3 Tomato Secrets Pros Don’t Tell Home Gardeners

If your tomato plants don't look like this, you're probably missing a few key things. These are three techniques that we use as commercial growers that most home gardeners were never taught, and they can completely change your plants. Welcome to Wishwell Farms. I'm Jason. Let's get started with the first tip. Removing three branches from the bottom of each plant each week. Your first thought might be that we just hurt that plant by removing so many leaves and branches from the plant. But what you need to understand about a tomato plant is that it goes through two different stages of growth during its life cycle. It starts out in vegetative growth or genitive growth, establishing strong roots, building a strong healthy stalk, and branches and leaves. And then it's going to transition into reproductive growth, where it's going to be focusing its energy on flower production, pollination, and fruit production, and ultimately maturing those fruit. For optimal plant health and to ensure that our tomato plant is going to consistently produce tomatoes throughout its lifespan, we want to keep the vegetative and reproductive growth in balance. We all want the healthiest tomato plants that we can have, right? And we also want to ensure that our tomato plant is going to produce fruit consistently throughout its lifespan. And one way that we can make sure that happens is to keep our plants balanced between vegetative and reproductive growth. And the reason this is important is because if the plant is always in its vegetative state of growth, you're not going to get any good fruit production. It's just going to keep producing a bunch of leaves and branches and stalks. And if it's always in a reproductive stage of growth, it's going to end up being a puny plant, and it's going to get loaded up with fruit and try to mature those fruit out, and then it's not going to produce any more fruit. So we want to keep that plant in balance. And one way to do that, there's several ways, but the first way we're going to talk about is removing three branches from the bottom of the plant. Now we don't want to just start removing three branches right away. There's a certain stage of growth that we want to wait for before we begin doing that. So this is our sample tomato plant that we're going to talk about. This is where I just removed three branches. And last week, I removed three branches prior to those. And the week before that, I removed the very first three branches at the bottom. So as of right now, we have three foot of stalk with no branches. And then there's our first cluster of fruit. Now if we look up at the top of the tomato plant, here is our uppermost flower cluster. We want to count our branches starting below that flower cluster. Those are going to be your uppermost mature branches. There are three up here, but these are considered immature branches. So we want to begin below that uppermost flower cluster and count how many branches we have. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. We currently have 13 branches on this tomato plant. And that should be the number you are shooting for, 12 to 13. Some growers will even take it as far as going down to 10. But on our farm, we shoot for having 12 branches. That is all that is required for this tomato plant to get the photosynthesis that it needs to feed that fruit, to feed the plant for optimal production. There are typically three branches between each cluster of fruit. So that means each cluster of fruit only needs three branches for optimal production. So each week, we are going to remove three branches from the bottom of every plant once that plant has 15 mature branches. Below the uppermost flower cluster. Now there are several other benefits to removing three branches from the bottom of your plants. It opens up this area down here where it's really congested, full of leaves to allow better air circulation and airflow to help prevent diseases. It also makes it easier to see the ripe tomatoes when they start turning red. Tip number two, removing some of the fruit. Now I know this one's going to be a little controversial, but hear me out. So you can see this cluster right here has four, five tomatoes and one flower. So soon to be six tomatoes. We want to prune that cluster down to only four. So I'm going to cut that end off. And it's often easier to just use a pair of scissors. This is how we want our clusters to look with only three or four tomatoes. Here's another example right here. This one has a little shoot growing off the end of it. We don't want that there either. So we want our four tomatoes. So we're going to cut this one off right there. Here's an example of one I'm going to trim down to three because of how far behind that one is. We want our three tomatoes on this cluster to all come on at the same time. So this one's going to get cut right there. We're going to cut this fifth one off right there. Here's another perfect example of one I'm going to trim down to three. I'm going to cut this little branch off first and I'm going to remove this fourth tomato. Now I know many of you are thinking to yourself, Jason, you're cutting off good viable fruit that is going to give us more tomatoes, right? Yes and no. If you have a very short growing season, you probably don't need to do much fruit pruning. But if you have a long growing season, especially like we do here in the greenhouses, we want to keep that plant in balance. If we leave all those tomatoes on those clusters, this plant is going to slowly switch over to all reproductive stage of growth to try to mature out all the tomatoes that it's carrying on the stalk. So by trimming some of those back, it helps force that plant back into vegetative stage of growth just a little bit. So it continues to grow strong, healthy roots, more leaves and branches, and ultimately start to set more fruit. If you've ever had tomato plants in your garden that were loaded full of tomatoes and you were really excited about getting one of the best crops you have ever seen, and then it just seems to shut down and stop producing more fruit, this will prevent that. By removing some of those fruit, it will keep that plant producing more fruit later on. And finally, tip number three that commercial growers use to grow strong, healthy, and productive tomato plants that most home gardeners don't know about, that is lowering the pH of your water that you are feeding your tomatoes. Now here in our greenhouses where we're growing hydroponically, it is very critical to have the correct pH in our feed solution for optimal growth of our tomato plants. Now in your garden growing in the soil, it's not quite so critical, but tomatoes prefer more acidic soil versus a basic soil. So if seven is neutral on the pH scale, tomatoes would prefer a 5.8 to 6.2. So we use acids to lower our source water coming out of our well, which comes out at 7.8, which is far too high of a pH for our tomatoes. And if we would feed that high pH to our tomatoes, there would be some nutrient lockout. The plants would not be able to take up some of the critical nutrients that we are feeding them. Now this is not as important when growing out in the field or in the soil or in your garden, but tomatoes do like things a little bit on the acidic side. So if you have basic soils like high sevens or even eights, like we do in our fields, it's going to benefit you and your tomato plants by feeding them a slightly acidified feed solution. There are several different ways that you can lower the pH of your nutrient feed solution. Let me show you how we do ours. So these are our fertilizer tanks that we feed our tomatoes with. This third tank is water with sulfuric acid. And here are the two containers of sulfuric acid that gets us through one season. Now, obviously home gardeners are not going to need large barrels of sulfuric acid, but you can pick up small containers. I think there's maybe a pint in the containers at your local auto parts stores, like O'Reilly's, AutoZone, or Advanced Auto. They all carry sulfuric acid for batteries and that is the cheapest, easiest way to bring down the pH of your feed solution for your tomatoes. You can also use citric acid or phosphoric acid. They're more expensive and not as easily attainable. I've even heard of some people using vinegar to lower the pH, but vinegar should not be a permanent solution to lowering your pH. I don't know about the safety using vinegar long-term on your tomato plants. Now, I know there are some of you thinking right now, why in the world would I want to waste my time and money lowering the pH of my feed solution for my tomatoes when I've gotten great production out of my tomatoes for many, many years doing it the way I've always done it? Well, I just want to show you the tomatoes in my greenhouse that would not look near as good or give me the yields that I'm getting if I didn't pH correct my feed solution. Many greenhouse tomato growers are getting yields upwards of 45 to 55 pounds of tomatoes per plant per season, and I guarantee you every one of them is pH correcting their feed solution for their tomato plants. Now, I realize not every home gardener wants to rush out and buy some form of acidifying agent and a pH meter to be able to test the feed solution before they feed their tomatoes so they don't burn up their plants, but if you're willing to put in just a little extra effort this season to give it a shot, I think you might be pleasantly surprised at the stronger, healthier, more productive plants you will have and better tasting tomatoes. If you can at least implement two of these three things, you will see a big difference in your tomato plants this season. I'll be making another video soon of some of the biggest tomato mistakes that I see. That one, you won't want to miss. Thanks so much for watching, everyone. I really appreciate it. If you found value in the content, please give it a thumbs up, and I'll see you all again next time down on the farm.