Category Archives: tomatoes growing tips

got some tomatoes!

first black pear tomato

Got my first 4 tomatoes! They are off a black pear tomato plant. They don’t look pear shape I but I don’t care. I’ve lost 3 pepper plants and one tomato plant in the main garden but other then that, everything else is doing great. The tomato plants are really taking off- some of the early varieties have little tomatoes on them but most are just starting to blossom except for those first two maters!.

tomato in cage with well

In the pictures you can see they now all have wells, drip system in the wells, and the wells are covered with straw (not hay-produces too many seeds) to help with evaporation and keep the roots cool.

The tomato plants have been trimmed up so no branches touch the ground or straw. This is so no soil borne diseases can be transmitted. When you trim plants, put some alcohol on your trimmers between each plant so if one is diseased it won’t be transmitted to the next one.

I have a bamboo post (sometimes more than one) where the main vine is tied to help it as it grows so as not to be unruly (mine usually become unruly anyways as the season goes on).

The big tomato cages that I made from concrete reinforcement wire (it has 6 inches by 6 inch holes-easy to get your hand through to pick tomatoes) are now on. The cages offer terrific support for the growing tomatoes. Just keep pulling the branches up to the next higher hole as it grows. I also have small t-posts (3 foot tall) in the ground and the cages tied to it so the wind can’t blow it over as the plants gets bigger.

giant tomatoes in garden

giant tomatoes in tomato sacks

I finally planted my giant tomatoes that I’ve been growing in the house since March. Looking good-all are over 2 foot tall.  I have five ‘Big Zacs’ and 6 ‘Nick Harps’. I put on some row cover tomato sacks (like potato sacks) that I sewed up last year to protect them from the leafhopper early in the season. The leafhopper carries bacterial wilt disease but if you protect your tomatoes when they are young, they can quite often resist the disease. The young tomato plants succumb easily to bacterial wilt. The sacks also help them from getting sunburned when you first put them out.

Wall of Waters for tomatoes

tomatoes in wall of waters-2010

Here are the 35 tomatoes in wall of waters. You can buy them at your local nursery or order them through the internet. They are an invaluable tool for Spring as they act like little greenhouses or cloches to help protect your tender plants from cold nights and the wind.Be sure you fill them up in the morning so they have all day to heat up. Then they will give off the heat at night and keep the plant warm.

To set them up, put a 5 gallon bucket over the tomato (the tomato must fit inside the bucket) then slide the wall of water over the bucket and take a hose and fill up each cell in the wall of waters. When done slide the bucket out and the wall of waters support themselves. If your plant is taller than the wall of water, you can still use it but will need a friend to hold the wall of water as you fill up each cell. Sometimes the wall of water (WOW) can partially collapse under heavy wind. In that case put some bamboo posts inside the edges of WOW to help support it. In a few years, you might get some leaky cells. I take one of my leaky WOW and cut off a good cell and insert it into the leaky cell and fill it up and it works. I only use wall of waters in early spring when it is still cold at night. Be sure to take them off when the plant starts to get crowded inside of the wall of waters, usually in late May or early June.

giant tomato megablossoms

Single blossom on left and double megablossom on right

GIANT TOMATOES-I got my first 2 megablossoms off my Big Zac tomato plants and they are not even in the ground yet. All giant tomato growers are looking for megablossoms. Some varieties tend to produce more than others. Since megablossoms usually come earlier on a plant I will leave these on as I don’t know if I will get more off each plant. A megablossom is at least 2 or more blossoms that fuse together to make one big tomato.  That is why giant tomatoes are so knarley and bumpy. It is kind of like twins, triplets or quadruplets that are all conjoined together. Recognizing these megablossoms is the key to growing giant tomatoes. It doesn’t happen all the time so it is exciting when we get some megablossoms and the potential for a BIG TOMATO.  Since they are made up of many blossoms, oftentimes they abort if they don’t pollinate well.  Most tomatoes are self-pollinating so you don’t have to worry about pollinating them unless you get a megablossom. That is when we should hand pollinate them although I didn’t on these. Using a small soft paintbrush, you can take some pollen off of the stamen part of one blossom and paint it onto the megablossom pistils. Kind of sounds like Luther Burbank doesn’t it?

The top picture has two blossoms-the one on the left is a normal single tomato blossom and the one on the right is a megablossom made up of two flowers. Notice how big it is.

megablossom with three blossoms fused

This second picture  has even more blossoms fusing together. Looks like maybe three blossoms. Starting to look knarley! I’ll see if it aborts or starts to grow into a giant tomato on it’s own as I didn’t hand pollinate them. I will pick off all the normal blossom off of each plant. I might grow 2-4 tomatoes from megablossoms off of one plant. You don’t let all of the normal tomatoes grow so all the energy goes into these potential giant tomatoes. Obviously I am growing these for size and I have other varieties where I let every blossom become a tomato to grow for food.

planted 35 tomatoes today

Yep-went ahead and planted tomatoes with the help of Beto, Mernie, Lava and her friend Mo. Together we planted 35 tomatoes, added amendments, put up wall of waters for every tomato we planted, placed the drip system around each tomato and gave them a drink of seaweed/thrive mix. Hope they make it as it was sooo blasted windy (no pun intended) here today and it is suppose to get cold but not freezing tonight. Many were wind thrashed but we did the best we could. I guess the hardy will survive. Many thanks to all of you good friends! Then I went into the house and planted up to the gallon size all my giant tomatoes that will go in the ground in a couple of weeks. I also planted up the rest of my 4 inch pots into gallon sizes that I will give to friends. Phew, what a power out day…I’m fried.

transplanted tomatoes again

On  April 4 I transplanted some tomatoes in my 4″ pots up to gallon size. They went  “shocky” as I didn’t have room to keep them under the lights even though I gave them Thrive. So I had to build another lightbox on Tuesday to house them and now they are good again. I guess they got a little cold.  Here is a picture of them in the gallon size now. Notice I put some bamboo supports for the stems that I tied with garbage bag twist ties. That way I can relax the twist ties as the stems get bigger.

April 4-tomatoes transplanted to gallon size-doing well

I still have 36 more tomatoes to transplant by this weekend up to gallon size!  This will be the last transplant before putting them in the soil. With about 75 plants, I will give some away to my friends who grow tomatoes! I also changed my planting soil now for the gallon size. Now it is Sungro 702. See picture here.

Sun Gro Metro Mix 702 growing medium

Here is a pic of the ones I will transplant this weekend. I still have some tomatoes left in 4″ pots that won’t need transplanting before going into the ground as I started them later. Notice in the picture below that I raised up the smaller plants on the right side of the pic by putting them on another upside down container. I do this so the smaller plants are at the  same level of the higher ones so they are the same distance away from the lights. Otherwise they would be further away from the lights and could get spindly. Keep your plants within 2 ” of the lights to keep this from happening.

tomatoes in 4″ pots need transplanting

Learn from my mistakes when starting tomatoes!

UGH!  I made 2 mistakes with my newly transplanted tomatoes last week. So I want to share the mistakes and how I luckily remedied them.
MISTAKE #1- After I watered the tomatoes from the bottom tray where they sit in, (which is a good thing), I forgot to drain the water from the pan all day and all night (too much standing water can suffocate the plants)

MISTAKE #2- Secondly I forgot to cover them with the reflective insulation at night to keep them warm while the house cools down. So not only did they sit in the water all day and all night but they got cold as well. In the morning they were slightly wilted and turned a little purple (turning purple means they can’t access the phosphorus from the cold soil.) Last year I had this problem with the tomatoes turning purple, being stunted and being too cold and have really paid attention this year except this one time. I didn’t get a picture of them purple..

rock phosphate powder

So I drained the water away and read if tomatoes turn purple that we should water some rock phosphate in (which is a good organic source of phosphorus) and put them under the lights to get warm.  This happened a week ago and they have snapped out of it and look good, I lucked out! So now I have given all the baby tomatoes some rock phosphate and they are doing really well. I think I’m going to need to transplant them again before I put them in the ground.

tomato plants after the rock phosphate

Here they are now after the rock phosphate- they have really grown since planting them on March 1. I’m hoping weather permitting, I will sneak them in the ground by April 15th, which is a month before the last frost date like last year. This really gives them a head start on the season, especially for those 80+ days tomato plants.

Another tip to not have those skinny, thin stems on your baby plants is to lightly brush them with your hand everyday and it will stimulate them to make stockier stems.