America’s Favorite Tomatoes
(Page 5 of 7)
February/March 2008
By Barbara Pleasant
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What Tomatoes Want
Starting with delicious, reliable varieties will create a solid foundation for your tomato patch, but your plants will produce even better if you give them the care they prefer. Here’s how:
- See to the soil. Organically grown tomatoes taste better and are higher in nutrition when they grow in soil that’s enriched with compost or other types of organic matter. In the article Grow Great-tasting Tomatoes (April/May 2005), we explained how hairy vetch can be used as a combination cover crop and mulch for happy, healthy tomatoes. Unless you planted some vetch in early fall, simply mix about two gallons of compost into each planting hole. In a tomato trial at Iowa State University, compost increased overall yields by 40 percent, while early yields shot up by more than 200 percent.
If you don’t have enough compost on hand, mix about a half-inch layer of fresh green grass clippings along with your compost. Grass clippings contain abundant nutrients, and research from University of California at Riverside suggests that grass clippings release their nitrogen into the soil much faster than compost.
- Start your seeds. Don’t be in too big of a hurry, because your plants will grow better if you set them out after the soil has warmed. You can set out a few varieties early as long as you protect them from cold and wind with cloches, tunnels or cages wrapped with plastic or a double thickness of row cover. (See Enjoy Fresh Tomatoes All Year, February/March 2007, for proven season-stretching techniques. Seed-starting Basics, December/January 2006, covers growing tomatoes from seed.)
In Zones 6 to 9, be ready to start another round of seeds in midsummer, because many spring plants exhaust themselves by producing their main crop. This is a great time to direct-seed tomatoes — no need to bother with transplanting. In warm moist soil, tomato seeds often germinate in three days. Or, root 6-inch-long stem cuttings, taken from your favorite plants before they show signs of disease, in 4-inch pots of moist potting soil. They will be ready to plant in two to three weeks.
- Be supportive. Your tomatoes will produce more fruits if you tie them to a sturdy trellis or stakes, or enclose them in wire cages — plus they’ll be less susceptible to insects or mold. As soon as you have some type of support in place, pile on the mulch to suppress weeds, maintain soil moisture and support the plants’ roots — you can use grass clippings, straw or chopped leaves. In a Hungarian study, grass clippings were as effective as black plastic in enhancing tomato yields, and at North Dakota State University, tomatoes mulched with grass clippings produced about 30 percent more fruits than those grown using plastic mulch.
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