How To Plant Tomatoes in Florida Fall Heat

Hey friends, it is the big day. We are going to be transplanting our tomatoes and transplanting tomatoes here in Florida in fall can be a little bit challenging because it's still like super hot and the tomatoes will do fine with super hot but the transplant shock mixed with the super hot is not a great combination. So I'm going to share with you all the little tricks and the little tips that I have about how I transfer my tomatoes so that they have the best start possible. The first tip is always going to be based on when you should actually transplant. A lot of people will get out first thing in the morning and start transplanting their plants and that is like the worst time that you can do it. I know it looks pretty bright right here but you can tell from the shadow of my body that it's starting to get to sundown. So it's probably about 5 5 30 at this point. I also looked at the 10 day forecast and I saw that tomorrow it's going to be completely cloudy like almost 100% cloud cover lots of rain that kind of day you know really dreary. That's actually the perfect time so I'm going to put them out at night and then I'm going to make sure that whatever the the temperatures look like tomorrow is going to be cloudy rainy any of those things. This is kind of like my way of hardening them off and hardening them off is basically getting them used to where they've been and where they're going. So if they have been inside your house at this beautiful 70 degrees with like no direct light it's just like a grow light that's very gentle and then you know they barely have any wind maybe set up a little fan and then we go chuck them outside where it's like 95 degrees it's like huge wind blows and then you know that direct sun is hitting them for 12 hours a day they're just going to tap out. So we need to adjust them slowly. If you look at your temperatures outside and you look at you know the next day climate and it doesn't look like it's the most ideal you can do other things. So another thing that I like to do is if I look at my 10 day forecast I'm like there's just absolutely no day here that's going to work. Then what I do is I still transplant at night because that's the best time and I usually will do it at dusk instead of here. I'm waiting till it's basically like sun is going down. Then the next thing that I do is a couple days before this I'm going to take this whole tray of plants and I'm going to stick them in that spot. So you can inch them out there a little every day like put them out there for an hour and then bring them back to their spot put them out there for two hours bring them back to their spot that's a little more painful than trying to find a good you know spot in the forecast but that is another way that you can harden them off to their new environment until they're sitting out there by themselves and then you transplant at night. The other thing is when you transplant them. So right here I transplant at soil level but I know there is a ton of information out there about transplanting deep transplanting on their side and I think that in some instances that does make sense. If you have like a huge operation and one or two percent of yield is really going to impact your bottom line then that can make sense to me why you would do some of those extra steps. Another example would be if you're growing in ground and you don't have as much insulation or mulch planting them more deeply helps with water retention it also helps with keeping the root ball at a good temperature so that that way they don't overheat. I'm growing in a raised bed and my raised beds are so insulated I have so much mulch we'll talk about that in a minute you'll see all that that I just do it at ground level. I've done it deep and I've done it on its side and I've done it at ground level and I got to tell you I've never noticed a difference. The other thing you probably saw me do was add fertilizer. This is super important. I know that a lot of us want to do very organic very natural gardens and I do too. Compost is going to help with that. Something I failed to mention earlier was my husband helped me out because I had such a migraine. He came out and he dumped all of my compost into all of these beds so he put like three inches of compost into this bed that's why the the dirt is so dark on top. So I did that but I know that tomatoes are super heavy feeders and they tend to have problems with something called blossom end rot so if you don't get enough calcium magnesium into the soil and get an even watering schedule in you're going to have problems with the fruit ends up rotting off the bottom and so one way that you can avoid that is putting down a tomato or fruiting fertilizer. You're looking for the ones that say you know three to nine percent calcium on the bag along with a NPK or the it's the three numbers and it'll have one number which is the nitrogen the middle number is phosphorus and the last number is potassium. You're kind of aiming for a fertilizer that has those numbers even across so something like five four three or four four two or something like that as close to even as possible. You don't want something that has no nitrogen or no phosphorus or no potassium and it helps if you get something that is a fruiting fertilizer specifically for tomatoes because it is going to have extra stuff like the magnesium and the calcium which is absolutely beneficial for these guys. The other thing you have to think about when you're transplanting your tomatoes is where they are going to be trellised up. Growing them on the ground really isn't a good use of space or going to be good for your yield growing here in Florida. Some people can do it but we have so much moisture and so many pests that they're just going to tear up. So you do need some kind of trellising system. I've done them all. I really like the the movable tomato trellises. I call it the build a trellis. I'll put that down in the description but the other one that I really like is this one right here where I have this flat panel and it's a cattle panel and it's connected between two t-posts. I personally do not single stem my tomatoes so that's why this one is not my preferred because this one is better for like single or double stemming tomatoes with lots of pruning. I don't prune at all. I'm of the the belief that it's better to just let them get full and big and bushy. We have a long season here so I don't need tomatoes super fast. I'd rather have a lot more of them. So I use the the panel to hold it but eventually they're going to get so big and bushy that I'm going to have to use some sort of tie structure. I know that. Right now I'm using my taping tool. This should work when they're younger and as they get bigger I can keep using it but once they get to full-blown height I'm going to have to come up with something. So keep that in mind if you are going to prune versus if you're not going to prune and it also will dictate how far apart they need to be. You can see right here mine are like two feet apart. That's crazy if you're single stemming. Single stemming you could do 12 inches. You could maybe do less than 12 inches but since I know that these guys are going to get super bushy because these are a semi-determinant 10 fingers of napal paste tomato they're going to get huge and so I need to give them lots of space so that they have breathable air and then that way you know they don't get so many fungal and disease issues. Another way that you can decrease diseases is to put something underneath the tomatoes. This is a mulch and the mulch basically separates any disease that's in the soil from the top of the plants and I get what you're thinking. You're probably like but Petrina it touches the roots of the soil so how does how the roots touch the soil so how does that help? Well apparently the disease doesn't really contract through the roots. Not of all disease but like blight. It contracts with it or contacts with it when it splashes from the soil up to the top of the leaves. It's almost like a contact dermatitis I think of it when I think of skin issues. So you just don't want those fungal spores touching the leaves. It's okay if they touch the soil or the root ball. So what we do is we put something underneath it. I am so much into renewable mulches. I absolutely hate paying for mulch. I think it is just the most awful thing that we could do because there's just so many sources of mulch that you can use. Right here I'm using my lemongrass cuttings. So my lemongrass plants got really big. In fact I'm probably going to remove one or two this year or this winter because man they just grow way too fast. So I cut the tops off and I use it as mulch which just kills some people. They cannot stand that I use it as mulch instead of eating it all. And that is how we transplant our tomatoes giving them the best shot of giving us the highest yield this fall. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today. Happy gardening friend!