Hit 200 pounds of tomatoes harvested this season and I almost cried

Been growing heirlooms for 6 years and never tracked it before, but after weighing every single San Marzano and Cherokee Purple that made it past the hornworms, I hit exactly 202.8 pounds off 12 plants in a 4x8 bed - has anyone else actually weighed their harvest and been completely shocked by the numbers?

3 comments

3 Comments

hayes.joel19d ago

That "holy cow, 202 pounds off 12 plants in a 4x8 bed" from william_torres jumped out at me. I think you might be mixing up the bed dimensions. The original post said a 4x8 bed, which is 32 square feet, not a 4x8 acre lot or something. At that density you're basically squeezing a plant into every 2.5 square feet, which is pretty tight for indeterminate tomatoes. Most folks would run three, maybe four plants max in that space if you want them to breathe. So either those plants were fighting each other for light or the poster is counting the space around them differently. Either way, hitting 200 pounds off that many plants in that small a footprint is wild, almost like counting nursery starts that never made it into the ground.

william_torres20d ago

Holy cow, 202 pounds off 12 plants in a 4x8 bed? That's absolutely insane, I'm blown away by those numbers!

sean_torres7119d ago

Man my buddy Rick tried weighing his harvest one year and it turned into this whole thing where his scale broke halfway through so he ended up at the grocery store comparing his tomatoes on their produce scale and the cashier thought he was stealing them haha. @william_torres you really gotta watch out for those hornworms too, they got half my San Marzanos last August before I even noticed them blending into the stems. So yeah the numbers can really surprise you, especially when you're picking every single day and it doesn't feel like that much weight.