How to plant and raise fruitful tomato plants
 (Read 50+ times)
By Jared Garrett
|
|
|
So you love that red vegetable that is actually a fruit, do you? When you spy a plump, glistening specimen it just calls you to slice it and have a BLT. I know how it is! I grow tomato plants during the summer so I can munch on BLT's every weekend. So here are some tips for making sure your tomato plants are nice and productive.
*Get them in the ground early. If you do box gardening, this is even easier, as you can control the environment around and the soil in the box easier. Basically, you want to get your tomatoes planted when you can work the soil and you are pretty sure maybe only one more frost is on its way. Also, plant starts, not seeds. Waiting for those seeds to germinate takes longer and the fruitful season will be shorter.
The thing is, the sooner you get tomato plants in the ground, the sooner you will get fruit! If you can have fruit ripening early on in the growing season, you can have fruit coming for a longer period of time. Now on to the next tip!
*Fertilize the soil. When you are getting your spaces ready for your tomato plants, be sure to fertilize that soil well, and naturally. These days my family has a neat composting system, but back in our less organized days I found that steer manure mixed into the top four to six inches of soil would help yield tons of tomatoes. So I say again, get that soil fertilized naturally and then plant your tomatoes. One important thing here is to not put too much steer manure in there. Really you only need about two inches of the stuff spread over the ground, then you mix it in. If you use too much, it might burn the roots of your plants.
*Fertilize again. You want to fertilize at least one more time during the growing season. Keeping your soil naturally full of excellent nutrients will keep your tomato plants healthy and abundant. During the season, I like to use some water soluble fertilizer to feed my plants, and this stuff is not hard to find.
*Take care in where you plant. If you plant your tomato plants in the same soil you planted the year before, they will usually be sickly and not yield as much. This is because tomato plant roots leave a fungus in the ground that does not disappear for at least a year. So maybe have two or three spots that you can rotate your tomato plants to each year.
*Harvest on time and regularly. It is true of jalapeno plants, it is true of bell pepper plants and pea plants as well. If you harvest when things are ripe and take care to not damage the plant when you do so, more fruit will come.
*Carefully and wisely prune. Don't go into this task blindly. Be sure to get advice from your extension office and perhaps from a local nursery. If you prune badly, you will actually reduce the number of tomatoes that you get. The truth is, I have never bothered with this, because the above tips always have yielded enough tomatoes for my family to can about 20 quarts of tomatoes each year.
So good luck and enjoy your BLT's!
|
Author Bio Box: Jared Garrett
 http://www.helium.com/user/show/45690
Didn't really find what you were looking for?
|
|
|
| |
|
|
![[Valid RSS feed]](images/rss.gif "Subscribe to our XML Feed for RSS")
