Cherry Tomato Growing Calendar: Stage by Stage Through the Season

Four stages, and the one that decides the season

The season breaks into four: establishment after planting, building the frame while the first trusses set, the long main harvest, and the run down to frost. Cherry tomatoes differ from large-fruited types mainly in the third stage, which lasts two to three months instead of six weeks, and that changes where your effort has to go.

The stage people get wrong is the second one, the four to six weeks between planting and the first ripe fruit. That is when the training decisions are made and the sucker habit is set, and a plant that is left to itself for those weeks is a bush by midsummer. An hour a week during frame-building is worth ten hours of untangling later.

The stage by stage list

Everything below is counted from your last spring frost, because that date differs by weeks between gardens while calendar months tell you nothing useful. It assumes you are buying transplants; if you raise your own, sow indoors six to eight weeks before last frost, which is a fortnight less than a slicing tomato needs because cherry seedlings grow away faster.

In a mild garden with a long autumn you can add a second planting four to six weeks after the first, and it will crop after the first plants have tired. That trick only works with cherry types, because they ripen in around 40 days from flower and can still finish a truss in the shortening days of early autumn.

Establishment: do less than you want to

For the first fortnight after planting, the work is mostly restraint. Water it in once at planting, then wait until the top two inches (five cm) of soil are dry before you water again. Constant watering at this stage keeps the roots shallow and you pay for it in the heat of high summer, when a shallow-rooted cherry tomato wilts every afternoon and splits every fruit.

Watch the leaves at dawn instead. Standing up in the morning means the roots are working, even if the plant flags at midday, which is normal on a hot day. Leaves still drooping at first light mean the rootball has dried out and needs a thorough soak at the base.

1. Check the plant at dawn, not at noon Midday wilting tells you nothing. Dawn is when you find out whether the roots are keeping up.
2. Get the permanent stake in early Drive stakes before or at planting. Pushing a stake in beside an established plant tears through the roots you spent six weeks growing.
3. Do not feed yet Nothing until the first fruit is pea sized. Feeding now gives you a huge leafy plant that flowers late.

Building the frame: the weekly round starts here

From about two weeks after planting until you start picking, you visit once a week and do three jobs together: suckers, ties, and a look at the lower leaves for spots. Do them on the same day every week and the plant never gets ahead of you. This is also when you commit to one stem or two, by choosing whether to keep the sucker directly below the first flower truss.

The first feed goes on when the fruit on the lowest truss reaches pea size, in a ring at the edge of the leaf canopy rather than against the stem. From this point the plant only gets bigger and hungrier, and the habit you set in these four weeks is the one that carries you through the summer.

1. Pick a day and keep it Suckers, ties, disease check, all together, same day each week. A missed week on a cherry tomato is a genuinely different plant.
2. Decide your stem count now Keep or remove the sucker below the first truss. After a fortnight that decision has been made for you by the plant.
3. First feed at pea-sized fruit A ring of balanced granular fertilizer at the canopy edge, scratched in and watered. Log the date.

Main harvest: picking becomes the job

Once fruit starts coloring, picking every two or three days replaces almost everything else on the list. Cherry fruit at full color on the plant is fruit waiting to split, so frequent picking is a disease and quality measure, not just a way of getting dinner. Combine it with the weekly suckering and the plant stays manageable through its biggest stretch.

Feeding continues fortnightly in the ground and weekly in pots, switching to a high-potassium tomato feed. Keep the mulch topped up as it breaks down, and get a rain cover over the row before the wet part of summer arrives. Strip two or three leaves below each truss as you finish picking it, which opens the base and keeps blight at bay.

Run down to frost, and the notes that matter

Six weeks out from your first expected frost, top every stem two leaves above the highest truss you expect to ripen and remove trusses that are still only flowers. Keep picking to the end, because late cherry fruit ripening in cool weather is often the best of the season. When frost is forecast, strip everything green and ripen it indoors, then pull the plants and take them off the plot.

Then write four dates down: planted, first flower, first ripe fruit, last picking. Add the stem count and rough position of each plant. Those six lines, kept from one season to the next, will tell you more about your own garden than any general growing guide can, and they are the difference between repeating a good year and wondering why this one was worse.

1. Top six weeks before first frost At 40 days from flower to ripe fruit, anything setting later than that will not finish. Put the energy into what is already there.
2. Strip and clear on the frost forecast Take all the fruit, then pull the plants. Old tomato growth left on the bed carries disease into next year.
3. Record four dates and the stem count Planted, first flower, first ripe fruit, last picking, plus whether you ran one stem or two. That is your baseline for next season.