Almost everyone loves tomatoes – if they’re garden fresh!
But we find it hard even to eat the hot-house “plastic” ones
we see in the stores most of the year. Wouldn’t you like to
grow your own and eat fresh a few months longer? You can,
and here’s how.
Tomatoes take about 12 weeks to grow from seeds to the
blossom stage, and another 8 weeks to produce ripe fruit.
That’s a long time to wait, and it’s the reason many of us
don’t see ripe tomatoes in our gardens until the end of July
or early August.
Next year plan ahead and plant your seeds indoors 12 weeks
before your average last frost date. Care for them according to
instructions in Let’s Grow Tomatoes (or other books by
Dr. Jacob Mittleider),
and you’ll be eating your own ripe tomatoes
by the end of June.
Give them ample space right from the beginning, full sunlight
all day long, and feed them properly with Pre-Plant and Weekly Feed
plant food formulas. These are
formulas you can mix yourself or buy pre-mixed. (See Jim's
article on plant food.)
Prune the leaves to prevent any overlapping with other plants.
Give your tomato plants a
good start
and you'll soon have seedlings with
thick, healthy stems ready to transplant and grow in your garden
quickly to maturity.
Growing Tomatoes Vertically
To maximize your yield of delicious tomatoes I recommend you grow them
vertically, using T-Frames, as described in several of Dr. Mittleider’s
vegetable gardening books, such as Chapter 15 of the
Mittleider Gardening Course.
Here’s what a T-Frame looks like:
Plant Selection
If you buy tomato plants from a nursery, try to avoid the tall ones with thin stems.
Look for plants that have not “stretched” because of crowded growing
conditions. They never fully recover from the thin, weak stems this causes.
Be sure to select indeterminate varieties to grow vertically, so you
have plants that will continue to grow. Determinate tomatoes generally
grow only grow 18-24" tall, and set their fruit in a fairly short time
span. Indeterminate tomato varieties produce fruit over several months
until killed by frost.
Transplanting, Feeding and Training
Before transplanting into the garden, be sure to “harden off’ your
seedlings by placing them outside in full sun for two or three days.
Take them in at night only if the weather threatens to be cold.
Plant your seedlings on one side of a prepared
soil bed
or Grow-Box, spacing the plants between 9” and 12” apart.
Avoid transplanting during the heat of the day. You want as little
stress as possible on the plants, and their roots have been disturbed,
so choose early morning or evening to give the plants time to adjust.
Handle carefully. Remember that the fine hairs all along the plant stem
can become roots if they are not damaged. And plant deep, leaving only
2-3” above ground.
A great way to help your tomato (or other) transplants get through
transplant shock and start growing quickly is to feed them ¼ ounce of
ammonium nitrate per running foot of plants (8 ounces for a 30’ row or
250 grams per 10 meter bed).
Begin applying the
Weekly Feed Mix
in a narrow band down the center
of the soil bed 3 days after transplanting, and continue weekly until
8 weeks before the expected first fall frost, unless you plan to extend
your growing season from 4 to 8 weeks by covering your T-Frames with
greenhouse plastic as shown below:
By the time your plants are 12” tall they should be guided around
strings, with alternate plants going to opposite sides of the T-Frame.
This technique of training tomato plants to grow vertically in a T-Frame
is illustrated and explained in detail in Chapter 15 of the
Mittleider Gardening Course.
Pruning Tomato Plants
As soon as your plants begin to grow sucker stems
– right where the leaf joins the main stem – take the suckers off.
Be sure NOT to remove the main (topmost) growing tip.
Proper and diligent attention to pruning will produce a strong
single-stem plant with clusters of tomatoes about every 7 inches
all the way up the 7 to 8 foot stem, amounting to between 15 and
30 pounds of fruit for each plant.
Tomato Pruning Questions and Answers
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Q.
|
I notice in your pictures of vertically growing tomatoes that
the bottoms of the plants are bare of leaves. Why is that?
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|
A.
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We remove all leaves that are touching the ground because of the
accessibility to bugs and disease, as well as moisture-related problems
- also often bug and/or disease related.
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|
Q.
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Why is it so important to remove all suckers from tomato plants?
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|
A.
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We remove sucker stems to allow the plant to put maximum energy
into producing tomatoes, rather than stems and leaves.
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What can you expect for your efforts?
If you plant your tomatoes 9 inches apart and grow them vertically
in a 30 foot soil bed as described above, you’ll have a total of 41
plants producing in excess of 600 pounds of garden-ripe delicious
tomatoes during summer and fall for you and your family to enjoy.
How do you like THEM tomatoes?
Good eating to you.
Jim Kennard
Jim Kennard
is President of the
Food For Everyone
Foundation, a non-profit organization with the
mission of "Teaching the world to grow food one
family at a time". You'll find many free vegetable
gardening resources, including a gardening ebook,
greenhouse plans, automated watering plans, and
a free chapter from each of the great gardening
books and software CD's Jim offers, at the
website:
www.foodforeveryone.org
