Another first year gardening question... I'm starting to panic. My tomatoes are coming in wonderful and then they start splitting around the top. What am I doing wrong? Cracks in my tomatoes ( photo / image / picture from Miss Liberty's Garden )
Did you get rain recently or water them heavily?. This is usually caused by a fast intake of water. the skins don't have enough time to grow as fast as they take up the water, so they split and heal over. I have LOTS of tomatoes that look like this since it rained for three days last week. they are still usable, just a little more work and not as pretty.
Carolyn, thank you. It makes sense. It's been so hot and dry I've been making sure everything has water. I must be watering too much. Plus we did have a heavy rain early this week. I hate to be the cause of the damage, but now that I know what it is, I can at least make changes.
Hi Liberty, Most likely the rain was what caused the cracking. Us watering the plants doesn't seem to cause this as much as the rain,unless you have a soaker hose that you left on for hours, once they were bone dry. You are doing good.
I avoid this tom-splitting by watering often and not giving a lot at each watering time. I have found that toms are very sensitive to large boluses of water, and will split frequently. I wonder if you could place 6-8 inches of a mulch around the base of your plants the next time that you get a big rain. This would hold a degree of moisture in the ground constantly, so that the next time one of these big rain storms hit, your toms won't get such a drastic change in soil hydration. It's just like Carolyn said--sudden over-hydration is something that the tom skins cannot handle...so they split.
GP, you are correct. the toms split because they grow so fast, due to the sudden abundance of water, whether it is rain water or a water hose, that the skins can't keep up and split or crack, to accommodate the sudden difference in size.
We picked several of the cracked tomatoes today. I simply cut the crowns off and used what remained, which was most of it. And they were super DELICIOUS!! I'm going to pay more attention to my watering to see what happens. This was a great lesson in gardening that I'll remember the rest of my gardening career -- which I hope will be long and fruitful (or veggieful as my case may be). By the way, I didn't post the picture upside down. That particular tomato is growing upside down like that.
