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TOMATO
GROWING TIPS, UPSIDE DOWN TOMATOES AND NEWSPAPER SEED POTS How’s that garden of yours doing? Mine is beginning to grow. Welcome spring weather! Thanks to everyone who gave my extra tomato plants a new home. I was honored to share 24 tomato plants, that I started from seed, with several local vegetable gardeners. More on tomatoes in a moment but not until I update you on my experience using seed starting pots made from newspaper with the PotMaker, sold by Burpee.
This simple device works just as described: Make your own seed starting pots! No more trays and pots to buy, wash and store! This nifty mold turns strips of ordinary newspaper into biodegradable seed starting pots that you plant right into the garden. Hardwood form lasts for years. A real money saver. I found the paper pots easy to make in just seconds using strips of newspaper. They are surprisingly sturdy, standing up to repeated waterings over several weeks. When it’s time to set your starter plants out in the garden, you just plant the whole thing—so no shock from removing it from a starter pot. If you start seeds, you should give this a try! Now, back to the tomatoes. A reader from Navarre has asked for my tomato growing tips. Here they are for those of you that may have missed them before: · -- Grow only disease-resistant, determinate tomato plants. Determinate tomato varieties generally reach a fixed height and ripen all their fruit in a short period of time. · -- Grow your tomato plants in containers using a high quality potting mix (not soil). · -- Add calcium to the upper half of the potting mix or use a fertilizer that has at least 4% calcium added (I use ground up eggshells or a bit of dolomite or garden lime. Calcium nitrate also works but be careful not to over do it). · -- To insure that your tomato plants can take up the calcium, choose a fertilizer that uses a nitrate form of nitrogen. Ammonium nitrogen should be only a minor component because excess ammonium ions reduce calcium uptake. This leads to blossom-end rot as well as poor tasting tomatoes.
-- Keep plants evenly moist. Don’t let them dry out. · -- Use a Bt product (such as Thuricide or Dipel) when you see signs of tomato worms. Repeat in 10 days. This natural insecticide is produced by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (called "Bt") that has been used for decades by organic farmers to control crop-eating insects and by the World Health Organization to kill mosquitoes without using dangerous chemical pesticides. · -- Try a natural product, something using a pyrethrin as the active ingredient, for other insects. Pyrethrins are natural insecticides produced by certain species of the chrysanthemum plant. Liquid Rotenone/Pyrethrin is a good one that also includes rotenone as an active ingredient. Rotenone is an odorless chemical that is used as a broad-spectrum insecticide and pesticide. It occurs naturally in the roots and stems of several plants such as the jicama vine plant. · -- Use a liquid copper-based fungicide, or biofungicide, as a preventative for disease. Be careful not to burn the leaves of your plants with the copper-based fungicide. I have great success with Soap Shield and Plant Guardian biofungicides from Gardens Alive. For those curious about trying to grow tomato plants upside down from a hanging container, Marc from Niceville shares this link with us (thanks Marc!). The site has easy-to-follow instructions on making upside down planters from plastic buckets. |
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