For a lot of gardeners, tomatoes are THE crop.
It's the one that we all seem to care about the most. The sign of summer.
The thing that lets us know that gardening really has started,
especially when you start actually getting those tomatoes coming out. You know,
there's so much variety in the world of tomatoes.
I actually went to a tasting panel once where we tried 32 different
tomatoes and ranked them for their juiciness and their flavor.
And there was this crazy tomato tasting wheel with like a hundred different
flavors and sensations that you would rank these on. I really, at that moment,
discovered how deep the world of tomato goes.
But there are some things you can do, in fact there's more than just some,
when it comes to making a mistake growing your tomatoes,
which is what we're getting to in this video.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a
greener thumb and grow some truly amazing tomatoes.
So in this video we're going to go over five different mistakes that you might
be making,
including a little bonus at the end as to different types of tomatoes that I
think you'll enjoy. So without further ado,
cultivate that Like button for 20,000 heirloom varieties,
and let's get into the video. Mistake number one,
which is an easy mistake to make,
is not knowing the type of tomato that you're growing or just selecting the
wrong one. And when I say type, I mean type in two ways.
Now I've talked about the first way in a tomato pruning video which I highly
recommend you check out, but it's basically,
are you growing a determinate or an indeterminate tomato?
One that will stick to a determined size and kind of all come to
fruition relatively around the same time, easier to manage, good for containers,
et cetera.
Or are you growing an indeterminate one where the growth is not determined and
the season kills it due to weather,
which means that your trellising and support strategy has to be different.
Now that's one type.
The other type has less to do with your success in supporting and growing that
plant and more to do with if you're actually going to like the resulting tomato.
And that would just be the actual specific variety that you're growing. So like,
do you want a cherry tomato? Do you want a roma? Do you want a grape?
Do you want a beefsteak salad slicing style?
Or would you rather have an heirloom variety that has a lot of visual appeal
but, you know,
sometimes those can be a little more susceptible to disease or sometimes they
tend not to grow as well just because a lot of these improved varieties are
improved for a reason, right? They have a disease resistance,
they might have the resistance to like a bacterial blight that tomatoes really
often suffer from. So two different types to choose and mistakes to avoid.
The second mistake you'll make will be tying in a little bit to the first and
it's the method that you choose to support your tomato plant.
So I've rigged up just a couple of random supports here as an example of
some good options, and we'll talk about some bad options. So first of all,
the bad option, the worst option really would be to not support it at all.
But the second worst option would be to use one of those flimsy metal conical
tomato cages that you can find at almost every nursery.
Sometimes they're so flimsy you can just pull down on one of those horizontal
support rings and it'll actually just break right off cause it's so poorly
constructed. And the reason that's bad, besides the construction quality,
is the actual structure of it.
You'd much rather have a cylinder instead of a cone so you have more support at
the base for when the tomatoes grow up and they have a lot of crazy growth on
them. So speaking of options that might be a little bit better for you,
you have something more like this. So this is a cylindrical cage,
as is this one. In fact,
this one is designed to go on top of this one to stake up and support
indeterminate tomatoes. But for right now, I just have it a little bit lower.
So this is called a Vertex tomato cage from Gardeners Supply Company.
What's really nice about it is again,
it's cylindrical so it goes down nice base of support at the bottom.
But then you have all these different areas that you can rest a branch or
a stem that's just absolutely laden with fruit.
So you have a lot of different areas to support.
Now you could also just DIY this by getting cattle panel and bending it into a
cylinder. So that's one fantastic way to do it.
All you need to do is kind of zip tie it together,
stick it into the ground and you have a really nice and relatively cheap tomato
support.
If you're growing tomatoes on a little bit larger scale and perhaps not in a
raised bed and perhaps more in a row style planting, first of all,
congrats cause you have a lot of space. But second of all,
you have a cool option available to you called the Florida Weave.
And so let's say we have a post here and we have a post here and in between
these posts is our row of tomatoes, right? So as you plant these tomatoes,
they're going to grow up and they need support.
So what you can do is you can take some string and you can actually weave it in
between the stems and then tie it around the other post, move up,
weave it in between the stems, tie it around the other post.
And so as you move up,
you get these little areas where the string has been supported via pressure
almost, and it's nice and taut.
So it will hold them up almost in a little bit of a sandwich or a weave.
So that's a really good technique for a very,
very cheap and effective bigger support system.
We're back in the side yard of the Epic Garden to talk about mistake number
three, which is improper watering techniques. And you know, tomatoes,
it really feels that they are the plant to NOT make these mistakes for sure,
because they have some serious problems when they're either watered incorrectly
or watered carelessly.
So the number one thing that I would avoid doing is dumping water all over the
top of a tomato, being very sloppy about it.
Because tomatoes are susceptible to a ton of soil borne diseases.
And if you're doing that, number one, you're getting the foliage wet.
So you're kind of putting them in a more moist humid environment,
which a lot of fungal pathogens like to live in. So avoid that.
But then number two, it's hitting the ground, we're hitting the soil surface,
and that soil is going to splash up and you have the potential to just introduce
disease onto the underside of those leaves, which I really recommend not doing.
Another way to prevent that, as you can see, is laying down some mulch.
So when the water does hit that surface of the soil,
it's broken up more and the soil is not splashing.
Maybe you get a couple of pieces of mulch, but the soil itself is not splashing.
Now other watering mistakes that you can make is irregularity.
Tomatoes really want a consistent amount of water.
They don't want to go through these feast or famine style cycles.
And so if you do that, number one,
you're probably going to cause more blossom end rot. Which is,
as the name would imply,
the blossom end of the tomato starts to go brown or black.
And then eventually the tomato will fall off and it will die. And you know,
a lot of people will say well, it's a calcium deficiency issue and it's,
it is true. And I know I've talked about this here on the channel.
But it's really more a calcium transport issue caused by irregular watering.
So really make sure that nice dose of mulch.
This bed in particular is a passively sub-irrigated system,
so it's a very consistent amount of soil moisture which is really nice.
And then also try to water at appropriate times of day.
I have a whole video on watering mistakes that you're probably making,
which I could recommend checking out, but cliff notes,
just water in the morning if possible. And then water in the evening,
if that's not possible and then water when the plant needs it,
if that's not possible. So avoid watering mistakes, just keep it nice, smooth,
and easy and take care of these plants.
We're going to remain in the side yard garden to talk about some pruning fails
for mistake number four.
There's a couple of different categories of things you can go wrong with in
pruning. And one of them would be to leave too much of this bottom growth,
especially as the tomato has matured. So this one's nice and mature.
I don't really need this little shoot right here.
And I could probably do away with this shoot right here,
because it's putting off another little sucker. And again,
I've talked about suckers very extensively in my tomato pruning video.
So I won't really go into that too much. I just recommend you watch that.
But you can see one right here, see how this is coming out.
We don't really need this and it's low on the plant. Again,
this is a leaf that's low on the plant that we can clear out.
Low on the plant just means it's probably going to get shaded out anyways,
and it's a closer to the ground leaf.
So it's more susceptible to getting some of that soil borne disease.
A massive pruning mistake that I've seen people make is topping off their
tomatoes. Either way if you've done that to a determinate,
that's a really bad idea because it doesn't have the ability to grow anymore
unless you've left a sucker shoot there to now become the new main stem.
But even on an indeterminate,
you typically don't want to prune off the top of your main leader stem.
It just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Now there are some other plants where this doesn't apply.
For example you know basil, it's a fantastic way to bush out that plant.
But with tomatoes the game is quite different.
You're actually removing a lot more low growth and managing airflow,
managing overgrowth rather than trying to get it to bush out too much.
So here's the before of a tomato plant before I've done a bit of a cleanup on
it.
And there's the after. It's really not that much different.
I just took off a lot of non-necessary low growth and came through and cleaned
up the suckers. And now we have more airflow and less propensity for disease.
So the fifth mistake you may run into would be anything that falls under a
fertilization error. And so the first of course would be underfertilizing,
right? So if you don't give it enough, if you're putting it in poor soil.
Tomatoes are a notoriously heavy feeder plant.
And so you may want to give it a nice healthy dose of compost early on.
I don't really bury like an egg in the soil or anything like that.
It doesn't seem to really do that much just from a scientific point of view.
It doesn't make sense you know, to add a lot of calcium, for example,
to the soil, with egg eggshells.
But giving it a nice dose of compost at the beginning,
giving it a side dress or top dress of compost halfway through the season can be
a really good idea. Now on the flip side,
most people probably fall into the overfertilization category and within that,
they will either give it too much nitrogen early on and promote a ton of
vegetative growth and not a lot of fruit and flower.
On the flip side of that you can also give it just too much phosphorus and
potassium, and there's no reason for it. You know, people say, okay well,
you know,
if it uses a lot of phosphorus and potassium to produce those fruits and
flowers, if I give it more, it will make more. And it's really not true.
You know, especially with phosphorus,
most of our soils have more than enough in the soil itself and you don't need to
add a whole lot extra to it.
It's just going to be a waste of your time and money.
And also potentially has some worse effects on the soil in the longterm.
And so what I would say is just keep it very simple with your tomato fertilizing
and give it nice healthy doses of compost or organic granular fertilizer,
maybe in the planting hole at the beginning,
and then do a top or side dress throughout the season.
I actually will give it some fish fertilizer here and there or kelp fertilizer
here and there. If I want to give it a liquid soluble fertilizer,
that's kind of what I'll do. Some sort of organic formulation like that.
But besides that,
I keep it really simple and my tomatoes are usually pretty Epic.
So there are a lot of mistakes that you can make when growing tomatoes,
but that's the joy of gardening - is sometimes it is making that mistake,
learning from it and then never making that mistake again, you know,
as long as you just don't keep repeating the mistakes that you make,
you're in a good spot. So as we hang out in my cornfield here,
I just wanted to say one more thing about tomatoes. And a lot of people think,
you know, a paste tomato,
you can only use to make tomato sauce and you can't use a cherry tomato or
whatever. All tomatoes can be used for all purposes.
So don't think that perhaps,
because you grew one for sauce that you can't just eat it straight up. You can,
it's just that they have some qualities that make them a little bit more
favorable.
So don't feel that you're stuck to any particular use for a tomato that you
grow. But that's it guys, if you have any tomato mistakes and/or tips,
drop them in the Comments.
We're always trying to learn in the Epic Gardening community.
My goal with Epic Gardening is to teach 10 million people around the world,
if not more, how to grow their own food.
And that's not something I can do alone.
I need you guys in the Comments adding some context,
adding your own experience and helping some people out. So thank you guys.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.