Fertilizer stunted growth?

[wodtheiii]

About 3 weeks ago I added a 10-10-10 fertilizer to my tomatoes for the first time this season. I spread a handful of it around each plant and then watered. This is the same process I used last year with great results. I have 2 Roma plants and 1 Cherry. Each had a handful of fruits and flowers. I noticed a problem with the Romas immediately. Some leaves dried up, the unbudded flowers dropped off and ALL growth halted; especially the fruit (one even dropped off). The Cherry on the other hand exploded. More flowers and fruit appeared and the over-all plant looked much healthier.

About a week later, the Romas started to develope new, tender (and I mean tender) stems and leaves. The old leaves remained curled but seemed to regain some vigor.

Within the past week, all yellowing dissapeared, new flowers began popping up and the remaining fruit grew slightly and began to turn red so all seems well.

This method seemed to work well last year (those are the tomatoes in the background) https://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f114/wodtheiii/garden.jpg
But if I did something wrong I need to know so that I don't make that mistake again.

I now yield to the experts ...

[bunge]

I'm NOT an expert, but I try to think like the tomato plant...
Maybe the fertilizer was too much or too strong and shocked the little roots so they kind of shut down. Like us humans eating too much and getting sick. YUCK ....
But after they got over the "too much" of it all,
they got better and the food (fertilizer) made them feel better and got to growing again. Bigger and better now...?
Just a thought.
I'd like to hear from the experts tho......

[Newt]

I'm not an expert either, but it sounds to me like shock from too much fertilizer. A cup per plant might have been too much. Did the instructions on the fertilizer say to use that much? Was this an organic fertilizer? Synthetic fertilizers can be like steroids for plants and can burn plants if too much is applied. Another possibility is that the soil was dryer then last year when you did this and the fertilizer was more concentrated when the plants absorbed it.

Newt

[jstr12]

Seems like we don't have any experts because I'm not either. Lol. The sudden change in nutrients might have put your roma plants into shock for a little while. How big are the roma plants in comparison to your other plants?

jstr