TOMATO CARE EGG SHELL PUREE NPK-CA PEST CONTROL IV ORGANIC PLANT GUARD

Hi, my name is Charles Malki, biologist and plant expert with Ivory Organics where we grow cool plants and today we're going to be talking all about tomatoes and making this growing season your best tomato growing season ever. So here we are on this Tuesday, March 14th and the weather this last week and the week going up ahead has been one of our warmest that we've had this entire year and this last winter has been one of the rainiest 10-year record rains here in Los Angeles, California and I just want to share with you what's going on with the temperature if you come and zoom in a little closer. So right now it's 81 degrees and it's just after 12 o'clock. It's 1220 and you can see that our weekly forecast Wednesday 83, 81, 86, 88, 77, 69. So it looks like there's a cooling trend coming back but our nighttime lows are still quite warm. We're dealing with you know 56, 59, 55 and even 49 is still relatively warm at night. It's those nighttime low temperatures that are warm that are ideal for getting your tomatoes in the ground now. So let's get started. So I'm going to share with you also my cheat sheet. I broke down a lot of topics as this is a really really important time to do things right so that you can maximize on yield, production, quality, disease resistance, pest resistance, so on and so forth. So these are the things that we're going to talk about. The first one is cost. Two, we're going to talk about determinant versus indeterminate. Three, heirloom tomatoes cages versus doing single double and triple stem roses for a vertical garden. We're going to talk about NPK and CA. We're going to talk about eggshell puree and blossom end rot. We're going to talk about planting them deep when it comes to your tomatoes whereas your pepper, squash and basil you do not. We're going to talk about snail baits. We're going to talk about ivory organic 3-in-1 plant guard as the spray and obviously as always like, subscribe and share these videos with your friends and family. And I'm going to put the links down below for more tomato videos. So let's get started. First thing, cost. Behind me what I have over here, what I have over here are a variety of plants and if you come in a little closer these are some plants that I picked up. One being basil I got peppers, I got marigolds, I've got some onions. I've also got all of these tomato plants and if you take a look I've got these tomato plants which come as a six pack. As you can see they're rows of two, four, six. There's six in this pack. There's this individual one which is about a pint size tomato and then I've also got this one which is in a gallon size container. The cost on these are about between three and four dollars for a six pack. The cost for this pint, the same thing, three to four dollars and as you can see height wise they're about the same. This gallon container on the other hand costs about between six and seven dollars, so quite costly. And the last thing I want to share with you is you can always start off with seeds. If you start off with seeds you can get from this to this in typically about 30 to 60 days and this would be your cheapest way to go. My recommended best way to be growing your tomatoes, start off with a six pack. You get six plants and this area which I've always grown my vertical tomatoes would typically support about eight plants. So the fact that I've got six for three dollars is a great deal and a great way to get started. Let's talk about determinate versus indeterminate tomato varieties. It's coming a little closer. You'll take a look here. This is one of my favorite of the cherry varieties. This is called the Sweet 100 Tomatoes and let's see if it says anything on the back here about determinate or indeterminate and come in. So you can see over here it says indeterminate. So now we know that this here is an indeterminate variety. This one over here is the San Marzano and this one also says indeterminate. Hopefully you can see that fine print right in there. It says indeterminate and this is also an heirloom variety. I don't know if you caught that as well. If you come in a little closer right underneath San Marzano it says heirloom tomato. We're going to talk about that in just a second and then the next one I've got over here is one of my favorite for a medium-sized tomato. This is called the Early Girl and it says 50 days and that's where the word early comes from is that it ripens about 10 to 15 days sooner than the other tomato varieties and hence the name Early Girl. There's one other one I want to share with you so hang tight let me pick that up. So here's the other variety I want to share with you. Everybody knows this. It's one of the most popular store varieties is the Roma tomato and hopefully the back of it is going to be labeled and there it is. If you take a look right where So here we have a determinate variety. So now what's the difference between indeterminate and determinate varieties? It's quite simple. It simply means that the determinate tomato is going to grow to a determinate height. It's sometimes also called a bush variety because it will grow to a certain height and then stop and secondly the determinate varieties of tomatoes will typically produce all of their fruit within a one to two week window of time so it quickly puts out its fruit and you're going to harvest all this fruit and the plant is typically recycled you know as in your compost bin or whatever else but you're done with your season typically if you start in spring by mid to late summer you're done. In comparison the indeterminate varieties of tomatoes will continue to grow, will continue to flower, will continue to fruit all the way until they're damaged by your first frost. So the indeterminate varieties as you can see have created this vertical garden supported by these green metal stakes and these bamboo that run horizontally to support these plants to grow vertically as what I like to call a single double or triple stem tomato plant and that's what we're going to do with the indeterminate varieties and we're going to try to find a home even your bush type varieties you can also grow vertically like so. Your determinate varieties are also the best ones to be planted in a tomato cage. If you're consider putting only determinate varieties as your indeterminate varieties are going to continue to outgrow the space of a tomato cage almost no matter how big they are. Your indeterminate varieties of tomatoes typically grow about six to eight feet but I've successfully grown these tomatoes in excess of 12 to 15 feet and especially by starting them early you're going to continue to harvest your fruits, your tomatoes off of these plants for the longest period of time. So now we just talked about indeterminate versus determinate. The other thing I want to talk about is heirloom as we saw with the San Marzano tomatoes. The heirloom simply means that this variety of tomato has been propagated by seed for the last 50 years as a minimum. So heirloom typically means that those tomato varieties have been grown for at least 50 years and have been propagated by seed generation after generation and now brought into your garden. So when it comes to planting your tomatoes you're going to want to look for a fertilizer typically and we many of you have heard of the words NPK and in the subject line to this video I'm going to be using the words NPKCA for calcium. The goal is when planting your tomatoes is you're going to want to make sure that there is sufficient calcium in the soil to support the fruit and if there isn't tomatoes will risk a phenomenon known as end blossom rot and make sure that this does not repeat itself as I had to deal with the issue of end blossom rot which is again typically caused by a calcium deficiency in the soil and we're going to try to correct that today but first check out this video. Here are my Roma tomatoes and you can see as they're you know shaped that typical oval shaped Roma tomato but take a look at the bottom of this one and it's the first time it's ever happened in my garden. If you take a look again at the video links that we've done earlier before we were very cautious and making sure that we added a lot of calcium to the preparation of this garden and we've been adding a lot of organic materials that also include calcium yet end blossom rot which is a calcium deficiency still happened at least for this one tomato plant. So what we're going to do here is is we're going to remove that one fruit and here it is again and again it's characterized by this rotting happening at the base of the tomato. This here was the original flower so the blossom and it's called end blossom rot and again that's indicated by a calcium deficiency and the way we're going to correct it is I've got a product here made by Kellogg. It says organic plus tomato vegetable and herb fertilizer. This is not the only product to be looking for. This was one of several that I saw but the reason I picked it was it said calcium and then the percentage of it was 10%. There's other products that I saw that had as little as five percent or seven percent which could work but this one here had the most. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to come near my plants and I'm going to give each one of these plants a handful on each side of its roots. So here's the base of the plant right there. I'm going to put one scoop there and one scoop over there and I'll just take my little hand shovel over here and I'll just carefully rake it to get it underneath the wood chips and the goal is you want to get the soil microbes, the nematodes, the earthworms, all the biology that's happening in the soil to actually come in contact with that fertilizer and once we water it we've activated the soil and the process will begin and those nutrients will be within that plant within the next day or two. When you're visiting your garden center and you're looking for a fertilizer to use around your fruits and vegetables when it comes specifically to your tomatoes and this is just one product it's not the only one but I happen to have this in the garage it's made by Espoma. If you want to come in a little closer I'm hoping you can see this. Made by Espoma it's an organic product and the way we know it's organic if you ever question it is simply look at the ingredients and you're going to see that it comes from organic sources such as feathers it says hydrolyzed feather meal, pasteurized poultry manure which is probably chicken manure, bone meal, alfalfa meal, green sand, humate, sulfate of potash, sulfate of potash, magnesia but what I'm looking for on these ingredients is calcium and you can see where it says CA I've got five percent calcium in here and that's the value for your tomato plants. Now when taking a look at other products for your plants you might come across this common label Miracle-Gro and Miracle-Gro does have an organic and a chemical line this here is the chemical line if we open it here I still got a cup in here I can show you what this looks like you should be able to tell that this is not derived by bone meal manure or anything else this is a chemical product it's glowing blue if you take a look at the side of the label actually let's start at the front so all-purpose plant food grows bigger and more bountiful plants and if you look on the side it says for all your vegetables and right there is a picture of your tomato but the ingredients if you take a look at it it says derived from ammonium sulfate and potassium sulfate and chloride and all of these chemical ingredients there's no bones no feathers no blood no anything else and then also when it comes to calcium take a look there's no calcium in here as well there's boron and copper and iron and manganese on this side molybdenum and zinc but again no calcium and for the sake of end blossom rot which is a common phenomenon among tomatoes when there isn't sufficient calcium this chemical source will not do it another important reason for not using chemicals in your garden aside from just the desire of having healthier fruits and vegetables by growing organic is that your chemical fertilizer will not be feeding your soil biology we're talking about the earthworms the nematodes the beneficial fungi the beneficial bacteria and the list just continues on and on this here will provide elements to the soil but this will provide the elements to the soil in addition to improving and conditioning the soil and improving the microbial life within it to give your plants a much stabler healthier and longer and more natural environment and life and it'll also lead to less disease and less pest issues in your garden by also doing things organically so please try to avoid chemicals in your garden so we just talked about n p k and then c a n being and let's take a look at this label one more time so the first number three is three percent nitrogen four percent phosphorus and four percent potassium those are your n p k n for nitrogen is typically going towards growth greening and in height your your next number your second number the phosphorus is there for flowers and blooms and fruit control and then the last one potassium is for disease resistance and root strength so those are your n p k again there's more to the product using organically as you're getting you know all of these sources of blood and feathers and bone meal which are breaking down into their elements as well and providing those elements to your plants so it's more than just npk we saw that it also has calcium but what i want to share with you now is how you can add more calcium to your tomatoes and it's a good time to do it before you plant it and we're going to do it a second and last time in the middle of the season being in the summer and providing the additional calcium to support all of the fruits and bring us to conclusion for the season and let's get started over here so over here i've got my eggshells from this morning's breakfast my wife and i had eggs so two eggs each and we saved the eggshells to basically demonstrate this purpose and what most people will do is take their eggshells they'll throw them in their compost or you know maybe put it in their garden like so possibly they'll go with the spoon and and crack it down and break it down but if we just leave your eggshell like this throughout the entire year it's going to look the same now as it will at the end of this year so what some other gardeners will do is they'll take their eggshells and there'll be people that will put them in a plastic bag like so and simply crush it like this and now if you put it back in the napkin you can see what we've and now by having all of these pieces of eggshell let me get out of the sun you can see that we've got now more surface area for these eggshells to break down and have ready available calcium to the plants but in fact these pieces are still too big how do we bring it down even further what i've seen other people do is they'll take their hammer and they'll now start i'll even put it back in the bag and they'll start crushing the eggshells to get it even finer and sure this method works but it's too time consuming you can see now i've got some really fine pieces in there let's even get the shade out of the way but you can see it's getting smaller but a faster and easier way and we're calling this the calcium puree for tomatoes is we're going to take our blender here and add water and you can see it's just a pitcher of water and we're just going to take our eggshells now and dump those in like so hopefully you're capturing all this and we're now going to close it and blend it and there we go and now we've got eggshell puree we've basically disintegrated those eggshells into dust and we'll be basically using this solution i'll be sure to mix it and i'm going to add a little bit to the base of the hole i'm going to add a little bit more to the top of the hole and i've increased now that five percent that's in my organic fertilizer to probably somewhere closer to 10 if not 20 calcium and that'll get me all the way through summer and then we'll repeat this one more time with probably a blend of one to two eggshells per plant throughout the entire garden so i'll then be dividing this solution among four plants and that'll come down to one eggshell per plant throughout the entire garden now at the beginning of the growing season and then we'll repeat that one more time in the summer let's get started now now before we get started let me give you a tour of what's going on in this bed where i've been growing my tomatoes for the last few years and many of you that are watching this and that have experience in growing you understand the importance of doing crop rotation and i've been doing that throughout the year in this location but it's a good idea that if you've been growing your tomatoes in the same place to consider moving them to other parts of your garden so that so that if there's any disease in that particular area that i've accumulated from year after year that it's allowed to dissipate and work its way out of your garden by simply moving your tomatoes to other parts of your garden and then just bringing it back by the second or even third year to make sure that the soil is free of any diseases that might immediately get picked up into your new plantings however i've got limited garden space this is my sunniest strip of land that i have here in the garden which is ideal for my tomatoes and it's evolving now to take shape of more fruit trees as you see behind me we just saw the oro blanco tree to my left i've got my bear's lime just a little bit behind me and then two avocado trees and i have a feeling that between this year and next year i'm going to have so much shape i'm not going to be able to successfully grow my tomatoes here anymore so we're going to have to come up with other ideas in the meantime what i've done is i've installed this which is one of my passion fruit vines and this here will be growing and eventually creating a shade overhead as well so this will be taking the place of a lot of area of what would once be my tomatoes that would be growing in this zone so we've got passion fruit i've got over here as well a couple of california native plants this here is my fairy duster over here and this here attracts a lot of native insects the bees the butterflies and so much more i've got over here my rose rock flower and this here's another california native plant and let me just give you the tour of what else i've got in here so you may notice as we come through there's some wood chips that i've got stacked up on top which i'm going to be getting out of the way as i prepare the soil so we've also got some onions that have continued to exist from last year and you can see over here that we've even got some more onions that continued from last year and if we go a little further you'll notice up on this end i've got a couple of strawberry plants and another one of my passion fruit vines over here and this will again continue to grow up the vine and eventually create a cave or a canopy overhead as you can see back i'm going to get back in this zone but originally this would be my tomato cave area and this will all be eventually my passion fruit vines which will be supported by these bamboo stakes that will go up in place like so and i'll attach them like so overhead and my passion fruit vines will eventually grow overhead and we'll be able to harvest the fruits from up above let's get started follow me thing we can do is we gotta dig a hole um over here is actually one of my metal stakes wrapped in a green vinyl plastic um and that's to help keep the metal cool so it doesn't burn the plant um so metal stake these are some bamboo stakes that have existed from years past and if you take a look on some of these stakes you can see that they've cracked from the weight of the tomatoes last year so some of these need to be replaced i'm hoping you can capture these bends in the bamboo stakes so these will be replaced um later on today but just to get started first thing we're going to do is dig a hole one of the mistakes i see a lot of gardeners do is they condition the entire soil or they'll even remove the soil and then just buy new soil and replace it it's important to keep your existing native soil and all of the life that's within it i'm hoping that we run into you know some earthworms or some other insects in here which i'm sure we will we can take a look over here if you take a look here in the soil you can see here's just one earthworm that we've come across so far and and now we've got a large hole and you can see what we're going to put in here is this going to be one of these six pack tomatoes i'm going to start off with my super sweet 100 and the reason i'm starting off with the super sweet 100 tomato is because this here is going to be the entryway into my tomato vertical garden these sweet 100s show off so many tomatoes and it's just such a beautiful showpiece um tomato variety um that i'm putting this on my edge and then i'll bury the other varieties behind me um you'll see what i'm talking about in just a moment um so what we're going to do here is i've got the hole you can see that it's much larger than needs be and what we're going to do first is we're going to add some compost to the soil you can use a product such as this which is made by kellogg's says grow mulch um organic plus and we can and if you take a look over here we can see what the contents look like and you can see that it's got some wood chips in there and some bark um and it's and it's pretty well composted so we can use this or i'm going to be using my homemade compost check this out follow me so here we are in the corner of the property furthest away from everything that we've got going on in the garden i've got this um trash bin which i've um put hundreds of holes all the way around the sides all on the bottom as well and we fill this up and i'll put the video link down below where we made our own homemade compost using ingredients such as starbucks coffee grounds to spent coffee grounds as well as a lot of our kitchen scraps um grass clippings a lot of the garden waste around the property all of that's gone in here and if we take a look let's see um if you cut into it hopefully you can see how rich this has become and take a look at that it looks just as good as the store-bought stuff so we're going to use our own homemade compost for our plants and take a look at this this is the most important part take a look at the life that's in here look at the worms they're just eating all of those scraps and bringing and breaking it down we're talking about not just the worms but again there's going to be nematodes in here there's going to be beneficial fungi in there beneficial bacteria here's another worm so you can see there's a lot of life in here when you're doing things right so we're going to take all of this and we're going to use that for starting off our tomato plants let's go check out all of this life in here and it's not just what you see it's mostly what you don't see that's going on in here what we're going to do is just take a couple of handfuls of this put that at the bottom of the hole one and two and when it comes to compost you can't overdo it unlike a fertilizer that may possibly burn your plant this will not so we'll mix that in with a little bit of the native soil and now we're just going to look what i found over here so i found this that hasn't quite decomposed down yet this here is the stem off of our tomato not our tomato but off of our banana plant so you can see all of these stems off the bananas that hadn't quite broken down i can either leave this as a dressing on the top of the soil to allow it to break down but if you put it in the soil it'll actually rob the soil of nitrogen as well as other nutrients as it continues to break down and it may also contribute to rotting and root rot to the plant so you don't want parts of your compost that haven't quite broken down to be down deep in the soil but if you leave it near the surface that'll be just fine so we'll leave that up here near the top and now we're just going to add a little bit of our organic fertilizer as well to enrich it with more nutrients as well as calcium and without even looking at the ingredients if it says to add a cup per plant or whatever volume i'm really only putting about a quarter of a cup or less check this out there's already a lot of good things in the soil so including calcium if you think about it all of the organic material your banana peels and all of the foods and everything you've been eating in your in your home all of those things that have entered your compost include calcium as well so we've enriched it with calcium that we know is in this product in addition to all the things that were in our kitchen scraps that are broken down are now part of this compost and now we're just going to mix that in thoroughly as well and the goal is to mix your native soil into your compost if it was pure compost that's not ideal if it's all store-bought materials that's not ideal either the goal is to have a blend of your native soil which has your native biology and microorganisms in it working with the compost that's there as well and now let's get started with our plant oh most importantly we've got our calcium puree that we're going to use as well we want to get that at the bottom of the hole as well as on the top we want to make sure it's all around the plant so let's get started with that so here we are with our calcium period i'm just going to mix that up and we're just going to put some of that near the bottom and then we'll continue with the planting so now we're just going to select one of our sweet 100 tomatoes and i'm looking for one of the healthiest ones because i i'm not going to plant all of these most of these will be given away again to other friends and family and so here's the plant take a look over here if you come in a little closer you can see it's got a very well developed root system and it hasn't quite coiled near the bottom but just in case i'm just going to pull these apart and make sure that they're not kinked the next step i'm going to do is i'm going to remove the bottom one half of the leaves that are on the plant and the reason is i'm going to plant this as deep as i can i'm going to keep the top couple of inches but everything else is going to go under the ground and the reason is these entire stem is also going to root it's going to create a much stable much healthier and stronger living tomato plant than if we just plant it at the ground level all of your other vegetables such as your peppers and your basil and your flowers and all of these things take a look over here just as examples your marigolds your bell your bell pepper your basil your onions everything else are going to want to be planted at ground level so if it came out of the container at this level you're going to want to put it in the ground at the same level but when it comes to your tomatoes it's very important that you plant them as deep as possible and the reason for removing the leaves is you don't want those to rot under the ground so again we'll use the leaves as compost near the top of the surface but we're not going to put these raw leaves that haven't quite composted at the base of the hole so we're going to put these um to use as a top dressing at the end so we'll save all those on the side and now here we go we're going to put your tomato on the ground you can either plant it straight in the ground like so that'll be about an inch or two below the ground or you can even tip it like so and tilt the plant over like so and unfortunately my soil is still pretty muddy from all the rains that we had last week but again i didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to get my tomatoes started at the beginning of the growing season so here we are just making it work and now i'm just going to take a couple more handfuls of my homemade compost put a little bit more near the top like so look at those worms we're and and now we can add a little bit more organic fertilizer near the surface just sprinkle a little bit here and a little there all around it work that in so it's in contact with all of those microbes and the last step we're going to do here is water with some more of the calcium puree again and mix it and water aside from my sweet 100 tomato the other one of my favorites as i mentioned earlier is called the early girl variety of tomatoes and the reason for that is it produces such a huge volume heavy yield of medium-sized fruits and it's not just the fact that it's early it just is just so bountiful disease resistance and just such a successful tomato that i've grown here compared to dozens of other varieties and the early girl is quite easy to find at your local garden center so hopefully you won't have problems finding that i would just want to share with you the result of what this plant will look like not the sweet 100 but what an early girl which is this variety um will look like in about the next 60 to 90 days check this video out here this is actually my tomato i wanted to show off in this video so here we are this one um is the early girl variety i've actually harvested the first group of tomatoes down here these will be coming off today let me actually get my pruners so you can see how it's grown all the way up and what's going to ultimately happen is we're going to add a couple more bamboo supports to each of the two supporting poles and then we're going to grow the roof of what we call our tomato cave so ultimately we'll be picking tomatoes off the ceiling of this plant so here today we're actually harvesting the last two remaining um early girls on this particular stem you can see we already picked one here one here one there one there these are the last two now we're going to remove the entire stem all the way to the trunk of the tree so that you don't have all of this dead plant hanging off on the plant which would be an entryway for more disease and insects to get into the plant so we're going to take this into the home and enjoy either fresh bruschetta fresh salads fresh sauces so many good things and the best part about this all is we're growing these all organically we're putting a lot of nutrients and all of those great nutrients that are growing in the soil are now in our tomatoes so this is superior to anything you can pick up in the market even from a whole foods market homegrown tomatoes is the best thing for your body's health and what i also want to point out is take a look at the quantity of fruit that we've got out of here you can see that in just this area alone we've got one two three four five six seven eight nine so we got nine here in this cluster got another one two three four five six seven i counted earlier today that we've got about 45 tomatoes that we're expecting so far on the stem and it's not even done we're still in the month of june and we've got many more months of fruitful production to get just off of this stem and this early grow variety i've actually grown as a two stem you can see there's one stem that's going up which is leading to these tomatoes and then the second stem which is coming out of the soil over here second stem comes up and you can see the tomatoes that are back here and here's like another group of at least 10 more tomatoes so i mentioned earlier that i've got a couple of native plants over here again the fairy duster and this one over here the rock rose the reason i planted these is i planted things that are specific to my area here in southern california that are native plants that will attract the native wildlife and we're not talking about just monarch butterflies or or hummingbirds or or bees we're talking about all of the pollinators that exist here in los angeles county that are going to smell these plants since they evolved with these plants over 200 million years ago and and are searching for these plants and when they come and they find them they're going to be in my garden and then pollinating my tomatoes and my fruit trees and all my other vegetables that i've got here in the garden let me share with you even though this is not the best example because they're not quite colorful yet but they will be in time with the rest of my tomatoes but let me share with you other things that are colorful in my garden check these out follow me behind me are the bluebells in addition to about a dozen different colors but if the blues that you see are called the california bluebells check these out and within these plants i've also got buckwheat and sage california poppies and let me show you my california poppies that are in bloom too check these out look at the beautiful california poppies check out all of these california natives as well so i've got this camellia over here that's all wilted and dead i'm just going to throw this over here on my compost pile which you may have noticed that are spaced in between all of my fruit trees it's one of the ways that i help recycle a lot of the organic matter that's in my garden and you know instead of just fertilizing my plants and then throwing those plants all of those fertilizers and beneficial elements that have made it into the plant are going to stay here in my garden by simply recycling them back into piles such as this or you saw our trash bin as well that's containing all of that organic matter breaking down into usable compost as well let's go fill this up with a new camellia and then get started what a beautiful flower check this out so here's our new camellia flower that we just that we just pruned off the camellia plant this here's our wasted one that we've got to enjoy inside of a house for the last week and yesterday when i was in the garden i came across a little surprise i want to share with you see if i can find them in here there it is check this out take a look at that hopefully it comes out but this is one of the largest slugs i found here on my property and right now it's got its body all tightened up but it's like two to three times longer than that once it expands and hopefully it wakes up but while it does one of the questions many of you have are in regards to pest control and what do i do i'm planting my tomatoes i'm planting my peppers i'm planting my flowers and these bugs are just eating my plants and i need to you know i need to get them under control there's going to be a few solutions solutions when you get to your garden center and one of them is going to be something like this and this here says um if you're coming a little closer it says complete insect killer so it's going to kill surface insects in 24 hours and kill soil insects for up to three months so you spray this in your garden and what it's going to do is kill the entire soil biology both above and below the ground and just make everything dead and that is not ideal you saw how much time energy and effort we put into making our own compost getting those worms getting all of those microbes that are going to help break down the soil including these compost piles that we've got depend on these pests such as a slug and a snail and saw bugs and all these other insects are necessary to break these materials back and make them usable for plants to then benefit from so if you use a product such as this and you're going to kill all of the living things both above and below your soil then you have just killed the concept of organic gardening a better product would be something like these and i've got here three products and one of them is over here called sluggo plus and what this product does is it kills the slugs and it kills the saw bugs and it kills the caterpillars and it kills the earwigs and the active ingredient in this product if i can find it if you come in a little closer is iron phosphate and spinosad and what spinosad is a gardening bacteria that if anything consumes it it gives it a stomach ache and within one to three days it's dead so this is one product another one is this product also made by sluggo where it just has the iron phosphate and doesn't have the bacteria or the spinosad in it then this here is a product made by captain jacks which is the active ingredient is just spinosad so just bacteria the problems with these products is if i take this now and apply it now take a look at this slug and how huge it is take a look at that here's my index finger it's about as long as my index finger it's huge and we like them in our garden and the again the reason that we like them is because it's breaking down the organic matter and returning all of those elements back to the plant so that you can have a beautiful healthy and thriving organic garden um check it out again it's i think it's even longer right now but there it goes towards the shade but anyways if we add a product such as this which is sluggo plus and we're going to sprinkle it alongside around my tomato plant if you absolutely have to use a product such as that i would just apply it to guard your tomato plant and then that would be it but keep in mind that once that mother slug comes over the tomato plant and this it's going to be attracted by this product because it looks like food even though it's got bacteria in there that will eventually give it a stomach ache and kill it um you're gonna have to you know make a conscious decision on whether or not you need a product like that surrounding your plants and and possibly killing all of these living organisms so think twice before applying a product such as this but if you do don't apply it all over your garden don't kill all of the living things in your garden apply it around the plant and hopefully within a couple of weeks your plant will be big enough and the bacteria and all of the active ingredients in there will wear off safely back into the soil and much safer than those chemical alternatives that kill all the living things um in your garden and also has a longer um life take a look at this again one more time so this product as well stays in your soil for up to it says over here three months so this is three months of protection compared to something like this captain jack's which needs to be on average applied every one to three weeks so um so keep that in mind um for our tomato plant we're going to do nothing again we have this compost pile and it's got saw bugs in there and it's got slugs and it's got all of these things in there um and we're not concerned about a little damage i've never lost a plant to slugs or any garden pests and especially not at this size and it's still small if it was a seedling i may need to guard the area um but for a plant this size i'm relatively safe the other thing i want to do what i am going to do for my tomato plant is i'm going to use the ivory organics and if you take a look um real close this is a ready to spray three-in-one plant guard for protection against your trunks branches and leaves protection against damaging sunburn and insects and rodents ideally for newly installed plants and trees and what i'm going to do is just shake the product like so and just spray it on the plant and you can see when i spray it on the plant i'm basically creating um an organic sunbloth to keep the plant cool during the day but also has these seven oils in here if you're coming a little closer you can see that it's got castor oil cinnamon oil clove oil cedarwood oil garlic oil peppermint oil and rosemary oil all of these oils that naturally repel insects off the plants so it tells the insects to leave me alone as they get established um and it'll get these plants off to a great start let's continue on so i've been here for about 10 or 15 minutes now i got a few things installed i'm now gently covering um a bed of radishes my radishes will be ready for maturity not just for the radishes but also the leaves will be used to make salads within the next 30 to 60 days so as these tomatoes work themselves up to like the first level um this first bamboo stake most of these will already be harvested and out of the way let me share with you what else i did you can see over here um the tomato that we sprayed with the ivory organics the sunblock has now dried you can see the white film that's been created on the leaves to help keep it cool um and less sun stress which is one of the issues that causes a delay in growing um i've also sprayed the marigold with the um ivory organic sunblock as well and what the marigolds are here to do as well as these onions that are just to my right they're all here to offer defense when the insects are flying around through the garden they're going to come across these marigolds and onions and they're naturally going to be repelled by the scent and leave my tomato plants alone at least that's the goal and that's the theory behind putting these what's known as companion plants within your garden then i've got again this bed of radishes that we put over here and then we've got our early grow um tomato and what i'm going to do is just put a couple more onion plants over here and you can see that i've got these little starters they come in these bunches like so i'm just going to pull out one or two of them from this bunch and just install it like so and you can see i'm just covering up the roots plus probably about a half an inch and that'll be it and now we'll just water it the other thing i want to point out to you are these bamboo stakes you can see that it's quite easy to create these levels to create a vertical garden within your garden all i'm going to do is take my bamboo stakes and i've got these zip ties they come in packages like this it's only a few dollars for about 50 to 100 of these and we'll just go with my zip tie like so i'm gonna just wrap the stake and pull it and now we've got a level to tie up this tomato plant once it gets to the to this lower level and we'll do the same with this zip tie as well and within about a week or two i'll be ready to stake this up to this level the next level the next level and work its way up to by the end of this growing season they'll be about eight to ten feet tall so here we are at the conclusion this is what it looks like and now let's zoom in and take a look so over here we've got some marigolds and some onions and our first of the tomato plants the sweet 100 tomato and you can see again um the ivory organics protection on there with that white sunblock and it's also got those seven oils that are in there and then this area over here is going to be our radish patch which we're going to harvest within the next 30 to 60 days and then we've got our early grow hybrid tomato and some more onions and then our san marzano heirloom tomato and this onion that we kept from last year we've got a few more marigolds and a few more onions scattered in between and again those are all my companion plants there to help naturally keep this garden pest free then we've got over here our better boy tomato and that one was just recently sprayed you can still see this ivory organics dripping off the leaves and then we've got another patch of onions the surplus of onions in this garden so far and our last one over here which is our roma tomato and this is going to be our only determinant variety of tomatoes here in what's going to become our vertical tomato garden in this garden we also have some sweet basil we added this today as well and we've coated the leaves with the three-in-one plant guard to protect it from sun stress as well as to make sure those insects don't get to those initial leaves and in the upcoming weeks we should have a few more inches of new growth and we can start enjoying basil in as early as the next few weeks let's go on to the next spot so in this planting bed we have a variety of plants this here is some sage which was planted last year it's black sage and this is here as a california native to attract the los angeles california native insects and pollinators and this here is some sweet bell pepper and if you take a look at the leaves here you can see that it too is covered with the ivory organics three-in-one plant guard and then we've got some onions which were planted in the fall and these are getting mature and then in the center here is some swiss chard and this one here self-seeded itself from this swiss chard that we had growing in around the same place last year and some more onions and we're just going to continue forward with the planting bed if you've enjoyed this educational tomato crammed lesson by ivory organics be sure to like it and also share it with your friends and family as well i never say that but do be sure to share it with those people that you think would benefit from these lessons that were discussed today most importantly subscribe down below because i will be doing a revisit to this garden within the next 30 to 60 days so you can see how beautiful this garden is coming together thanks again for watching happy gardening