"balvenieman" wrote in message
m...

"Paul M. Cook" wrote:

"Frank" wrote in message
...


Once tomatoes get going, they are like weeds, and it takes a lot to
eradicate them. Wouldn't worry if branches were cut or broken.

Once I got onto calcium and add a handful of limestone to my pots each
season, BER has not come back.

It took way more than I would have guessed but it finally did the trick.
I
was losing 3-4 every day for a while. I may try pruning next year to keep
the branch weight down. So far I have a very large number of not so big
tomatoes. Would like that to be the reverse.
Most tomatoes, except for the "patio" tomatoes that have a fairly
thrifty habit and can even be pruned to grow as a standard, require some
sort of support. You can influence the directions of growth and, some
say, the number of fruit by early pruning but, as a rule, I don't bother
with it. I just cage the plants in fence wire and let them rip. Small
fruit can be a sign of over-bearing, commonplace for tomatoes and in
which case the fruit may be thinned very early in its development (if
you wait too late, say until they're "frying" size, the remaining fruit
isn't likely to get any bigger), and/or of root crowding, which is
particularly troublesome for container-grown plants.

I used cages and trained the vines as best I could. But I did not tie off
the heavy clusters and they broke higher up the vine. All the break points
were my biggest clusters. Next time I'll tie off each cluster individually.
I may just get rid of the smallest ones at this point and let the plant put
its energy into the largest fruit.

Limestone may not be your best source of calcium because of its
effect on pH. Gypsum adds calcium without raising pH. Unless you have
serious nutrient imbalances to correct you can eliminate or, at the very
least, seriously mitigate future calcium deficiencies by incorporating
bone meal, a slow-release source of phosphate and calcium, into your
admixture in whatever quantity is required to provide sufficient
phosphate. Excesses of certain micro-nutrients -- magnesium, for example
-- can interfere with plants' ability to acquire and/or to transport Ca.


Very interesting. Since my tomatoes are next to my peppers I was watering
them with the same magnesium rich fertilizer I used for the peppers. I did
stop doing this and switched the tomatoes to fish emulsion only about the
time the BER showed signs of abating. You may have found the missing link.

Paul