Old Fashioned On Purpose

117. Tips for Growing Your Best Tomato Crop Yet

May 08, 2020 Jill Winger
Old Fashioned On Purpose
117. Tips for Growing Your Best Tomato Crop Yet
Show Notes Transcript

Tomatoes are easily one of my favorite things to grow.  These versatile vegetables can be eaten off the vine, turned into pasta sauce, and so much more.  On today’s episode, I explain my preferred process for growing tomatoes and what I do to get the best yield.  Find out whether it’s best to plant your own seeds or buy them from the store.  Learn why you might be getting “leggy’ seedlings and what you should can do about them.  I also discuss some of the best companion plants you can put in your garden to boost the quality of both plants.

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speaker 0:   0:00
welcome to the old fashioned on purpose podcast. So it was transplanting my tomato seedlings yesterday, basically from one little pot to a bigger pot. And then in a couple weeks, I'll put them out in the garden. And I just got to thinking of how many years I have been either attempting to grow tomatoes or successfully growing tomatoes. And I've learned a lot. Tomatoes can be one of the most rewarding vegetables to grow because obviously, tomatoes, they're amazing. And so I thought it would be fun in this episode to go through some of the things I've learned about growing tomatoes over the years and give you some of my best tips. I'm your host, Jill Winger, And this is the podcast for the Trail Blazers, the Mavericks, the makers, the homesteaders, the modern pioneers and the backyard farmers. If you're ready to boost your food security and living more homegrown lifestyle, you have found your tribe a friend. I'm interrupting this episode for just a sec because I know a lot of you are planning on expanding your homestead efforts this year, and you are in need of some supplies because it's more important than ever to be supporting small businesses. I wanted to tell you about one of my favorites. Lehman's hardware. Trust me, if you're listening to this podcast, then I guarantee that Lehman's is pretty much your dream store. They're all about supporting old fashioned people like us, and they carry everything from kitchen supplies to canning equipment to gardening tools and everything in between. I have yet to find any home studying supply store as comprehensive as they are. And guess what? They are offering a special discount on all of their baking supplies just for my listeners. Use code. JillMay, when you check out to save 10% on any things in the baking category. So head on over to theprairiehomestead.com/lehmann's L E H M A N s. Check out all they have to offer and take advantage of your now back to the show. Okay, so I just have to say I'm not an expert at growing tomatoes. I'm not. I don't really consider myself an expert in any aspect of gardening because, you know, if you've heard any of my story, I've been on the struggle bus just a little bit over the years in various aspects of the garden. But thing about me is I don't give up. And I learned from my mistakes, even my hardest mistakes. And so eventually, if you're just super stubborn, you're gonna figure it out. And that's kind of what happened to me with tomatoes. Now, as you know, we live in Wyoming with the world's shortest growing season. That should be like the state motto. Wyoming, land of the shortest growing season in existence. Yet I still grow tomatoes. I can a lot of tomatoes. I can a lot, and I don't even have a giant tomato patch. I just usually fill up two of my raised beds, and it's great. So I thought I would give you some of my bumbling learned the hard way garden tips, and maybe it'll increase your tomato harvest this year. At least that's the hope. So first off, I always grow my tomatoes from seed. You could absolutely just get tomatoes at your local nursery or your plant store for me, though, if I'm gonna grow any quantity of tomatoes, it just makes more sense economically for me to start them myself because you know, you get into three or four bucks per seedling. And if you want to buy 60 tomato plants and you're gonna put up some tomatoes like that's gonna add up, and that's gonna be the most expensive tomato sauce ever, So grown from seed, you're gonna want to start them 6 to 8 weeks before your last frost. Eight. You could even push that a little bit if you want to make them extra robust by the time you finally do, put them outside if you can look for some varieties that work best in your region. You know, if you're in a short growing season like I am, check those maturity dates. Try to get those ones that are going to mature the quickest, Um, I personally I grow paste tomatoes more than anything else. I've grown all kinds, big ones and the cherry ones and all the colors. But, um, I don't know their names. I'm not. I'm sorry I'm not one of the homestead bloggers who knows all the tomato names. So my apologies. But you know, the orange ones in the black ones in the blue ones Aiken. That's what I call them, Um, but I grow San Marzano paste tomatoes and Amish paste tomatoes just because I do more canning with them than anything else, and you can still eat those a slicers. Maybe they're not the world's premier slicing tomato, but for us, they work great. Um, and I do. I can attest that the San Marzano and the Amish paste do great here. When I start my seeds indoors, it's pretty simple, and I've done lots of episodes and videos and block posts on how I start my seeds so I won't go into that in great detail today. I will say, though, that tomato seedlings grow pretty fast and they germinate fairly quickly. And so I will usually start them in one of those a little four pack plastic guys that the kind that you would get from your nursery. So I put one seed in each of those I'm sorry don't know their name on then. Once they get to be a pretty good size, I will move them over into a larger pot. Sometimes that's just like a red solo cup, right? It's just a little bit bigger, and you just don't want the tomatoes to get to root bound, and they do need to be expanding a little bit, even if you're starting them in your house under grow lights. So keep that in mind. The other alternative is just to plant them in a larger pot to begin with. That's something else you could do if you have room. So once the tomatoes are there trucking along, we're doing good. Then it's time about you know, I usually go three weeks, maybe even as much as four weeks before I put them out in the garden. Officially, we start to harden them off, and that used to. I used to hear that term and be like, that sounds so complicated like there's this whole process and I don't know how to do it right. Here's what I do too hard enough.  I bring the flats of seedlings up from the basement. I will put them out on my deck on nice days, and you let the wind rough them up and you let the sun hit him, and it's just toughening them up to be so they have less shock once you finally put them in the dirt. It's really simple. The hardest part is remembering to bring them in at night, and sometimes you can leave them out. But if your temperatures drop and you get a frost like that's the saddest thing ever when you kill your plants before they even get in the dirt, that's a Jill move. Don't do that. So, um, just make sure you put even a timer on your phone or something. So remember to pull them in before you go to bed if it's cold. But I'll water them out there with the hose, and then the wind blows him around a little bit, and it just makes them tougher. And then once you get past that last frost date, which is for US Memorial Day, end of May, then you can go put them out in your garden. When you do go to transplant your tomatoes, you're gonna want to plant them deep. And I didn't realize this at first because a lot of seedlings, you know, you put the top of the root ball level with the soil and tomatoes are a little different. You want to actually plant them a little bit deeper because the stem and the leaves that are buried well actually end up sprouting roots and you'll end up with a stronger plant. So that's good news if you have some of those leggy tomato seedlings, By the way, leggy seedlings happened when they're too far away from a light source, right? So if you do have some leggy ones, it's OK. I just planned them a little deeper now. Another thing you can do when you dig those holes before you put your tomato plant in the hole is you can take a little bit of eggs shells, so save your eggshells from your kitchen, crush them up and put it at the bottom of the hole. And we know that egg shells have calcium and extra calcium helps to prevent blossom end rot, which is a common problem in a super annoying problem when it comes to tomato growing. So try that if you want, you can put a little bit compost down in the bottom of the hole as well. I usually don't do that because my soil is pretty well amended. But if you've ever had blossom end rot in the past, eggshells are some cheap insurance. And then, of course, after you transplant with as with anything you want to water them well, and you can also put some mulch around the tomato plants. I personally have been using grass clippings from our yard. That's my favorite garden mulch, because it doesn't matter together like leaves, Um, and we don't spray our grass with anything, so I don't have to worry about it being contaminated with pesticides or herbicides. And it just does a really nice job of holding in the moisture, reducing the amount of water I need to use and smothering out some of the weeds. So as far as companion plants for tomatoes, there's a few things that you can plant next to your tomatoes if you want to. If you have room that they kind of help each other out. Um, one of those has always kind of makes me smile. Is Basil right? It's the most popular tomato companion plant, and it just makes sense because basil and tomato, they go together like peanut butter and jelly. Right and basil actually can help repel bugs like white flies, aphids and horn worms in your garden. So if you may be interspersed some of those in your tomato patch, it can help. They also can attract pollinators if you'll allow your basil to go to seed. So bonus some other companion plants for your tomatoes, as my four year old calls them chives. Um, they're also good for repelling things like aphids, marigolds, which I have found. I I My mother in law gave me some marigold seeds several years ago, and I just plant them in strips kind of along the edges of my raised beds and gorgeous. And they also can help repel nematodes, horn worms and slugs. And the cool thing is, is, I just saved the seeds every year, and I don't have to ever by them, and they actually grow quickly. Ah, lot of flowers here. I can't grow from seed necessarily. But marigolds do great, and they have beautiful blooms that I get to enjoy for a good amount of time in the summer. Um, yeah, So those are some companion options now as far as the maintenance of your tomato plants. Watering obviously, is important with tomatoes. It's best to water from the ground up. If you can just cause it's best to avoid in the leaves of the plant wet. Now I'm gonna I'm gonna be honest. I have watered tomatoes with a sprinkler in the past. It didn't just instantly kill them. But if you can try the water from the base.  When it comes to tomatoes support I just have to say that I have really good intentions every year of having these beautifully staked and woven Florida weave and all these things, cages, There's all these ideas for making your tomatoes stand up perfectly and organized, and it just doesn't happen. And every year I'm like, This is the year I'm gonna stake the tomatoes properly and I just don't quite get there. So I mean, I tried it. I have some cages. The problem is with my tomato plants usually gets so large that, like, well, even pull the cages out of the ground or you can't even find the cages. At some point, it is like a tomato jungle. Um, so cages can work. Maybe not so much for me, but maybe it'll work for you. One thing I'll do is I'll just sometimes if worse comes to worse, I just get some wooden stakes and tie if the tomatoes are really leaning as it grows. I'll just take some yarn, something soft and just gently tie the tomato to the stake just to help it grow up a little bit more. That's pretty much the extent. But then again, like when it comes August, it's a free for all out there. And I'm like the kids are like wading through the tomato rainforest trying to get them so I may or may not plants my plants a little too close. So maybe give yourself a little more space if you want to keep things staked and pretty now, if you want to save your tomato seeds. The good news is that saving tomato seeds is actually pretty easy. Sometimes it could be complicated to save seeds. Tomato seeds are kind of a no brainer as long as, this is important, you have an open pollinated or an heirloom tomato variety, so there's a lot of hybrid tomatoes floating around. That doesn't mean they're genetically modified right. They're just hybrids. But as we know, ah, hybrid can't reproduce. So you if you say the seeds of a hybrid tomato doesn't work so good. So you need to have an heirloom tomato, and all you have to do is you take a ripe tomato. You cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, and you put the pulp and the seeds in some water. Give it a stir, cover it with a towel and then put it in a warm place and we're basically you just ferment the tomato seeds. Um, and you need to have a little bit of warmth. So 70 degrees, I'd say. But then every day you just remove the towel, stir the seeds again and then put the towel back on. And if you do that for about a week or so, they'll be seeds that have sunk to the bottom, and you'll notice there are some fermentation indicators, like maybe a little bit of mold or some scum at the top, And they'll be maybe some seeds floating at the top to so the seeds that float are the bad ones. You want to toss those along with the mold and the scum, but the seeds at the bottom of the jar can be saved. You can rinse those out and then dry them on a sheet of parchment paper or a paper towel. Put them in an envelope in a cool, dry location and you can use them next year, so it's kind of a bonus that if you have a variety of tomato that you're absolutely loving, you can easily save it next year and save yourself the cost of buying more seeds. All right, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about common tomato problems and a few solutions. So first up, blossom end rot. So we talked about that a minute ago. The main reason that you're gonna get blossom end rot is due to a calcium imbalance. Okay, so you can help maybe head that off if you put some eggshells down in the soil. There's a few other things that can cause this issue, too, though things like cold soil temperatures. Maybe you have a really hot day, a heat wave come through. All of a sudden, if you're not watering very consistent or if you have a lot of nitrogen in your soil, high levels of nitrogen, which for us that something we do have to watch because we use a lot of composted manure in our garden beds, and that's lots of nitrogen. So be careful with that. If you do start to notice the blossom end rot, You can't necessarily reverse it for that particular tomato, but you can take measures to prevent it in the future. So again, put more calcium in your soil. Try mulching around your plants just to help keep things at a more consistent temperature and moisture level, just in case like heatwaves or weird watering schedules are part of your problem, and to avoid it in next year, remember not to put your tomato plants out too early because we want to have that soil be nice and warm and to harden after plants before you stick them in the ground. Okay, so those little things just little adjustments can often save you a lot of headache with your fruit down the road. Okay, so if your leaves are turning yellow, I don't know if you've had this, but I have in the past. Um, everything is okay, and then all of sudden, they just get a little bit discolored. That can indicate a nutrient deficiency. Um, usually, that means they aren't getting enough nitrogen, although again, too much nitrogen isn't great either. So could be issue of too much of a good thing. So if you're if you're yellowish try a fertilizer and see if that helps. Another thing that can cause yellow leaves is something called Septoria Leaf spot, and it's It's a fungus, actually. So if you have the yellow leaves with little tiny black dots in them, that might be the leaf spot issue. So something to keep in mind. And I just got to say, If you do have curled leaves,  I do have unfortunately personal experience with that one. There are some different things that can cause that in the past for me, when I had curled tomato leaves. I have a whole post on this on the blog, but they were kind of curled and gnarly and thickened looking. That was an indicator that I had basically poisoned my soil with some mulch that have herbicide on it. So I hope you never experienced that. But if you do have these gnarly looking tomato leaves and you're seeing that show up repeatedly in multiple plants, you may need to check out if you have some sort of herbicide contamination. So there is a post in the blog about that. How I poisoned my garden, which ended up it's a happy ending. But it was a sad story. The beginning, um so that just watch those tomatoes because they could be one of the first plants to give you that sign that you have something going on. As far as herbicide contamination. One other tip before we wrap up here. Chickens and tomatoes, they love them. They think tomatoes are the greatest thing since sliced bread. So if you have chickens that are free range, you're definitely going to want to rope off the tomatoes or capture the chickens and put them in chicken jail during tomato season because they will gore your tomatoes and it's so annoying, like you have this big tomato hanging there and you're just reaching for it and you pull it off the plant and you turn it around and there's this hole in it from a chicken beak and oh, it's horrible. So watch the chickens and tomatoes. They like them just as much as we do, and they will wait till they're ripe to massacre them. So that was a lot of tomato information, my friend. I hope that was helpful. If you have any magical tomato growing tips, I would love to hear them. I'm always up for some good hacks and garden tweaks so you can send them over to me at my email hello@theprairiehomestead.com, or shoot them over on Facebook or Instagram. If you're ready to do this homesteading thing much needed a little bit of help on getting started. I just so happen to have an entire library of resource is I put together for home centers just like you, and you can go get complimentary access over at theprairiehomestead.com/grow, and that's it for today. Don't forget to hit. Subscribe so all the new episodes will show up automatically in your player just a little bit easier for you. And if you found this episode helpful, I would appreciate it so much if you could leave a quick review or rating. I read every single one. Thanks for listening. Friend will catch up on the next episode of the old fashioned on purpose podcast