One of the things that's made tomatoes so popular is obviously the flavor but now
we've gotten to a point where it almost becomes a competition with who can have
the first tomato, who can have the biggest tomato, the ripest, the pinkest or the
reddest. In fact, I've heard rumor, that they're considering it for a competition
in the Olympics in 2012. Not sure on that though.
Hello, I'm Jerry Goodspeed, with Utah State University Extension and we're here
at the Ogden Botanical Garden. And it's early May and it's time to plant tomatoes.
Tomatoes are the number one grown vegetable in America, hands down. In fact
if the truth were known, that's the only reason I garden. Everything else is just
fluff. So the carrots and the spinach and the beans, yeah they're nice to have
and they kind of showcase a little bit but, the whole reason I garden, is for
tomatoes. There's nothing better than a nice fresh tomato picked out of your
garden. The first BLT is what you're after here. So I'm going to show you a couple
of tricks or a couple of things about planting tomatoes and growing tomatoes
that I find that help me. You'll noticed that I'm in a raised bed here and I don't
care what vegetable it is, they all do better in a raised bed. Whether it's a
formal structured raised bed like we have here or if you're just mounding you're
soil in your garden. Either way, what you're trying to do is create a better
soil environment for your vegetables. For the roots! That's what I tell people.
You're not planting the tomato, you're planting the roots. If the roots are
healthy, the plant will be great. So we have a couple of sizes here that
you'll find in the nurseries. This is what you'll get out of a pony pack
You'll see the nice healthy roots, that's what you're looking for. The nice white
roots, healthy, pretty good growth. You don't want insects and diseases on it.
This is a little bit bigger plant, you can also find in the nursery as well. And I'm
going to be planting this one today but you'd be doing it the same way whether
it's for these small pony packs or this big one. What I will do, is I will dig a
hole, quite a lot deeper than the plant is because tomatoes are kind of cool.
They're one of the few plants that can grow roots just about any where on the
stem, which to me is kind of weird but it's also really cool. So what I do, is
I'll just dig this big hole here, where I'm going to stuff this tomato into.
And we're going to go deep, which is you never do on any other plant, but you
can on tomatoes. Then I'm going to pop it out of the pot, even though this is a
biodegradable pot, I still feel comfortable about popping it out,
looking at the roots, making sure they're good, they're what I like. And it doesn't
hurt the plant to disturb those roots a little bit. There's no problem at all.
K, I'll pop the bottom off of that. Now what I'll do, because I know that it can
grow roots anywhere along that stem, I'm going to plant a little bit deeper and
I'm going to remove some of these lower branches here. Leaves on it. You can see,
I've actually got two tomatoes in here. That's a bonus for me, I'm alright with
that. So we're going to remove those lower branches, about to there. You can see
we've cleaned that up really nice. And now I'm going to plant it all the way up to
that first leaf, that's pretty deep. And I'm going to dig it out, that's the other
nice thing about a raised bed, is man, you can dig with your hands, I always like
that. Okay. You stick it in the ground. Fill it back in real nice around it and
you can see that,
I've filled it back in and planted it right to those leaves that I left. Now
it's important to leave some of the top, and which I did, but I planted it deeper
than I normally would have, because, tomatoes will grow roots on those stems.
That's really neat.
You'll also notice here that what we have done is we've planted it next to some
fencing that we put in our raised beds just for this purpose. This is kind of
cool. We've got peas that are about to come up and the peas will come up and
we can use this on the, the peas will grow up here, we'll harvest them and about the
time the tomatoes are getting really big where we'll need to put them on the fence
we'll cut down the peas and the tomatoes will grow up here for the rest of the
summer. This keeps the tomatoes off of the ground so that we don't have slugs
and snails problems. It's easier to harvest as well. It's easier to see and to
care for. We just tend to have a lot better luck if we can tie them up and get
them up off the ground. And like I said, I love tomatoes. But tomatoes are kind
of tender. And so before you do this, before we've planting this tomato into
the ground, we want to make sure that we've past the last frost. And I know
that's always tricky to do but try to get it past the last frost because if
we get a freeze, a hard freeze on a tomato, it will kill it and then you got
to start all over again.
As far as fertilization goes, we only fertilize our tomatoes once. And I know
there's a lot of people out there that they're fertilizing them every week,
I don't. And we have wonderful luck without doing that. We'll just put an
all purpose fertilizer and what we'll do with it, we'll actually just plant
it right next to our tomato. So we'll make a little hole here.
About two inches deep and about three or four inches away from the tomato.
We'll grab our fertilizer. And we'll just use an all-purpose fertilizer. Whatever
we can find on sale. Just an all-purpose good fertilizer is what we're after.
We'll take a small handful of it, we'll place it into the hole right here and
then we'll just cover it up.
Now that plant has a little pocket of fertilizer right next to it. As those
roots grow and mature, they'll be able to find that, it's where they need it.
Make sure you don't put it in the same hole, it's got to be in a different hole
because the fertilizer's a salt and you don't want to burn or hurt that new
tomato. And you can hurt zucchinis, no problem there but tomatoes, ah you don't
want to hurt them. You want to keep them alive and healthy. That'll help you, by
planting it a little bit deeper, it'll give it a really strong root system.
By giving it a place to grow up and some good fertilization, you should
have a real healthy, good tomato and be able to enjoy a lot of BLT's
throughout the summer.