Huge, gorgeous tomato plants, but no tomatoes

Last year, we only had our community garden plot and we we're pulling a wheelbarrel full of tomatoes every week.  This is what our kitchen looked like for months:

This year, we not only had the community garden plot, but now we had a house with a lot of garden space.  We hunted garage sales and collected pressure canners and jars. 

We fertilized the hell out of the soil and really worked the soil with a rototiller.  Save your back, buy a rototiller.  We got ours for $50 at a garage sale and see them all the time at others. 

I ordered a prolific amount of tomator seeds from Pinetree Seeds.  Spent weeknights and weekends trying to find anything that would hold soil.  We had pots of dirt all over the house.  We made a greenhouse out of old windows to germinate seeds.  Somehow I had no success with the green house.  So, I threw up the white flag and took all of those pots of soil filled with seeds and dumped them into our garden.

Then, we contacted Tomato Ty in Huntington Beach.  Him and his partner drive long and far for rare tomato plants and then graft them.  Then they sell them for a whole dollar. 

So, now we have tons of space, super-fertilized soil, 50 planted tomato plants and then those darn seeds that wouldn't do a damn thing in the green house (3 months later) are growing from the soil dumped in the garden. 

Look closely.  What is missing from that picture?  Tomatoes?  Yep.  Apparently, you can over fertilize your soil.  I put too much nitrogen in the ground and so now these huge, gorgeous tomato plants do not think they are going to die.  If they don't think their lives are threatened, they don't produce tomatoes.  The same at the garden plot.  We maybe got one medium-sized bowl a week.

You can add mulch which takes nitrogen out of the soil, but the tomatoes have taken over such that there is no soil exposed to add mulch to.

You can add potassium to try to neutralize the soil, which I did do.  High-potassium supplements promote blooms.  That did help, we did get some blooms, but unfortunately there is still too much nitrogen in the soil.

Our solution: rip them out and plant Siberian tomatoes that can tolerate our mild, California winter.  Pictures and results to follow.