the tomato that hurt my stomach but the seeds … tell me how I can raise seedless tomatoes.”
Humorous as these letters are, they reveal that seedless tomatoes are essential to some people.
Hormone-Spraying Method
The method of use is simple. Here are the following steps:
- Just mix the hormone preparation with water as directed on the label.
- Pour the solution into an ordinary, clean sprayer of the household type.
- The nasal-type atomizer is not necessary.
- When blossoms begin to open up and fold back, the spray should be applied.
Some hormone preparations must be confined to the blossoms only when spraying.
Others may safely be sprayed on the whole plant and are much easier to use.
In using both types, the spray must envelop the blossoms.
When using the whole-plant-type hormone spray, aim the sprayer at the blossom cluster and spray. That’s all there is to it.
Be sure to use a blossom-set hormone on your tomatoes this year.
Leave some plants untreated so you can see the difference for yourself.
You’ll eat better-tasting tomatoes earlier than ever before—right from your own garden. And you’ll be the envy of your neighbors.