5 Tips Tomato farming Grow | tomato farming at home
(avoid Mistakes)
(avoid Mistakes)
A lot of gardeners tomatoes are the crop it's the one that we all seem to care about the most the sign of summer the thing that lets us know that gardening really has started especially when you start actually getting those tomatoes coming out you know there's so much variety in the world of tomatoes.
I actually went to a
tasting panel once were we tried 32 different tomatoes and ranked them for
their juiciness and their flavour and there was this crazy tomato tasting wheel
with like a hundred different.
Flavours and sensations that you would rank these
on.
I really at that moment discovered how deep the world of tomato goes but there are some things you can do in fact there's more than just some when it comes to making a mistake growing your.
Tomatoes which is what we're getting to in this blog Cabernet Spirits are here from epic gardening or it's my goal to help you grow greener thumb and grow some truly amazing Tomatoes so as two different types of tomatoes that.
I think you'll enjoy so without further ado cultivate that like button for twenty thousand heirloom varieties and let's get into the blog mistake.
Common mistakes in growing tomatoes
Which is an easy mistake to make is not knowing the type of tomato that you're growing or just selecting the wrong one and when I say type I mean type in two ways and I've Talked about the first way in a tomato pruning blog.
Which I highly recommend you check out but it's basically are you growing a determinant or indeterminate tomato one that will stick to a determine size and kind of all come to fruition relatively around.
The same time easier to manage good for containers etc or you growing an indeterminate one where the growth is not determined and the season kills it due to weather which means that your trellising and support.
Strategy has to be different now that's one type the
other type has less to do with your success in supporting and growing that
plant and more to do with if you're actually gonna like the resulting.
You need a grape do you need a hamburger steak salad cutting style where you rather have a treasure assortment that has a great deal of visual allure however you know now and again those can be somewhat more susceptible to disease or sometimes.
They tend not to grow as well just because a lot of these improved varieties are for a reason right they have a disease resistance they might have the resistance to like a bacterial blight that Tomatoes really often suffer from two different types to choose and mistakes to avoid
T omato Cages
the second mistake you'll make will be tying in a little bit to the first and it's the method that you choose to support your tomato plant so I've manipulated up only a few irregular backings here for instance of some good options and we'll talk about.
Some bad options so first of all the adoption the worst option really would be to not support it at all but the second worst option would be to use one of those flimsy metal conical tomato cages.
That you can find in almost every nursery sometimes they're so flimsy you can just pull down on one of those horizontal support rings and they'll actually just break right off because it's so poorly constructed now the reason that's bad besides the construction quality is the actual structure of it you'd much rather have a cylinder instead of a cone.
So you have more support at the base for when the tomatoes grow up and they have a lot of crazy growth on them so speaking of options that might be a little bit better for you you have something more like
This so this is a cylindrical cage as is this one in fact this one is designed to go on top of this one to stay up and support indeterminate tomatoes but for right now.
I just have them a little bit lower so it's called a vertex tomato cage from gardener's Supply Company
What's really nice about it is again it's cylindrical so it goes down nice base of support at the bottom but then you have all these different areas that you can rest a branch or a stem that's just absolutely laden with fruit so you have a lot of different areas to support now you could also just DIY this by getting cattle panel and bending it into a cylinder.
So that's one fantastic way to do it all you need to do is kind of zip tie it together stick it into the ground and you have a really nice and relatively cheap tomato support if you're growing tomatoes.
On a little bit larger scale and perhaps not in a raised bed and perhaps more in a row style planting first of all Congrats because you have a lot of space but second of all you have a cool option available to you called the Florida weave and..
So let's say we have a post here if we have a post here and in between these posts is our row of tomatoes right so as you plant these Tomatoes they're going to grow up and they need support so what you can do is you can take some string and you can actually weave it in between.
The stems and then tie it around the other move up weave it in between the stems tied around the other post and so as you move up you get these little areas where the string has been supported via pressure.
Almost and it's nice and taut so it will hold them up almost in a little bit of a sandwich or a weave so that's a really good technique for very cheap and effective bigger support system we're back in the side yard of Epic Garden to talk about mistake
W atering Techniques
which is proper watering techniques and you know Tomatoes it really feels that
they are the plant to not make these mistakes for sure because they have some
serious problems when they're either water incorrectly or watered carelessly so
the
Number one thing
that I would avoid doing is dumping water all over the top of a tomato being
very sloppy about it because tomatoes are susceptible to a tonne of soil borne
diseases and if you're doing that
Number one you're
getting the foliage wet so you're kind of putting them in a more moist humid
environment which a lot of fungal pathogens like to live in so avoid that but
then
Number two it's hitting the ground or hitting the soil surface and that soil is gonna splash up and you have the potential to just introduce disease onto the underside of those leaves which I really recommend it not doing another way to prevent that.
As you can see is laying down some mulch so when the water does hit that surface of the soil it's broke up more and the soils not splashing maybe you get a couple pieces of mulch but the soil itself is not splashing now other watering mistakes that you can make is irregularity Tomatoes really want consistent amount of water they don't want to go through these feast or famine style cycles and
So if you do that number one you're probably going to cause more blossom-end rot which is the name would imply the blossom end of the tomato starts to go brown or black and then eventually the tomato will fall off and it will die and you know a lot of people will say well it's a calcium deficiency issue and it's it is true and I know.
I've talked about this here on the channel but it's really more calcium transport issue caused by irregular watering so really make sure that
Nice dose of mulch this bed in particular is a passively subrogated system so it's a very consistent amount of soil moisture which is really nice and then also try to water at appropriate times of day I Have a whole blog on watering mistakes that you're probably making which I could recommend.
Checking out but cliff notes just water in the morning if possible
and then water in the evening if that's not possible and then water when the
plant needs it if that's not possible so avoid watering mistakes just keep it
nice smooth and easy and take care of these plants we're going to remain in the
side yard garden to talk about some pruning fails for mistake.
Different Categories tomato plant
A couple different categories of things you can go wrong with and pruning and one of them would be to leave too much of this bottom growth especially as the tomato has matured so this one's nice and mature I Don't really need this little chute right here and I could probably do away with this chute right here because it's putting off another little sucker and again.
I've talked about suckers very extensively in my tomato fruiting blog so I won't really go into that too much I just recommend you watch that but you can see one here perceive how this is coming out we don't actually require this and it's falling short on the plant again
This is a leaf that's low on the plant that we can clear out low on the plant just means it's probably gonna get shaded out anyways and it's a closer to the ground leaf so it's more susceptible to getting some of that soil borne disease massive pruning mistake.
That I've seen people make is topping off their Tomatoes either way if you've done that to a determinate that's a really bad idea because it doesn't have the ability to grow any more unless you've left a sucker chute there to now become the new main stem but even on an indeterminate you.
Typically don't want to prune off the top of your main leader stem it just doesn't make a lot of sense now there's some other plants where this doesn't apply for example you know basil it's a fantastic way to push out that.
Plant but what tomatoes the game is quite different you're actually removing a lot more low growth and managing air flow managing over growth rather than trying to get it to Bush out too much so here's the before of a tomato plant before.
I've done a bit of a clean-up on it[Music]and there's the after it's really not that much different I just took off a lot of non necessary low growth and came through and cleaned up the suckers and now we have more air flow and less propensity for disease.
F alls Under Fertilisation Error
You may run into would be anything that falls under fertilisation error and so the first of course would be under fertilising rights if you don't give it enough if you're putting it in poor soil tomatoes are a notoriously heavy feeder plant and so you may want to give it a nice healthy dose of compost early on I don't really bury like an egg in the soil or anything like that it doesn't seem to really do that much just from a scientific point of view.
It doesn't make sense you know to add a lot of calcium for example to the soil with eggshells but giving it a nice dose of compost at the beginning giving it a side dress or top dress compost halfway through the season can be a really good idea now on the flipside most people probably fall into the over fertilisation category and within that they will either give it too much nitrogen early on and promote a tonne of vegetative growth and not a lot of fruit and flour on the flip.
Side of that you can also give it just too much phosphorus and potassium and there's no reason for it you know people say okay well you know if it uses a lot of phosphorus and potassium to produce those fruits and flowers if I give it more it will make more.
And it's really not true you know especially with phosphorus most of our soils have more than enough in the soil itself and you don't need to add a whole lot extra to it it's just going to be a waste of your time and money and also potentially has some worse effects on the soil in the long term and so what.
I would say i just keep it very simple with your tomato fertilising and give it nice healthy doses of compost or organic granular fertiliser maybe in the planting hole at the beginning and then do a top or side dress throughout the season I actually will give it some fish fertiliser here and there or kelp fertiliser here.
And there if I want to give it a liquid soluble fertiliser that's kind of what I'll do some sort of organic formulation like that but besides that I keep it really simple and my tomatoes are usually pretty epic so there are a lot of mistakes that you can make.
When growing tomatoes but that's the joy of gardening is sometimes it is making that mistake learning from it and then never making that mistake again you know as long as you just don't keep eating the mistakes that you make you're a good spot so as we hang out in a cornfield here.
I just wanted to say one more thing about tomatoes and a lot of people think you know a paste tomato you can only use to make tomato sauce and you can't use a cherry tomato or whatever all tomatoes can be used for all purposes.
So don't think that perhaps because you grew one for sauce that you can't just eat it straight up you can it's just that they have some qualities that make them a little bit more favourable so don't feel that you're stuck to any particular use for a tomato that you grow.