Container Gardening

Tomatoes are one of the most rewarding vegetables to grow in a home garden. The difference between store-bought and home-grown tomatoes is dramatic, and truly fresh tomatoes add to any dish. Tomatoes are not terribly hard to grow, and can fit into most people’s budgets and landscapes with just a little bit of effort.

Here are ten tips for growing fantastic high-yield tomatoes.

1. Give them plenty of SUNLIGHT
Tomatoes LOVE light.  Find the sunniest spot in your yard to place your tomatoes. You want a MINIMUM of 6 hours of sunlight a day: the more, the better. Check your yard carefully, tracking the amount of sunlight each area is getting, before choosing the best place.

Tip: If you are growing tomatoes in containers, sometimes a few feet of height will make a big difference in sunlight. Consider piling cinderblocks or putting your pots on a wall until the plants have reached 2-3 feet tall. They may get an extra hour of sunlight a day that way.

2. WATER them heavily
With so much sunlight, soil will dry out quickly. Tomatoes are thirsty plants, which is how the fruit gets so juicy. Tomatoes which are planted in the ground need up to 2 inches of water a week. Tomatoes in containers often need more, since the roots are more compact. Make sure you are watering every single day! If you miss days and then overwater later to compensate, your tomatoes will crack open or develop blossom end rot. Water the soil, not the leaves.

3. Condition your SOIL
Tomatoes prefer slightly acidic soil. You can get soil test kits at your local garden center. You are looking for a pH between 6.2 and 6.8. If your soil is too acidic (pH below 6.2), you can add agricultural lime to raise the pH. If your soil is too alkaline (pH above 6.8), you can add sulfur to lower the pH. Remember to fertilize regularly, too: plants don’t just need dirt, they need the nutrients in the dirt. Compost or commercial fertilizers provide those nutrients.

4. Crush EGGSHELLS into your soil
Calcium helps tomatoes make fruit! To add calcium to your soil, crush a few eggshells and sprinkle them into the soil. If you are planting from seedlings, you can put the shells directly into the hole you’re making for the seedling. This will help give you round, even fruits.

5. Stake or CAGE the tomatoes
Tomatoes are heavy. When the fruit starts to come in, tomato plants will begin to bend and sag under the weight. You don’t want to let your tomatoes touch the ground, because that can encourage rot, disease, and insect damage. To keep this from happening, place a cage around your tomatoes. The bars will help support tomato stalks. If branches begin to get too long, you can tie them up or prune them off. Don’t let your tomatoes waste their energy! Put the cages in while tomatoes are seedlings, so they grow around the cages.

6. Give the tomatoes lots of HEAT
Tomatoes LOVE being hot. Any way you can raise the temperature of the soil will help them to thrive. In you can, put black plastic on the soil a few weeks before you plant, to prepare it for the tomatoes. Wait to mulch until temperatures are higher, since mulch can cool the soil. For container gardening, dark-colored containers will make warmer soil.

7. PRUNE regularly and thoughtfully
You don’t want to prune your tomato plants too heavily, or they won’t grow full and lush. However, you want to be certain your tomatoes aren’t wasting effort. Determinate tomato varieties need no pruning, but indeterminate tomatoes can benefit from pruning away the wasted branches. There are two major ways to prune tomatoes:

• Trim branches that reach too far beyond the cages.  If the cage doesn’t offer support, these branches will start to sag and break.  Even if they already have fruit or flowers forming, it is best to trim these away early.  They’ll do no good if they snap before the tomatoes are ripe.  Don’t let your tomatoes waste effort!
  

  Tomato Suckers

• Trim away tomato suckers.  Tomato suckers are the little leaves and stems that grow at the joint between tomato stems.  If you let tomato suckers grow, they will form new branches.  Eventually, these branches will flower and fruit, but the fruit will be small.  Thick plants are good, but don’t let them get TOO thick.  Pruning away most (not all) tomato suckers will let your plants focus on big, healthy plants, and allow sunlight to reach inner leaves.

With these tips, you will wind up with healthier,  tastier tomatoes, with higher yield.  Enjoy!

Tags: Tomato

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Tomatoes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.