Blossom Drop Prevention

Holy Moly look what I found this evening.

 One almost ripe strawberry.  Taste test tomorrow night.

Blossom  Drop Prevention 

In my years of gardening experience I have come to expect tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants to drop their blooms if the temperature falls below 50 degrees F.  Tomatoes also have bloom drop occur when the temperature goes above 95.  On a spring like this one or summers like what we’ve had the last couple of years experiencing these cold and hot temps can mean a loss of a great amount of fruit.   A few years back when I was only growing 30 tomato plants a year (last year I had 257 plants) I complained to my dear neighbor, John Wilson, a well of wisdom, that with the high temperatures we’d had the last few weeks all my tomato blooms were dropping and I wasn’t getting any tomatoes.  John told me that I should try a product call Blossom Set.  So I bought an 8 ounce  pump spray bottle at Bluestem Farm and Ranch in Emporia.  (I love that store)   The bottle said to spray the blooms and the leaves around the blooms.  With my index finger pumping away I sprayed the flowers on my 30 plants all of which were in the 6 to 8 foot tall range at the time.  I used up almost the entire bottle.  And my finger got tired pumping.   But, sure enough, in the coming days blooms began to set and tomatoes began to form.   Cool!

It worked.  Thank you Mr. Wilson

my current spraying rig powered by an ATV battery

Reading the ingredients on the label of the Blossom Set I saw that it had (if I remember right) .00006% of cytokinin.  I searched for blossom set concentrate instead of the RTU (ready to use) 8 oz. bottles.  No luck.  The rest of that year I bought several bottles and sprayed after every rain or once a week if it didn’t rain until the temps came down to more moderate levels.   My tomatoes produced consistently the rest of that summer.  

As life turned out over the next couple of years I expanded my garden by many fold.   I was soon doing 100’s of tomato and pepper plants.  The 8 oz bottles weren’t going to cut it. Fortunately I located a company in Maine that sells a product called Seacrop 16.  It is a seaweed extract that is naturally high in cytokinin. I mix 4 tbsp in a 16 gallon sprayer.  I use it as a foliar spray.  The extract helps the plants tolerate both low and high temperatures.  

This week our low temps  have been and are expected to be for the next few days in the  low 40’s.  I pulled out the sprayer from winter storage (more about that on another post) and sprayed all the field plants the day before the temps dropped below 50.  Three days of cool nights and so far the blooms look fine.  If this cool weather continues I’ll spray again in a day or two.

 

 flowers still viable on baby tomato plants after 3 nights in the low 40s

I’m convinced that this extract helps me get the earliest tomatoes I can and helps me keep up production all summer long even when the weather is scorching.  Which it does in Kansas.  This year I have also started using the Seacrop 16 for watering in seeds and transplants.  Oh, and I’m spraying the strawberries with it to help them  be more tolerant of the cool weather, too.  One almost ripe strawberry will soon be buckets of ripe strawberries.  I've already told you i'm excited.  My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

Three special people in my life.

A lucky day for me today.  I got pictures of my three grandkids in California.  Frank, Mila, and June are the children of my oldest son, Austin, and his dear wife, Angela.  I, of course, want to show off pictures of my grandchildren.  They are so cute who could blame me.