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Spring tips:
Is it too early too be thinking about your tomatoes? Not if you’re the competitive type who wants the earliest and
sweetest tomato on the block. Start early with some time tested tomato tips to insure you bragging rights this year.
1) Don’t Crowd Seedlings.
If you are starting tomatoes from seed, be sure to give the seedlings room to branch out. Close conditions inhibit their growth, so transplant them as soon as they get their first true leaves and move them into 4" pots about 2 weeks after that.
2) Provide lots of light.
Tomato seedlings will need either strong, direct sunlight or 14-18 hours under grow lights. Place the young plants only a couple of inches from florescent grow lights. Plant your tomatoes outside in the sunniest part of your vegetable plot.
3) Put a fan on your seedlings.
It seems tomato plants need to move and sway in the breeze, to develop strong stems. Provide a breeze by turning a fan on them for 5-10 minutes twice a day.
4) Preheat the soil in your garden.
Tomatoes love heat. Cover the planting area with black or red plastic a couple of weeks before you intend to plant. Those extra degrees of warmth will translate into earlier tomatoes.
5) Bury them.
Bury tomato plants deeper than they come in the pot, all the way up to a few top leaves. Tomatoes are able to develop roots all along their stems. You can either dig a deeper hole or simply dig a shallow tunnel and lay the plant sideways. It will straighten up and grow toward the sun. Be careful not to drive your pole or cage into the stem.
(6)Mulch Later.
Mulch after the ground has had a chance to warm up. Mulching does conserve water and prevents the soil and soil born diseases from splashing up on the plants, but if you put it down too early it will also shade and therefore cool the soil. Try using plastic mulch for heat lovers like tomatoes and peppers.
7) Remove Bottom Leaves.
Once the tomato plants are about 3' tall, remove the leaves from the bottom 1' of stem. These are usually the first leaves to develop fungus problems. They get the least amount of sun and soil born pathogens can be unintentionally splashed up onto them. Spraying weekly with compost tea also seems to be effective at warding off fungus diseases.
Pinch & Prune.
Pinch and remove suckers that develop in the crotch joint of two branches. They won’t bear fruit and will take energy away from the rest of the plant. But go easy on pruning the rest of the plant. You can thin leaves to allow the sun to reach the ripening fruit, but it’s the leaves that are photosynthesizing and creating the sugars that give flavor to your tomatoes.
9) Water Regularly.
Water deeply and regularly while the plants are developing. Irregular watering, (missing a week and trying to make up for it), leads to blossom end rot and cracking. Once the fruit begins to ripen, lessening the water will coax the plant into concentrating its sugars. Don’t withhold water so much that the plants wilt and become stressed or they will drop their blossoms and possibly their fruit.
10) Getting Them to Set Fruit.
Determinate type tomatoes tend to set and ripen their fruit all at one time, making a large quantity available when you’re ready to make sauce. You can get indeterminate type tomatoes to set fruit earlier by pinching off the tips of the main stems in early summer.
smiln32
Hey, that's great information, Elena. I'm growing tomatoes for the first time in my life. Can you imagine? I'll be a whopping 40 years old this year and I've never grown my own tomatoes. I don't count the years I had to work in the gardens at my parent's house. I didn't get to choose what I grew - or weeded - or watered...blah blah blah.
Now, I'm a veggie gardener again. First time ever on my own. Why ever did I wait this long?
~Carla
scooterbug
Awww Carla, lol
Memories of your personal tomato deprived childhood will vanish as soon a you bite into your own tomato grown by yourself in your own garden.
Just you wait ......... ummmmm ,yummy !
The pop of the tender skin on that red ripe tomato as you gently bite into it . So fresh picked off the vine and while standing in the tomato patch you feel the juice warmed by the sun running down your chin that is just beneath that big cheshire cat-like grin on your face.All the while your barefoot toes wiggle with joy in the soft black earth. "
Hows that for a run on words ?
smiln32
My parents grew tomatoes during my whole childhood. I picked a mess of them every year, too. I just never put them in the ground myself once I got older. There's a good reason for it, too. I don't like tomatoes. Never have. I'm growing them for my family. Each year, I try to eat a fresh home-grown tomato and each year I am reminded of just how distasteful the whole experience is. Ha!
Elena
Sooooo, Carla, you don't like shrimp and you don't like tomatoes. Which one do you "don't like" the most?????
Scooter, you have me drooling and wanting a ripe tomato from the garden instead of what we buy in the grocery store now. What a descriptive paragraph!!!! Even if I didn't like tomatoes that description sounds good enough to make me love them.
smiln32
I love shrimp. I just don't want to touch them unless they are all prettied up like at Red Lobster.
Elena
AHHHH! I thought you didn't like them when everyone else was eating them at roundup. I can see what bothered you about those then. They weren't quiet prettied up enough for you there. Here is Tazzy's picture of them for anyone who might want to see what we are talking about.
Pinch & Prune. 