Why Do My Veggie Plants Look Amazing, But Not The Veggies?!?

[caption id="attachment_1674" align="alignright" width="300"] Picture of overgrown tomato plants with very few tomatoes. These are the biggest tomato plants I have ever seen with little reward. We grew beans there the year before. There was too much nitrogen along with very high temps, making the tomatoes not grow.[/caption]

Sometimes one of the problems we have when gardening, is our plants grow nice and robust, but then we get very little fruit from it. This is very frustrating!! We are planting the garden for the Veggies not the plant anyway.

Obviously there are conditions in your garden that are conducive to the plant thriving. There is sometimes a balance you have to have. You want the plant to do well so that it will produce fruit, however if the plant dose too well, it will skimp on the plants. Here are a few ideas on what could be going on in your garden:

• You may have too much nitrogen in the soil. This can happen from fertilizer or from compost added to the soil if the compost is heavy in nitrogen. This is great for plants that are being grown for the foliage, but if you are wanting fruit from it, too much nitrogen encourages the plant to grow and focus its energy on growing rather than producing. Peas and bean plants fix nitrogen into the soil, so planting something that is sensitive to too much nitrogen there after, might be a cause of the problem. Tomato plants are particularly sensitive to this.


• This is also particularly for Tomato plants: The temperature outside when the plant is flowering and ready to produce cannot be too high or too low. Too much heat or cold will cause the flowers to drop off before fertilization occurs. So Tomatoes in areas that are too hot, maybe heat reflecting off buildings and the like, might get really large in size and produce very little fruit.


• Another thing might be that the plant is getting too much water. This can encourage the plant to keep growing with out producing fruit. Check the soil with your finger before watering. If it is still wet, do not water.


• It might need fertilizer with the middle number high. This is the part of the fertilizer that encourages the plants to produce fruit. That number stands for phosphorus. Bone meal and rock phosphate is some good organic sources of phosphorus for your garden.

Happy Gardening!