Help! Please help a gardening numbskull with her tomato trouble!

[rnbsmum]

I have three fine looking cherry tomato plants all doing ok - about foot and a half, two feet tall, a little bushy but I have been pricking out the extra little shoots of leaves growing in the crooks of "branches". I have no flowers yet. Is that normal? What should I do to try to encourage the elusive things? Any help gratefully recieved!

You have obviously got female plants there.
What you need to encourage flowering is a male plant. Much the same as a cockerel can encourage a hen to lay eggs, your plants need some male attention.

Which tomato is it and have you checked that it needs the side shoots pinching out, some grow as bushes and you don't need to. I've lopped off flowers before by accident, I wonder if you might have taken some off at some point without realising.

As far as I know tomato flowers have both male and female parts . I gently tap the stalk or cane if insects aren't getting at them.

I have 9 tomato plants in growbags atm. Most are flowering, incl the cherry ones, but my Brandywine and Reif Red not yet. I suspect this is because they were a little behind compared to the others when I planted them out.

I'd just wait a bit. The flowers on some of mine only appeared last week and I'm in sunny Kent.

Thanks for the advice. I bough them from a lady selling outside her house and only know they are 2 red cherries and 1 yellow. I shall do a spot of tapping and see if that alone will give them the male attention they may craving! Then will bide my time a bit!

I was quite late putting my tomato plants out, and they are only just beginning to show signs of producing flowers - I'm in sunny Kent too!

(By the way, I was shloshed last night and made all that up about the male and female thing.)

lol goober!! I liked the idea! Is very sunny and really hot here in Dorset too, maybe they don't like the salty sea air!