{"id":28,"date":"2007-05-25T16:02:46","date_gmt":"2007-05-25T20:02:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/25\/cluster-thinning-for-better-tomatoes\/"},"modified":"2007-05-25T16:02:46","modified_gmt":"2007-05-25T20:02:46","slug":"cluster-thinning-for-better-tomatoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/25\/cluster-thinning-for-better-tomatoes\/","title":{"rendered":"Cluster Thinning For Better Tomatoes?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I wrote about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/16\/cluster-thinning-for-better-wine\/\">cluster thinning<\/a> to improve wine grapes, it got me thinking about tomatoes. Could the same technique improve the quality of tomatoes (and wine made from them)? I always have a problem with blossom end rot on my Romas, and I think that may be clue.<\/p>\n<p>This rot occurs because the plant can&#8217;t fully ripen it&#8217;s fruit, and it can be caused by improper watering, nutrient imbalance, or over cropping. I&#8217;ve tried to correct this problem by more careful watering and closer attention to the proportion of nutrients in my fertilizer, but with no success at all. Maybe I&#8217;m just not doing it right, or maybe those weren&#8217;t really my problems. Thinning has worked for me every time, and this makes me think that it might improve the fruit on other tomatoes, like the Gold Nuggets that I&#8217;m going to make wine from, that aren&#8217;t hit by blossom end rot.<\/p>\n<p>Tomatoes aren&#8217;t grapes, of course, so there&#8217;s a limit to how much knowledge of one I can apply to the other. I&#8217;m not even going to try limiting fertilizer or water to my tomatoes, for example. I&#8217;ll probably try thinning, though, and maybe some other grape pruning ideas. I&#8217;ll keep you posted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I wrote about cluster thinning to improve wine grapes, it got me thinking about tomatoes. Could the same technique improve the quality of tomatoes (and wine made from them)? I always have a problem with blossom end rot on my Romas, and I think that may be clue. This rot occurs because the plant [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gardening","category-tomato-wine"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/washingtonwinemaker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}