Tomatoes are the most popular crop in summer.
And we want to make sure that we're growing our tomatoes correctly,
which is why we're talking about care in this video.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening,
where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb.
We have this massive wall of tomatoes. If you haven't seen the trellising video,
check that out because it shows how we built this. But four, four, and four.
So 12 different tomatoes here in three different trellising methods,
all growing really nicely. I think the last time we checked in,
they were probably one-third to one-half the height.
So a lot has been growing and a lot has been going on. That's why in this video,
we're talking about some pruning, some interplanting, some watering techniques,
everything you need to know to make sure that you have a successful tomato
harvest this summer, this season.
So cultivate that Like button and you will be blessed with 55%
juicier tomatoes, and let's get into the video.
The first thing we're going to talk about is managing the growth of the tomato
over the season. So pruning, training, supporting, all that kind of stuff.
This is the Florida weave style trellis, this is one of the easier ones to do.
So I haven't done a whole lot as far as supporting these tomatoes goes,
except for just stringing up a new line of the weave,
which is the whole point of this system. But,
what I might want to do is start taking off some of these suckers.
Now it really depends on what you care about in the garden.
If you really want like a nice clean, precise tomato patch,
then you can take off every single sucker if you want to.
I have a whole video on how to prune tomatoes and how to think about pruning
them. But in this particular instance, for example,
I could take this one off right here. I'm probably not going to. Why?
Because the plant's already up off the ground, it's going to spread out,
it actually will provide a little protection for the tomatoes when they actually
start to fruit.
So there's a lot of benefits to leaving the sucker at this point in time.
But I'm going to show you down below why I will do a decent amount of pruning.
Here's the bottom of one of the tomatoes here in the Florida weave system. So,
what do you see? Big old sun leaf right here.
This is actually a sucker that I've let go.
So I'll figure out a way to get that up into the trellis.
So let's just do that right now. So we can keep on talking about pruning.
We're going to weave this up in here. We'll secure that. It's pretty old.
I don't want to really remove it at this point. We'll let it go.
But what I do want to do is come in and clean up the bottom
here. Why? Number one,
you're going to get potential disease when all these are sitting on the surface
of the soil. Number two, you're opening up the canopy.
You're opening up the airflow a little bit. That's going to be helpful.
And then number three, you can actually interplant.
I mean look at some of these leaves.
These weren't really long for this world anyways,
maybe starting a little bit of disease.
I'm going to really clear up maybe the first foot or so of growth here.
And then I'm going to replicate that across the entire planting of
tomatoes that I have. I have a lot of them. So I'm going to do that.
And that's going to be a really good way to clear up this whole inner canopy and
I can plant stuff around the edges, protect the surface of the soil.
We are all pruned up, it's time to do a little bit of plant training.
There are a lot of different ways to approach this, like I've mentioned before.
I'll show you a clip of a tomato that I just have done absolutely nothing to.
I put it in a Gardener's Supply Company Titan tomato cage and it lives up to its
name. It just sits in there and it's completely well-contained. But,
if you do want to do some training, depends on your trellising method.
One thing I'm really partial to are these tomato clips that you just attach to
your string and then just adhere. So every like three, four inches or so,
I like to come in and just clip it in. So we still get more vertical growth,
especially if you're doing a conduit trellis like this one over here or this
lower and lean style.
You want to get it up as quickly as you can because you pruned it to a single
leader so you don't really want it to be flopping all over the place.
If you did,
you probably wouldn't have pruned it and just let it go in a cage or something
like that.
So I'm going to tie a couple of these up and then we will talk about fertilizing
and watering tomatoes across the season. Before we get into our fertilizing,
one final little note.
Depending on how you're trellising or staking or caging your tomatoes,
you just want to keep an eye on things that want to go a little wonky. And so,
you know, this one's growing faster than this one.
I can put a line here and when this one grows up to size, that's fine.
I'll just tuck it in and it's completely, completely fine. So fertilizing.
These tomatoes are at the stage of their life where they are starting to put out
early young fruit. It's time to fertilize,
but it's time to really strategize around how you do it.
You don't want to be dumping a ton of nitrogen onto the plant at this point in
its life. So what I have here, this is my favorite tomato fertilizer.
It's a Espoma Organic's Tomato-tone. They are the sponsors of the video.
We've been working with Espoma for like two years now, two, three years,
family-owned company, organic from the start before it was even a thing.
So huge, huge fans of them. I'm going to talk to you about what's in this one,
it's a 3-4-6 NPK. So it's lower on the nitrogen,
higher on the phosphorus and potassium,
and also has a little sulfur and calcium to potentially stave off blossom end
rot. Now, blossom end rot, for those of you who don't know,
it's when the tomato has a little sort of rot or black spot on the blossom end
where the flower was. That's usually a calcium deficiency,
but not for the reasons you might think.
I'm going to do a little granular application while we talk about this.
It's not really necessarily because there's not enough calcium in the soil,
although that can be a problem.
It's typically because you haven't watered adequately.
So as I sprinkle some of this granular fertilizer around, you know,
if the soil was deficient in calcium, sure,
now I've probably solved that over the course of the season.
But we do have to talk about managing your watering with tomatoes cause I think
a lot of people can make some mistakes here that can mess with your crop.
So let me fertilize all of these real quickly.
I'm just doing a little handful around the base and we'll water it in.
And then we'll talk about some watering care that I think you really need to
know. Watering your tomatoes can cause all sorts of headaches for gardeners.
I actually have a problem in this little grow.
Bag. My own fault. I overwatered.
A little bit and this tomato split. So I'm going to show you that in a second.
This is just another way that you can grow tomatoes and care for them.
Another Titan tomato cage from Gardener's and then their self-watering grow bag.
I probably should have heeded the warning and let it water itself.
But let's show you what happens when you overwater.
This here is an indeterminate Socolades tomato and you actually see a couple of
different interesting problems on this one. The weirder one is this right here.
See this zipper type of look?
That is called zippering and it actually happens when you have a semi-poor
pollination and it causes this little tear or sort of hybrid tear type of thing
coming up here. That's a separate issue than this right here.
This is the bigger issue obviously, this splitting.
This happens when you don't water it enough and the skin gets sort of tight,
and then you water it a lot. All the interior tissues swell up and of course,
POP goes the weasel. So this is one of the issues you can run into.
But now let's talk about watering in general.
We're talking about watering your tomatoes.
There's a lot of different techniques to do this. You could have irrigation,
you could do it by hand in a can. You could, like me,
have a hose with a long handle attachment and make it rain all over your
tomatoes and myself cause it just blew into my face. But that's fine,
we're just keeping on and living our lives.
So what I'm going to do here is just put it down at the base. A lot of people,
including myself in the past,
have said you don't want to water over the top of your tomatoes,
or many other types of plants. I would say on a base level,
that's a good practice, but I wouldn't freak out
if you got like a tiny bit of water on one of the leaves.
You're not going to have a completely decimated crop.
Most of the reason for that is if you have, let's say,
blight in your soil and you know it's a problem,
and then you're splashing up those blight spores onto the underside of the lower
leaves. Remember, we just took off the lower leaves.
So that was a good strategic move. Also for watering,
what I'm doing here is I'm just taking my hose and I'm coming in and just
lightly hydrating the soil at the start. Sometimes,
especially with tomatoes cause you're watering deeply, but not very often.
You're not watering every single day.
You want to make sure that you rehydrate that soil before you actually come in
with a deeper water. Now that I've given my tomatoes a once over with water,
I've waited a little bit of time,
a few minutes or so for the water to actually penetrate the soil.
Now we'll come in and give it a deeper water.
And you can make sure that your nozzle goes maybe a little bit slower.
Really give it that time to sink in. A couple of things I'll say here,
mulch is going to be crucial.
If you're watering something deeply but less often then mulch is going to help
you do that really effectively because it's going to keep that water in.
So that's number one. And then number two, I will say,
don't freak out if your tomato leaves wilt in the middle of the day.
That's a natural heat response.
You'll be a little bit more worried and know that your tomatoes need water if
they're wilting outside of the heat of the day.
So in the morning or in the evening, if they're wilting at that point,
then you know you probably need to water them.
There's a potential that something else is going on,
but that's the most likely thing. So let's finish this up and onto the next tip.
Now we want to talk about the flowers. That's what we care about, right?
We're trying to get these juicy toms. This one's a little guy right here.
Actually has a couple of aphids on it. Get off!
A lot of the times with aphids you can actually just blast them off the plant.
They're not really strong enough to get back on sufficiently. So,
I have a toothbrush here. Why? Well,
this is a really common technique that is often promoted and it certainly does
work. So the tomato flower has both the male and the female parts within it.
And so it will pollinate itself. It's helped a lot by pollinators.
If you're growing it out of season like winter, trying to push it into fall,
you get some flowers, not a lot of pollinators around at that time.
At least less. You might have some more pollination issues.
If you're in an area that doesn't get as much wind,
I get a lot of wind through this little corridor here,
maybe you might still have some pollination issues. Maybe.
You just want to do this, go ahead and do it. It works perfectly.
Fine. So you can take this.
I've got one of these little vibrating electric ones.
I don't have a great example of a flower that I could do this to right now,
but let's just pretend that I do.
Let's just pretend that that's open right there. You would come through.
Zzzzzzzz, give it that.
Little vibration. You could just do it with your fingers too.
You could just do that.
I don't know that you really necessarily need this at all.
But it can be a great way to help get that pollen all mixed up and get a better
fruit set on your tomatoes. I would say if you're at an apartment,
maybe growing it indoors, this is a really,
really good tip to help your pollination issues.
An opportunity I think a lot of tomato growers miss out on is the opportunity to
add even more plants in the same space.
So I have three different types of basil here.
Basil is probably the quintessential recommendation for interplanting underneath
your tomatoes. Let's imagine this one grows up another two,
three feet over the course of the next month and a half or so.
I'm probably going to have a little bit more of the foliage taken off the
bottom. Maybe it's dying, whatever. And that opens up the canopy,
the undercanopy quite a bit. And so let's get some extra yield.
What this will do is number one, we get beautiful, beautiful basil,
which is a quintessential combination crop with tomatoes,
both in the kitchen and in the garden. But we're going to get more yield out.
And we're also going to protect the surface of the soil quite a bit more.
Because this basil is going to bush up,
provide some shade and it's just going to do a lot better,
both for the basil itself and also for the tomatoes. So nothing too fancy here.
I would say when your tomatoes get to about this height, you can come in.
That soil though is so dark.
Ooh, that's what we're talking about! But you can just come in.
And plant in some basil, you can put in marigolds,
you can put in alyssum, sweet alyssum or alyssum, and there you go.
Water this in,
this will come up here in no time and you have a beautiful combination.
There's a lot to know when it comes to tomato care.
This right here might be the pride and joy of the season.
This is Kevin's super tomato, not named after myself. Named after my friend,
Kevin40,
who's known for having a couple of Guiness Book of World Records for growing
giant vegetables. This is the genetics that he's provided to me. Amazing,
vigorous tomato. One of the most beautiful ones I probably ever seen.
It's just so crazy growing.
I have a lot more tomato videos coming up this season.
So fertilize that Subscribe button, if you're interested in that.
And until next time, get out in the garden, grow some tomatoes.
Good luck and keep on growing.