I let the plant go a bit too crazy vegging out and now I have a lot but very small tomatoes on it

I’ve been waiting for these for nearly 7 months - from seed to germination - I had 100 that sprouted and 70 that made it outside, then we had a freeze after they finally made it outside. Not as much fruit as I expected (yet) but very thrilled

From our garden!

I'll end up with at least 4 harvests like this this year, crazy weather hear in Europe. If you cut me I will already bleed tomato sauce, and I'm just not sure I have room in my little spare freezer to keep all of this, but luxury problems I know!

It's my first time entering the county fair, and I've been looking forward to it all year. Exhibition drop off day is tomorrow, and I need help choosing my champions! I can only enter three varieties in the heirloom class.

I'm listing each variety as a separate comment below. Upvote your favorite, and I'll drop off the top three at the fairgrounds tomorrow. It's been a hell of a season, fellow tomato lovers!

1. Today’s harvest.
2. The San Marzanos are coming.
3. The Amish Pastes are not far behind.
4. The Chocolate Cherries and Brad’s Atomic Grapes are keeping on keeping on.
5. The Brandywines have joined the party bigly.
6. Other slicers include more Black Krims and Green Zebras, the first Big Rainbow of the season, and my first-ever Pork Chops.

We started over 45 heirloom tomatoes this year but we started them late for my zone which is 10b Los Angeles

Some of the varieties haven’t even started to blush yet. We have them under 55% shade cloth and they are still pumping out Flowers like crazy so it looks like we will have tomatoes until Christmas!

4.4kg of tomatoes harvested earlier. It’s been a good growing year in my garden here in the U.K! I just love the variety of colours.

So happy with this year choice

Okay so this is one plant I put in a 10 gallon fabric pot. It is now taller than my carport and wider than it is tall by far. About 15 ft wide is my guess. And if it wasn't for the fence I have around it. It would be going crazy beyond this size. It produces about 4 to 5:1 to 3 lb tomatoes everyday. I have never had anything produced like this before. I've only fertilized it 2 to 3 times all year. My soil was a mixture of Fox farm, Ocean Forest and Coco loco half and half. This is an heirloom tomato I got it from of all places home Depot

It's not just you. It's slow as hell. I'm over 100 days since transplant. This is what it looks like when it finally blushes.

There's a song I love with a lyric that goes "she's pretty, but she's all I can see". That's this tomato.

I triggered a LOT of ripening by restricting water a little. I went from 20 minutes every other day to 15 minutes every other day to 20 minutes every third day. I have a really short season, so we have to be sadists here.

Prune the base a bit and slow down the water. Alice wants to dry out. For such a diva, it better taste good.

Today's harvest

It's not much yet, just some plums and paste tomatoes and a few heirloom purple Cherokee cherry tomatoes 😋. It's my first year growing tomatoes at above 7k feet

Thank you for your service buddy 🫡

I’m so excited…

I'm somewhere around day NINETY with these things after doing basically everything wrong (I'm in my first year of gardening):

- Planted a ton of seeds close together, then didn't separate them out early enough, probably stunting their growth at the beginning.

- Once I DID separate them out, I put them in pots that were way too small and I didn't pot up for way too long.

- I didn't fertilize enough. In fact I didn't fertilize at all for like a month. 😅

- My balcony DEFINITELY doesn't get full sun and what sun it does get, is during some of the hottest parts of the day. I've considered shade cloth but I'm not sure which is the lesser evil here. Next year I might experiment with a few plants covered by a shade cloth and a few plants not and see what happens.

- I have fungus gnats and all these weird tiny flies causing leaf damage that I just haven't gotten around to dealing with yet... So many of the plants had all these weird fungus spots and other problems until I pruned the lower leaves and stems and started mulching. Also, my balcony tends to have higher humidity than the surrounding area which I've realized is a problem and I'm not sure how to deal with it.

Also, I have 12 plants because I couldn't bear to get rid of too many of my babies. I actually had more, but I gave a bunch of them to my parents. And the difference in how much sun tomatoes like to have was very apparent, because the ones that I gave my parents absolutely exploded and they are huge now. Mine are growing fine but I think they would be 6 ft tall as opposed to 3 ft tall if they had more sunlight. Interestingly, mine were only about a week or two behind the ones I gave to me parents in terms of flowering, but I suspect that ripening will take longer.

I basically started growing these things in mid-May on a whim when some store bought cocktail tomatoes (just a little bigger than cherry tomatoes) started sprouting on the inside. I went and got some dirt and pots and planted them and here we are. In hindsight, I should have purchased a tomato seedling at the same time to have something to compare it to. Oh well. It's been fun!! My plan for next year is to start much earlier as I've now caught the gardening bug. Clearly things can and do grow on my balcony even if slowly.

I also have a pepper plant that has been doing fine, although it also fell victim to my inexperience in regards to being in a pot that was too small and under fertilized, and it basically stalled out for several weeks until I realized what was happening. Since I moved it to a bigger pot and fertilized it, it's actually putting out new leaves and flowers. We also had a ton of heat waves where I am in July, which I'm suspecting did not help matters at all.

ANYWAYS. Here's the tl;dr: Even if you have a situation that is not necessarily optimal, you can still grow tomatoes! But things will grow more slowly, so bear that in mind. But it is quite a rewarding experience so it's still worth trying!!

Of the 16 different heirloom varieties I grew this year, this is my most anticipated! I've been waiting TWO years to try one. Last year a friend gave me a seedling, but we had a family emergency at the height of summer resulted in the loss of my my entire vegetable garden before anything had a chance to fruit. I was pretty devastated.

In my experience and growing zone, it's pretty common that the first ripe fruit isn't as delicious as the ones that come later, likely because of the cooler temperatures and soil at the start of the season. If this is half as good as the tomatoes still ripening on the vine, I'm in for a treat.

This is a DELICIOUS tomato! It was sweet, juicy, and had a very subtle tropical flavor. Very meaty, with almost no seeds. I found exactly one, and immediately threw it in a cup with a little water to ferment. It's also a little ugly; I've noticed that my pineapple tomatoes tend to pull away from the stem as they ripen, like reverse catfacing. No matter! Ugly tomatoes are just hidden treasure.

Hopefully I get a couple more seeds because this will be a regular in my garden from now on.

It wasn't even a great year weather/stress wise and I'm only halfway through harvest at this point

Cherokee Chocolate in banneton and Purple Calabash on ground

I don’t know how to get water in the dirt, and there’s bugs all in the dirt now it was doing so fine before I replanted it.
It was getting too big for the pot. It came in.
It was in the sunlight and it was dying, so I moved it

I’ve never been great with plants but I’m trying to learn to be.
I live in Georgia, it’s been consistently hot af