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simone54's avatar

Will this work to get a giant tomato?

Asked by simone54 (7629points) April 2nd, 2012

I have an heirloom tomato plant that yields two pound tomatoes. Once I get the first fruit I plan on cutting off all the other fruits and flowers so all the energy goes to this one fruit.

Will that make a HUGE tomato?

Furthermore, I want to take the seeds from that fruit and plant them again and again over several years.

Will the following years give even bigger tomatoes?

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8 Answers

2davidc8's avatar

The answer to your first question is “yes”.
The answer to your second question is “not necessarily”.

marinelife's avatar

Maybe.

No.

El_Cadejo's avatar

In theory yes.
And no to the second. Thats like saying if I cut off your arm will your child be born missing an arm? It doesnt work like that.

Now if you selected just plants with large yield tomatoes and kept breeding them over generations of the plants you should gradually increase tomato size.

i personally would just cross breed a tomato and a tobacco plant

RocketGuy's avatar

Nature vs nurture.

zigmund's avatar

My mother always removes the first few flowers on certain tomato plants. She swears it improves the quality of the rest of the crop. In certain viticultural (wine) areas, “green harvesting” or removing a certain number of bunches of grapes after fruit set can help to improve the quality (not size) of the remaining fruit. The Native Americans were familiar with this concept and would remove a number of squash blossoms to improve the quality of the remaining squash. It’s why we eat squash blossoms today. Nothing was wasted.

I can see that putting your tomato plant’s energies into one (or perhaps a reduced number of) fruit might seem like a good idea. It might not make the tomato larger, but it might improve its taste. Sounds like a worthy experiment. Please let us know what it yields.

simone54's avatar

@uberbatman I might actually be able to that. We have tobacco growing in our yard. They did that on the Simpsons. They called it “Tomacco”.

El_Cadejo's avatar

yes im well aware, thats why i said it.

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