I don’t mean anything cosmic or metaphysical by saying that time is nonlinear in the garden.
I’m just trying to figure out when I should start clipping the flowers off my tomatoes.
And I come up with the ridiculous answer of “now”.
This post explains how I arrived at that answer.
Please remember to phrase it in the form of a question.
Image source: WalMart.
Answer: Now.
Question: When should I start clipping the flowers off my tomato plants?
Really?
Yep.
The theory is ridiculously simple
For the sake of argument, assume it takes 55 days to manufacture a ripe tomato, under ideal growing conditions. That is, 55 days elapse between the time the flower opens, and the time the ripe tomato is ready to be picked.
Further assume, correctly, that I place little value on green tomatoes.
How late can my tomatoes flower, and still give me ripe fruit?
For sure, frost kills tomato plants. Halloween is my expected fall first frost date. So, any tomato flowers opening after September 6 are probably useless to me. That’s 55 days prior to expected first frost. If first frost occurs on time, those late flowers won’t give me any usable fruit.
First complication: Mere 50F cold damages green tomatoes.
During last year’s bumper crop of green tomatoes, I learned a lot. Mostly, I learned to plant my tomatoes earlier.
But in addition, I learned that green tomatoes are permanently damaged by 50F nighttime temperatures. This and other fun facts are summarized in:
So if I want ripe fruit, it needs to ripen up before nighttime temperatures routinely drop to 50F or lower. Eyeballing the weather for the past five Octobers, that happens around October 7 in my area. Or 21 days before typical first frost.
As a result, the entire tomato-ripening timeline needs to shift back by 21 days. Because I don’t merely need to avoid frost. I need to avoid nights under 50F. I need to start cutting the flowers off my tomato plants not on September 6, but on August 16.
If I want to pick ripe tomatoes before nights begin dipping below 50F, flowers opening after August 16 are useless to me.
Second complication: Time is non-linear in the garden.
Source: Gencraft AI
Everything in the garden slows as we slip into fall. It slows, in part, because we see less sunlight. It slows, in part, because temperatures drop.
Back-of-the-envelope, I guess that October days produce about one-third as much plant growth as August days. In my climate (Zone 7). That compounds a roughly 50% decline in growth due to temperature (October around here is about 10C less than August, which cuts the speed of a typical chemical reaction in half), along with having only about 70% of the sunlight that we see in August. I’d then guesstimate that September days produce perhaps two-thirds the growth that August days do.
This means that the entire month of September accomplishes only 20 days’ worth of growing and ripening under ideal conditions. And October only adds 10 days’ worth. More formally, if October 7 is my end-of-season date (beyond which I can expect 50F and lower nights), then to get the equivalent of 55 days of perfect growing conditions, I have to start clipping off my tomato flowers on July 30. Or, two days from now.
Conclusion
If my tomatoes take 55 days to go from flower to fruit, under ideal growing conditions, then I should start clipping the flowers off approximately 93 days before expected first-frost date.
Or, more-or-less now.
This sounds absolutely ridiculous. But I swear it’s true.
Of the additional (93 – 55 =) 38 days that arise from the factors discussed above:
The flower-kill date moves up by 21 days, because the actual practical no-damage cutoff is 50F nights, not frost.
The flower-kill date moves up by a further 17 days because fall growing conditions are not ideal, and everything in the garden slows down in September and October.
Afterward: A controlled observation is a form of an experiment.
I, like most gardeners, have a hard time cutting new flowers off my tomatoes. Or, off my vegetable plants in general. If nothing else, it’s an admission of finality for the year. The only fruits I’m going to get this year are the ones that are already set, on those plants.
This year, I’m going to test the theory by marking a selection of flower bracts on my tomatoes now. (Probably just put a twist-tie around them). Then letting one or more rounds of new flowers survive, beyond the marked bracts. Then seeing which of those led to mature fruits, before nights turn cold in the fall.
I’m pretty sure, for example, that cherry tomatoes take less time to develop than full-sized (slicing) tomatoes. And I’m pretty sure that my early-season tomatoes also take less time to mature than slicing tomatoes. And so I strongly suspect that the right time to start clipping the flowers is directly correlated with the size of the final tomatoes.
If so, that should come out clearly in my end-of-season observations.
