- Hello, and a very warm welcome back to the garden.
I'm here in the polycrub, and I'm in the middle of
transplanting all of the tomatoes.
And in this video, I wanna discuss
eight must-do things in order to have
an incredible tomato harvest this growing season.
This video is primarily for growing cordon tomatoes,
but many of the tips will also apply
if you're growing things like bush tomatoes.
It's currently raining outside,
but because we're undercover,
we have to keep things watered.
And I'm just removing this cardboard here,
because what it did is, I like to
give undercover beds a good soaking.
If they have nothing in it,
about a week or two before transplanting,
I wanna put in around, for this raised bed,
which is effectively three foot by ten foot,
we put in six to eight full watering cans,
just so there's plenty of moisture in the soil.
So these are the tomatoes I'm gonna be growing.
I think tomato growing is, quite often, overcomplicated.
In truth, tomatoes are very simple to grow.
All you need is compost, and enough space,
and enough warmth.
But there are a few ways to get a better crop
out of what you're doing.
And I'm gonna show you some tips and tricks,
in order to do that.
When it comes to transplanting tomatoes,
there's two really important things to do.
The first is to plant them as deep as possible.
Eventually, I'm thinking about having
raised beds in here, about twice the depth for tomatoes,
and to really get them in as deep as I possibly can,
because that means that they have access
to more nutrients, and also to more moisture.
Tomatoes have a shallow set of roots,
but they also have a deeper set of roots.
The other thing is spacing between plants.
You don't want your plants too close,
because if you're growing undercover,
say a polytunnel or a greenhouse,
good airflow is essential.
If you don't have good airflow around your plants,
then this can harbor issues,
like tomato blights and other diseases,
which is something you don't want.
You wanna have a great tomato crop,
and you don't want to have any problems.
So the spacing that I like to go
for cordon tomatoes is around 16 inches.
I use this bit of string as a marker between plants,
just to make sure it's roughly around that.
16 inches is 40 centimeters.
And it's just really useful to have something like this.
It could be a bit of string or a stick
to guide you as you're doing it.
So I'm gonna start just kind of in this corner,
a little bit away from the edge.
I'm gonna have two rows of tomatoes in here.
And what I'm gonna do is get started
by making a pretty deep hole.
So that's about as deep as I can go.
I'm just going to show you, I'm gonna
grab one of the seedlings out.
Now with tomatoes, I try and be as careful as possible,
I never try and grab it by the leaves, or even by the stem.
Grab it by the roots there.
I'm gonna place it down,
and you can see that it's pretty deep.
And that's fine, even though that there's, like,
a leaf that would be covered,
I can just snap this off.
But what I'm gonna do is just place the seedling
to one side, because tomatoes are quite hungry plants.
It's important we give them
a really nice amount of compost
to get them going.
So I've got some dalefoot compost here,
and I'm gonna put it at the base.
Whenever you're transplanting seedlings,
it's really important that they have plenty of water.
So I'm just gonna fill up a watering can,
so I can give the hole, after putting the compost,
a really good soaking.
There's a nice amount of compost, put in the water.
Next thing I'm gonna do is plant this.
So I'm just going to, very gently,
break this bottom leaf off on these two, as well.
I'm now going to place it in the hole, like that,
and then gently cover the soil back around it.
My plan with the tomatoes is to intercrop them
with a lot of low growing crops,
like particular herbs and stuff.
I try and make my life as easy as possible.
And one of the tricky things, quite often, is watering.
And then the water goes off
in all sorts of different directions.
So, with this tomato plant here,
I've packed it in nice and firm.
But what I'm now gonna do, with my hands,
is to create a little bit of a bowl shape,
which makes it a lot easier to water this plant.
I can just gradually, using a watering can,
put it in a bit of water.
The bowl will collect it, and then it will seep in.
So rather than the water going off
in different directions and not hitting the roots,
all the water is going to go down into the roots.
These tomatoes were planted last week,
and the bowl effect is very much visible,
I've already given them a water.
But using this rose, you wanna be gentle
when growing tomatoes, you don't wanna just
overload it with water, and it's filling up like that.
And then I can let the water,
I can see it already starting to seep down.
And I know that I'm giving it the water that it needs.
And it means that I can be in control of the watering,
rather than thinking, "Oh, is this not working
how I want it to?"
So the first must-do thing, is just to
plant your tomatoes as deep as possible,
and ensure you have a good spacing between plants.
Now, I'm gonna crack on,
and get the rest of this bed planted up.
The next thing to do is to
provide a good support system for your tomato plants.
Because the last thing you want
is your plants from collapsing, because
they've got such a weight of fruits.
It can be pretty depressing.
All we've done here in the polycrub,
is we've used a really simple wire system
that has been, kind of, tightened at both ends,
and we've run it across.
We've got one at the top, one at the bottom.
And this is a permanent fixture.
And then what we're gonna do, is we're going to
use some heavy duty garden string, tie it at the top,
and then bring it down and kinda tie it loosely
at the base of the tomato stem.
And then gradually, we'll train the tomato to kind of
wrap around the string,
so it will grow upwards and upwards.
And because it has that support, it makes it a lot easier
for us, as gardeners, to both work around
in terms of pruning the plants, but also
and more importantly, in terms of
making it easier for harvesting.
Another thing and to do is to think about
conserving the moisture in the soil.
Which is really important, because
it helps various different things.
For example, the soil biology, it stops potential issues.
The next tip is gonna look into
actually watering, in more detail.
But there's a couple of ways that you can conserve moisture.
The first is to use some kind of mulch.
Here's a load of lawn clippings,
and I could just go around, kind of
leaving the little bowls exposed,
just to make it a lot easier to water.
But what this, kind of, layer does,
you can also use other things like wool as well,
is it's going to stop evaporation,
which is gonna save you a lot of time watering.
Now, there is another thing that you can do.
In a space like this it's really important
to make the most of it, to try and get
as many different crops as possible.
So what you can actually look at doing,
instead of adding something like a mulch,
is to put something on, like some kind of green cover crop.
For example, I'm gonna be growing
a load of things like herbs, and also, like, beetroot
underneath these tomato plants, 'cause it grows so tall.
That means I can grow them underneath,
and make the most out of that horizontal space.
So I'm getting as much crops as possible.
By growing things underneath, that, too,
is going to help conserve moisture,
and it's going to help improve the soil biology,
which means that the tomatoes, as a result,
will also benefit from that.
Two very common issues that happen with tomatoes
are cracked fruits, and also blossom end rot.
And this usually happens because of inconsistent watering.
Now, blossom end rot is because of a
calcium deficiency, but very often it's because
there isn't enough water in the soil,
that the plant can uptake, that will then
carry the calcium around the plant.
Very often, there is actually enough calcium in the soil.
So, consistent watering is very much
about sticking to a regular routine.
So what I like to do, is kinda time it
where I water tomato plants, on average,
once every two sunny days,
or once every kind of three overcast days.
I like to keep it fairly simple like that,
and use that as a general rule-of-thumb.
Now, the other thing to bear in mind
is as tomato plants grow, they need more water.
So when they're at kind of this stage,
I'll probably water each plant with around
half a liter to a liter of water at a go,
but when tomato plants get pretty big,
I can sometimes find myself watering them
with perhaps three or four liters of water at a time.
They are thirsty, but they are tomatoes, after all,
which makes it very much worth it.
Fruit cracking of tomatoes very often happens
when you have quite a dry period,
and suddenly there's an excessive amount of water.
And basically the inside swell faster
than the skin can grow, which is what causes it to crack.
So to reduce blossom end rot and cracking,
just create a consistent watering schedule,
and chances are, you'll be fine.
In a climate like mine where we don't get
particularly warm summers, and often they can
be cut short a little bit too soon,
pruning is really essential.
Pruning a tomato plant is really simple.
As they grow, they're gonna create suckers.
Really easy way to think of it is
you've got your plant growing out there,
and you've got the main stem, there's this kind of leaf,
and then the sucker appears,
and you want to just snap it off.
Because, even though you could let those suckers grow,
and they can even bear fruit,
what happens is that it over crowds the spot.
What you want to do is to concentrate on your plants
growing upwards, but also on setting fruit,
and to get the best quality fruits
in the time that you have.
So really good thing to do is once a week,
once your tomato plants are perhaps
twice the size of this, start going through
and picking off all of the suckers.
If you just turn it into a weekly routine,
it's really easy to keep on top of.
Tomatoes are hungry plants,
and you can get fantastic results with compost.
But if you want to give them
a little bit of extra nutrition,
or you think that maybe your plants
aren't looking as healthy as possible,
what you can do is to make your own plant feeds.
They can be as simple as chucking in
a load of nettles and comfrey into a bucket of water,
or you could go ahead and make certain things like
nettle-fermented plant juice.
Now the important thing is to look at
giving them a wide variety of nutrients.
They need potassium, phosphorus, calcium, nitrogen,
of course, but also a lot of the *micro* nutrients as well.
So if you wanna find out more about
creating plant feeds, then there's a video up here,
which you can learn all about,
to find out ways that that can help you.
And in terms of tomatoes, that I think
it's important to not completely overload them.
you never want to completely overload a plant
with excessive nutrients.
What you want to do, instead, is perhaps
do something every couple of weeks,
put in a little bit of homemade feed into your watering.
So as you drench your plants, you'll also be providing them
with a little extra nutrients should they need.
The next thing is more of a must-try than a must-do,
and it is quite a fun thing.
So, one of the ways for growing peppers, actually,
in order to make them hotter,
is you deprive them from water.
And you can actually use that kinda similar strategy
for tomatoes to create a more intense tomato flavor.
So what I kind of challenge you to do this growing season,
is to set aside maybe two or three tomato plants.
And once around half of the fruits have ripened,
stop watering, just completely stopped watering.
Don't feel tempted to water again in two weeks,
'cause it will cause the fruits to crack.
But what you'll find, is that because there's less water,
the flavor of the tomatoes will intensify.
And it's a fun little trick that you can do,
just to really make super powerful
and delicious tomato salads.
And it's something that you can experiment
with some other fruits and crops, as well.
Now here in the polycrub, I'm gonna hopefully fit in
around 60 to 70 tomato plants.
Can never have too many, and definitely want to
process a lot, to make sure that I have loads during winter.
And those are just the basic principles
that I follow to try and get the best harvest possible.
There's not really much else to it.
I think too many times things are over complicated,
but if you just really focus on the few things
that make the biggest difference,
then you're set on track to get
a fantastic tomato harvest this year.
So I really hope you enjoyed this video.
And if you have any other questions,
please don't hesitate to ask them
down below in the video description.
And if you wanna find out some extra gardening tips,
looking for more content, some behind the scenes,
then I invite you to join me over at my Patron
for more videos there.
Hope your season is going well,
and I look forward to seeing you guys again next week.