This is part one of a basic primer on how to grow tomatoes at home. We're going to cover
growing them in the ground and growing them in pots. Raised beds are kind of a halfway
point between those two options. They're basically giant pots. This video will cover preparing
your soil, selecting your plants and getting them in the ground.
I would say tomatoes are the most worthwhile food to grow yourself. Nothing comes close
to the taste of a vine-ripened homegrown tomato. I have a whole video explaining why that is
the case — it's linked in the description.
If you're going to grow tomatoes in the actual ground, I think it's worth your time to test
the soil first — find out if you need to add any nutrients or anything. Tomatoes are
what they call medium-to-heavy feeders. They need rich soil.
There are lots of soil testing kit options that you can google. But if you live in the
United States like I do, google the name of your state plus the words "soil test" and
"extension."
Every state in the union has a public land-grant university with an extension office — that
is, a department with the mission of extending the university's mission out to the people,
particularly as it pertains to food and growing things. This is a legacy from when land-grant
schools were basically farmer's colleges. All the extension offices offer soil testing.
Here in Georgia, the kit costs $15.
You pays your money, and the kit comes in the mail. It'll have very precise instructions.
Just do whatever it says. This one tells me to take at least eight samples from all around
my garden. You take a trowel, you dig a little hole, and then you cut a slice of dirt from
the side of the hole. You're trying to get a little cross-section of dirt going down
a few inches.
It's important to combine samples from all over the garden, because the dirt could really
vary a lot from place to place. The kit tells me to mix all my samples together, pull out
any big rocks or leaves or sticks, and then let the dirt dry overnight. There it is, nice
and dry, fill the bag up to the line, and then in the mail this goes to the lab. Less
than a week later, they emailed me my results.
My garden needs phosphorus and some alkali. Don't worry if that means nothing to you — the
soil report will tell you exactly what to do about it. Just do what it says.
Helping me prepare my garden is my University of Georgia county extension agent, Karol Kelly.
If you live in the U.S., there is a person like this for your area whose whole job is
to help you grow things, and your taxes have already paid for them. They offer free classes
and advice.
"I think we are a lesser-known resource in the community. I think our older — some
of our older clients probably know us a little bit better than some of the younger generations.
So we're always happy to introduce ourselves to whoever wants to get some good information
from us."
The first thing to do is to get my soil pH a little higher. If I don't do this, my fruits
will be susceptible to blossom-end rot, which is exactly what it sounds like. It happens
when the tomatoes physiologically cannot absorb enough calcium from the dirt.
"Here in Georgia, our soils tend to be more acidic because of the soil type we have, and
we usually have to put lime on to raise the pH up to the correct range. Some of your other
viewers may have pHs that are way too high, and they would use sulfur to lower the pH,
to get it in that right range so that the plants can absorb the fertilizer that you
put on."
Again, just do whatever your soil report tells you. Mine says to add 40 pounds of garden
lime per thousand square feet. My garden is 10x10, so a hundred square feet. This bag
has 40 pounds, so we are simply eyeballing one-tenth of the bag. You should probably
actually weigh yours. Just scatter it on.
Next, fertilizer. My report tells me to "broadcast" 30 pounds of 10-10-10 per thousand square
feet.
"So about about 3 pounds of 10-10-10."
No doubt you are wondering, "10 what, 10 what, and 10 what?"
"Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. That's the three macronutrients that plants require.
So this bag will have 10% nitrogen, 10% phosphorus and 10% potassium. So if you see a fertilizer
that's 15-0-15, then it would not have the phosphorus. The soil test dictates which kind
of fertilizer you need."
And this is where the word "broadcasting" comes from. It's a farmer term. It means scattering
things onto the ground relatively indiscriminately, as opposed to, say, placing one seed at a
time exactly where you want it.
Oh hey, is fertilizer like this, "natural?"
"For the organic people, it would probably not be acceptable. There are organic fertilizers
like bone meal and fish emulsion and things like that that deliver lower nutrient quantities.
But for the general gardener, this is a very common product."
Look, I definitely think organic farming has an important role to play in feeding the world
sustainably, but for my tiny little home garden, I say screw it. What we're doing here is not
what is causing the great Gulf of Mexico dead zone, or whatever. From an environmental perspective,
be more worried about what you put on your lawn. That's a more significant scale.
Now we're gonna till the garden. Just digging down into it a few inches and upending the
soil with a shovel or a pitchfork. There are actual tillers you can buy, but for a small
garden I think there's no point. Just use a shovel. This gets the fertilizer mixed in,
it loosens and aerates the soil for planting, and it kills or damages those weeds, though
I'm not really worried about them — they are winter weeds. They're gonna die as soon
as it gets hot.
In anticipation of the summer weeds, we're going to put down a so-called "pre-emergence
herbicide."
"People that are not in favor of using chemicals in their gardens, they would probably not
do the herbicide application. It's a product labeled for the garden. It's safe to use in
the garden, and so it will provide a barrier to prevent lots more weeds coming up this
summer."
It's best to wear garden gloves when handling fertilizers and herbicides.
"Let's not get the shot of me dumping herbicide all over my hand."
Put on however much the instructions say, and you can certainly skip this if you're
uncomfortable with it. This is my first time trying it. I'll use a rake to kinda work that
into the soil and also smooth things out and get ready to make rows.
That's when you mound the soil up into some long hills onto which you will plant your
stuff in a line. Not everybody does rows. I'm down with rows. They bring order to the
garden.
"It allows you to kinda figure out spacing for plants. You don't want plants overcrowded
because that causes more disease problems, insect problems."
For tomatoes I think you want the rows pretty far apart from each other — about four feet,
or well over a meter. You gotta leave room for you body so you can work on each plant
as it grows — tying it, pruning it, harvesting, etc.
The mounding is mostly just a visual guide for this purpose, but it makes the tomatoes
easier to plant for reasons that you'll soon see. The mound also drains some water down
and away from the plants, which in my book is a good thing. I can add water to my garden.
I can't take it away, and it tends to get really wet in my backyard. If your garden
tends to be really dry, maybe just plant into the flat ground.
"So, drying out a little bit quicker and temperature fluctuations. So if you get your tomatoes
in and we have a late freeze, the mounds might be affected a little but more than they would
be if they were just planted straight in the ground. But I think, at this point, the pros
outweigh the cons with the mounds."
Thank you, Karol. She's going back to work and I'm finishing up here. Working in the
garden all spring and summer is one of my top-five favorite things to do, and it's one
of the few times I can listen to podcasts or music all by myself, which I can do with
my new bluetooth speaker from Kove, the sponsor of this video.
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Now, what if you're growing your tomatoes in containers, or in a raised bed? It's way
easier. Just buy a potting soil mix. Something like this. It'll already have fertilizer and
everything in it, and crucially for tomatoes, it'll have moisture regulators in it — peat
moss and other spongy substances. Tomatoes really, really need an even supply of water.
They can handle being a little wet, they can handle being a little dry. What they can't
handle is wild variations between the two. That causes end rot, it causes the skins to
split — all kinds of problems. Even moisture is really hard to guarantee in a pot, so the
potting mix is spongey to hold onto water and release it slowly to the plant.
For most tomato varieties, you want really big pots — like, at least 18 inches or half-a-meter
in diameter. That's about the size this is. This black one I have is huge. This magnolia
tree I bought came inside it. But it's black, which is not ideal for the hot climate I live
in. It'll absorb a lot of heat from the sun. I have to be extra careful about frequently
watering whatever I put in here.
For a raised bed, it's the same basic deal, you just just need to make sure to tear out
the sod — the grass on the ground — before you build up your bed on top of it.
Now, when is it time to plant? In the springtime, when you're pretty sure the temperature isn't
gonna drop below freezing again, and the soil temperature hits about 65 degrees Fahrenheit,
18 degrees C. How do you know the soil temperature? You can buy a soil thermometer, but again,
here in the U.S., your local land-grant university probably has a website where you can see soil
temperature reports from all over the state in close to real time.
When it's warm enough, it's time to head to the store and buy seedlings — little baby
tomato plants. You can obviously grow you own from seeds, but that is a whole other
thing. You have to start them inside or in a green house, and I do not think it's worth
it if you're growing on a modest scale.
Which varieties should you buy? Well, the chief distinction is between determinate and
indeterminate varieties. Determinates grow more like bushes, to a fixed size. And indeterminate
varieties grow like vines — basically as huge as you let them. You can grow either
kind in the ground, but in pots, determinate varieties generally do a lot better. I've
got some of those for my pots. For my garden, I'm mostly doing indeterminate varieties,
which, I don't think it's controversial to say, generally taste better.
I think you should just get a bunch of different things and see what grows well at your place
and see what you like to eat. I have found that I enjoy the Cherokee Purple variety far
more than anything else. I cry when they're gone, which sucks because the plants aren't
very productive, so this year, I'm planting a lot of them.
How do you plant? Well, the first step is getting them out of their plastic containers
without hurting them, and I find the best way is to gently squeeze the roots and dirt
out of the container, like squeezing out toothpaste. There you go.
Then you gotta dig a little hole, and here's the weird thing with tomatoes: You want to
partially bury the plant itself, which is easier to do if you've built up a little mound.
Tomatoes will actually grow more roots from their stems, which means you can help them
get established by burying them like a mobster buries a guy in the sand at low tide. How
deep is a matter of debate. Some people say go up the first leaves, some people say go
deeper. The producer of these particular seedlings recommends burying the plant two-thirds of
the way up.
Now let's talk about stakes. Tomatoes plants naturally grow up and then flop over and grow
across the ground. They're vines. That makes very inefficient use of your space, and the
fruit tend to rot on the ground, so you have to give them something to climb upwards. Tomato
cages like these are a very easy. The vines will just grow up and naturally flop over
the sides.
If you use a long, straight, stake, you'll have to tie the plant to the stake as it grows
up and to keep it pruned. The advantage, however, is if you use stakes, you can plant them closer
together — one and half or two feet, or about half a meter. If you use cages, the
plants are gonna spread wider, so you need to go like three feet, or a full meter apart.
I always plant my plants too close to each other, because they're so small right now.
It feels so stupid to waste the space. But they are going to grow. I still probably planted
my garden too tightly this time. You'll see.
You want to do this staking phase right when you put your plants in, because if you did
it later, you'd be more likely to damage their root systems, which are gonna spread out underground.
Oh, and I definitely recommend plastic or metal stakes. Wood ones are natural and romantic,
but they start to rot and break after just a couple seasons. And get the tallest stakes
you can, at least for indeterminate varieties. They'll basically climb up forever.
With the pots, same basic deal, you want to leave the plants a lot of room to grow, which
probably means one plant per pot. Though with this giant pot that I've got, I'm gonna try
to grow three of these Celebrity varieties at once. I've done two before, I'm gonna try
three. The Celebrity does well in close quarters, and if I'm diligent with staking and tying
these, it should work. It'll also help to keep my pots pretty well spaced out from each
other. That way they can all get sun, and they'll be less likely to pass disease to
each other.
Regardless, your pots or garden need to be someplace where they'll get at least six hours
a day of full sun. Tomatoes like lots of sun. You'll want to water them right after you
get them in — being transplanted is traumatic. And in general you'll want to water a couple
times a week unless you're getting really frequent rain.
Last thing to consider is mulch — something to cover all the parts of the ground that
don't have tomatoes on them. This will conserve water and nutrients and discourage weeds.
A great material for this is cardboard. If you have a bunch of old boxes lying around,
you can literally cover all of your exposed dirt with cardboard. It's economical and effective,
but I'm not sure that I want to look at this in my yard all season long, so I'm probably
gonna get some straw. This is my friend Rebecca's garden. Dried leaves work great too.
Mulching definitely helps, but if I'm honest with you, I haven't bothered with my tomatoes
for many years and I've gotten great crops. That said, I'm gonna try the best practices
this year and see if I can't do even better. In part two, we'll cover maintaining your
plants and then harvesting. I'll have that video to you just a soon as I have something
to harvest!