5 Mistakes That Will DesttroyYour Tomatoes…

Diseased leaves, blossom end rot, weak plants, tomatoes splitting, soil borne diseases. Tomatoes can give you a lot of problems if you do a few things wrong. But do things right and you will be harvesting the most beautiful and delicious fruit you can ever imagine. Today I'm going to share with you five mistakes you cannot afford to make when growing tomatoes. Let's go! One of the most impactful mistakes I see gardeners make has to do with pruning and staking their tomatoes. You got to get both right to get the full benefit. First off, for the highest level of production you want to grow indeterminate tomatoes vertically, either up a stake or a string. These tomatoes will continue producing fruit up until a frost or disease kills them. They just keep flowering and keep fruiting. On the other hand, determinate tomatoes grow best in a cage. They will put out a few big fruit sets and then stop producing. For indeterminate varieties, I suggest you prune them to grow up one stem by removing the suckers, which is the growth that forms in the crotch of the sunleaf and the stem. You want to remove them when they are young, ideally when you can just pluck them off with As the plant grows, continue to remove the suckers and tie the tomato to a stake or string. Using tomato clips is the easiest and safest way in my opinion. By pruning to a single stem and growing vertically, you're allowing the plants to get way more airflow and way more light, which are the two major enemies to fungal diseases. So just by pruning you can significantly reduce blight problems. Here's a quick tip to avoid sun scald on your tomatoes. If you live in a hot area that gets a lot of sun, and you're growing especially beefsteak tomatoes, it's a good idea to leave a sucker around like right at the center of your plant. This way when the sun is beating down, your tomato can get a little bit of shade from that and that will prevent your tomato from getting sunburned, or as we call it when growing tomatoes, sun scald. What about determinate varieties though? Should you prune them? The answer is yes, but not the same way as you prune the indeterminate ones. For determinate varieties, we want to go out and remove leaves that are low and close to the ground to allow air to easily move up through the plant. But we don't want to remove the suckers, because our determinate varieties won't continue to produce all season long like our indeterminate ones will. To allow us to get the most fruit before the plant finishes, we want to leave the majority of the suckers on the plant to maximize the future harvest. An important note, whenever you see diseased leaves on any tomato plants, no matter what kind you're growing, make sure to remove them so disease doesn't spread. By staying on top of pruning, we can prevent disease or at least slow it down and reduce its impact if it does show up. When pruning, we want to keep things clean and sterile to make sure we aren't spreading disease from one plant to another. What I like to do when pruning tomatoes is use gloves if I'm pruning multiple plants, and I also make sure that I'm cleaning my pruner with isopropyl alcohol when I go from one plant to the next. This next mistake seems simple, but it could snowball into multiple issues that end up being hard to trace back to the root cause. Blossom and rot, such an annoying problem. You grow healthy tomato plants, they look great, the fruit is forming and looks okay, then flip it over and boom it's rotting from the bottom. All that work, that effort, it's frustrating. We find out, oh, it's a lack of calcium. We can add eggshells or bone meal or tums, that will fix it. Well, those things will definitely add calcium, but they probably won't fix the root of the problem, which is improper watering. Yes, blossom and rot is due to a lack of calcium, but even if your soil has an adequate level of calcium in it, if you're not watering consistently, then your fruit won't be able to get the calcium because calcium is what's known as an immobile nutrient. It needs water to move it through the plant. So if the fruit is trying to form on that plant and you're not staying on top of watering, then there's no way for that calcium to be moved up to the fruit. Here is where mulch plays an important role. A good mulch will keep the soil from drying out too fast and will keep it moist to allow the calcium to be moved to your fruit so it forms beautiful looking tomatoes. Something as simple as improper watering surely can't be the cause of more issues with your tomatoes, right? Well, it definitely is. Having tomatoes that split or crack, yep, another watering issue. And yet a simple mulch will help with this as well. Tomatoes split when the soil is overly dry, then you come by and give them a heavy watering or a big rainstorm comes and they drink up a lot of water at once. When this happens, that causes the fruit to expand quicker than the skin can keep up with. This makes the tomato split. It won't ruin your fruit, you can still eat it, but it will definitely ruin its shelf life. To prevent this, use a thick organic mulch like wood chips. Also grow varieties that are crack resistant ones. One of my all-time favorites is the Mountain Magic tomato, super productive and split resistant. And you can harvest fruit early and let them ripen inside to avoid splitting. Using an apple will help them ripen even quicker. Let's look at one more big issue caused by improper watering, fungal diseases. Tomatoes will develop fungal issues when their leaves remain wet for too long a period of time. Airflow and light are the enemy of disease. Wet leaves and stagnant air are the breeding ground. If you water your plants from the base, you will keep the leaves dry and avoid a lot of future headaches. You're probably thinking, yeah, well, the leaves are going to get wet when it rains. That is true, but there's a reason that large-scale growers use high tunnels. Dry leaves mean less disease and more fruit. Just by getting watering right, you'll avoid blossom end rot, blight issues, and your tomatoes splitting and cracking. One simple fix for such a massive payoff. Unfortunately, you could avoid the two previous mistakes and still not get the harvest you were hoping for. Plants might start strong, but then slow down, or grow a whole lot of leaves, look super green, but then not much fruit if you don't get fertilizing right. Before planting your tomatoes, I suggest you mix into your soil a good, organic, all-purpose fertilizer. This way, they can explode into growth once they hit the soil. Make sure you don't use a fertilizer that is super high in nitrogen or your plant will focus on leaf growth instead of on fruit production. Your plants will grow fast and look beautiful if you feed them right. Fertilizing once though, won't be enough. When your plants start flowering and heading into production, you want to go out and give them a top dressing of fertilizer. Mix it into the top few inches of the soil, water it in, then add your mulch. This will make sure your plants have enough food to keep you fed with tomatoes. Later in the season, it's good to go out again and feed your plants, especially for indeterminate varieties that never stop producing. I have had some tomatoes grow way past 10 feet tall that continued to produce fruit for me until mid-October because I kept them pruned and stayed on top of fertilizing. The earlier the better, right? Get your plants in as early as possible, this way they have the most amount of time and you'll get the biggest harvest. Well, that's not always the case. Transplanting out too early is one of the most common and demoralizing mistakes I see new gardeners make. Transplanting tomatoes into the garden is such an exciting time, especially if you started your plants from seed and have nurtured them to this point. But, if you plant out too early, then a late frost comes, you'll find yourself scrambling around to try to cover them so they don't die. Here is where a simple cover, like a cut one gallon jug, will be helpful. The easiest thing to do to avoid this is wait for the ground to heat up and the frost to be far past. Tomatoes are warm season crops, they crave and they thrive in that warm weather. Don't try to fight nature, it rarely ever works out. Also, before actually transplanting into the garden, you must harden your plants off. They can go from living inside in a controlled environment, in a pot, to then living outside in the ground without some kind of transition period. What you want to do is have this transition period be over like a, say, five or seven day window. You can bring them outside the first day when it's not too windy, put them in like a shady location for an hour or two, then bring them inside. As the days go on, bring them to areas where it's a little less shady and give them a little more time outside until they get to the point where they can spend 24 hours outside on their own and show no stress. At this point, they're fully adjusted and you can transplant them into the garden. Let's shift to the next mistake, fighting a losing battle against soil-borne diseases. Have you ever grown a tomato plant? You do everything right, and yet still it gets a disease? It can be super frustrating. Believe me, I've been there. The unfortunate reality is the problem might be your soil, harboring diseases like fusarium wilt and verticillium wilt. Using sprays for these, in my opinion, is basically pointless because we don't want to be poisoning our food. Instead, you can grow in containers and use bagged soil or make your own soil and grow in raised beds and avoid the diseased soil. Another great option is to just grow varieties that are resistant to the problems that you're dealing with. This goes for any issue with tomatoes, not just soil-borne diseases. There are so many different varieties out there and some of them are fantastic at being resistant to specific issues, so do a little homework, find out varieties that will, you know, be resistant to the problem, then you won't have to deal with it. You can grow a variety like the Super Sweet 100, which has strong disease resistance to fusarium wilt and verticillium wilt. So instead of fighting the problem and potentially poisoning your food, you could avoid the problem and use the natural characteristics of a variety to safeguard your plant from disease. I want to leave you with a bonus mistake you cannot afford to make and that's allowing the tomato hornworm to decimate your plants. They can do a lot of damage fast. When your fruit starts to form, you want to make sure that you're out there on the prowl checking to make sure that there's no damage from the tomato hornworm. The best way to find them is at night using a black light because they'll actually glow in the dark when you use that. At this point, you can either pick them off or you can use a spray like this one, BT. This is the one that I use. It's effective. It's organic and you can use it up to the day of harvest. It's the same one that I use for my brassicas. That's today's video growers. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. It's still early for me to have tomatoes in the ground here but the time to be thinking about these mistakes is now before they happen. It's always better to avoid a problem rather than having to manage it. When you have to manage so many problems all the time, it just gets to be a lot of work and a lot of headache. If you can just do a little prevention, it definitely goes a long way. Something as simple as mulch, like I mentioned in the video, will prevent so many problems and will make it so you're not all the time out there watering and it's just a simple thing that makes definitely a big difference. So get your mulch down, prevent a lot of these problems, don't water the leaves of your plants. It's just little things but they make big differences. It's like throwing in a pebble. That little ripple turns into a big wave. I had a blast out here. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. I want to send a thank you to one of our new channel members, Jessica Byers. Thanks for being a part of Team Grow. Thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here. I also want to mention that we've got some really great stuff over at the shop that you can pick up. There's all different kinds of seeds, great varieties. We've got some merch down there. We've also got our Team Grow plant armor which is that kaolin clay that you spray on the plants and it protects them from a host of different issues like some important ones. We're talking cucumber beetles and plum curculio if you live around here and you're trying to grow fruit. So it's a fantastic organic spray. It's just clay but it's super fine and it's very valuable in the garden. Again, I had a good video. It was fun to make this one and I can't go a video without showing the young king. I wish he was out here with me but he's not and he's not really featured in this video much because he wasn't really a fan of tomatoes. He liked a lot of the root crops like the carrots, the radishes, stuff like that and he also loved the asparagus which is just starting to pop up here. That's a sign that things are getting close but going back to a previous video one thing that tells me tells me when to plant is that idea of phenomenological timing. So when something happens in the garden like asparagus pops up that tells me that it's time for something else. We haven't yet gotten to the point where it's time for me to get the tomatoes in. I honestly still have probably like you know about six weeks over a month. Can't wait for it. Prepping for it and we've got a lot of tomatoes started and growing. So stick along for the continued videos and hit that subscribe button. Hit that like button. We'll catch you on another one real soon. We out.