Secrets to Growing Fab Tomatoes

Thank You www.OrganicGardening.com. Love these simple tips for the best tomatoes ever!

1. Choose a bright, airy spot. Plant tomatoes where they will get at least 10 hours of light in summer. And leave room between plants for air to circulate.

2. Rotate even a little.Alternate your tomato bed between even just two spots and you diminish the risk of soilborne diseases such as bacterial spot and early blight.

3. Pass up overgrown transplants. When buying tomato seedlings, beware of lush green starts with poor root systems. They will languish for weeks before growing.

4. Bury the stems. Plant your tomato seedlings up to the first true leaves. New roots will quickly sprout on the stems. More roots means more fruits.

5. Water deeply but infrequently. Soak your tomato bed once a week, or every five days at the height of summer. Water directly on the soil, not on the leaves.

6. Pinch the suckers. Prune off these non-fruiting branches. This directs the tomato plant's energy into growing bigger, better fruit.

7. Stake them high. Use 6-foot stakes for indeterminate varieties like the 'Brandywine' tomato. Put in the stakes when transplanting to avoid damaging roots.

8.Add compost and trim. While the first fruit is ripening, encourage new growth and continued fruit set by scratching compost around the stem, and trim some of the upper leaves.

9. Plant again.Three weeks after you plant tomatoes in your garden, put in another set so all of your harvest doesn't come at once.

 

10. Pick ripe, but not dead ripe. Heirloom tomatoes that are too ripe can be mealy. Harvest them when they're full size and fully colored.

 

For more information about growing tomatoes, check out our Tomato Growing Guide.

 

 

Great Tips on Propagating Tomatoes !

Once you try home grown tomatoes, you will never (ever) want to go back to store bought tomatoes again. I have been growing tomatoes, and actually they grow like weeds, but I am sure making a few adjustments can only be a good thing. I love these tips from Organicgardening.com.


Plant deep.

Bury a tomato plant's stem and the stem will sprout a slew of new roots that help the plant grow sturdy and tall quickly. You can bury just about all of stem--pluck off the branches below the top flush of leaves.

Early in the season, when the soil is still cool, dig a trench 4 or 5 inches deep in the soil and set the transplant into it, again burying the stem up to the top leaves.

If you're transplanting later in the season, when the soil has warmed or in dry climates, bury the transplant in a straight, deep hole. Cooler, moister soil below 6 inches deep helps tomatoes survive in hot, dry summers.

Feed the soil first.

 

Avoid the common mistake of overfeeding your tomatoes. They thrive in soil that's rich in humus for extensive, well-nourished root systems and potassium (K) for strong stems. Add too much nitrogen (N) and you'll have a big, lush plant with very little fruit.

"A lot of organic gardeners overload their soil with manure and get fewer tomatoes for it," notes Will Brinton, Ph.D., president of Woods End Research Laboratory in Mount Vernon, Maine. "I save my best compost for tomatoes and supplement it only with seaweed powder, which is a quick-acting source of potassium. We get incredible fruits."

Homemade compost typically supplies all the phosphorus (P) your tomatoes need for good flowering and fruiting. If a soil test indicates a serious phosphorus deficiency, add rock phosphate to your tomato-growing beds next fall.

Keep them warm, keep them cool.

 

Chilly spring temperatures (nights cooler than 50 degrees F) slow tomato plants' growth. Sizzling summer temps (days hotter than 95 degrees) cause the flowers to drop off. You can moderate both extremes with Wall O' Waters, which are plastic "teepees" with individual tubes filled with water. They also help keep the plants upright and shelter the plants from high winds.

Red plastic, maybe.

 

Many organic gardeners rely on plastic mulch to warm the soil in spring and prevent weeds from sprouting up. Plastic mulch isn't part of our ideal organic garden, but study after study has found that beds covered in black plastic in spring produce tomatoes earlier and more of them all season long. Where the growing season is short, plastic mulch may be essential if you want to harvest tomatoes at all. Even more effective, researchers have found, is infra-red transmitting plastic mulch, which reflects just the kind of light plants need up onto the foliage.

 

Mulch for sure.

While plastic mulch has proved its worth, all-natural mulches also help tomatoes grow well. Surround your plants with a layer of straw, leaves, dried grass clippings or pine needles and it will keep the plants' roots cool, prevent weeds from sprouting around them and retain moisture in the soil. Because these mulches keep the soil cool, don't apply them until after the soil warms to 65 degrees F.

Pluck the first flowers.

Growing deep, extensive roots and a full leaf canopy will help establish newly transplanted tomatoes. Many experienced tomato growers pull off the first flowers, so the plant does not devote energy to forming fruit before its roots and foliage have filled out. Amy Goldman, who grows hundreds of heirloom tomatoes in her Rhinebeck, New York, garden each season, reports, "I pull off all the flowers until the plants reach at least 1 foot tall." She also pulls off all the suckers (shoots that emerge from the main stem below the first fruiting branch).

Grow them up.

 

Tomato vines left to sprawl on the soil are more susceptible to attacks by pests and diseases. Sprawling vines take up a lot of room in your garden and the fruit they bear is more difficult to harvest. So stake or cage the vines for your healthiest, most productive tomato crop ever.

You can revive damaged plants.

 

If cutworms, mice, slugs, the neighbor's dog or other hazards hack into your transplants, don't despair. If you get to the plant before the sun has baked the life out of it, cut an inch or so off the bottom of the stem and place the rest in a container of water out of direct sun for a week or so. It will sprout roots along the stem. Then transplant it back into garden and watch it grow.

Bamboo: versatel with many uses

The more I find out about bamboo, the more I realize it is soo versatel. Really a plant to get to know.

I love this article from OrganicGardening.com.

I love bamboo. There, I said it.

I love it for its trellising potential. I love it for how it becomes the skeleton of a garden, the frame from which my sprawling vines will hang and bear fruit.

I would never plant bamboo in my own yard, of course. Let’s face it—it’s an arrogant weed when left to its own devices.

 

I found an overgrown stand of bamboo not far my house, a living privacy fence gone wild. A quick call to the owner granted me permission to cut and haul away as much as I’d like
.
Armed with a pair of loppers, hand pruners, and a roll of electrical tape, I entered the tight grove of evergreen grass, the tall canes rising up all around me. I lopped the canes close to the ground and dragged them out into the open space, where I snipped off the leaves and the skinny tops and was left with the perfect raw material for trellis and teepee.

When I thought I had enough canes, I bundled them together in groups of eight, wrapping them with electrical tape the way an electrician bundles sticks of conduit. I strapped the bundles to the car roof and headed back to my garden.

 

Why is bamboo so great? It’s lightweight and strong. And—if you play your cards right—it’s free.
The teepee is the easiest bamboo structure to make. You take three or four canes, tie them together about a foot from the end, spread the other ends open, and push the canes into the ground. Wrap a spiral of jute twine from top to bottom to give your climbers something to hold on to. This is perfect for pole beans, morning glories, even cucumbers and some small squash or gourds—really anything that sprawls and climbs will appreciate a good bamboo teepee. Leave one side open, and by mid to late summer your kids will have a fun shady hideout.

Learn more: How to Make a Simple Bamboo Trellis

 

Another favorite bamboo structure is something that I call the net trellis. It’s essentially two teepees (preferably tripods) connected by a horizontal stick of bamboo at the top, from which you hang a net of jute twine.

Tie lengths of twine horizontally between the tripods, about every 8 inches. Then do the same vertically across the connector piece, again about every 8 inches, looping each string around the horizontals. Be sure to put a little tension on the twine as you go, ensuring that your net isn’t too loose. Tie the ends of the strings off to the bottommost horizontal. Do this all the way across, and soon you’ll have a handsome little net for your climbers to ascend.

The trick to this, like the trick to almost anything, is to take your time. Be patient, watch what you’re doing, be present, feel the air, hear the birds, make the net.

The net trellis is also great for beans, cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, and more.

 

I’m using bamboo in a new way this year, too—as supports for the Florida weave I’m trying on my tomatoes. I’m officially done with those flimsy metal tomato cages. Every year by August, my beautiful tomato plants are cascading over the tops of the cages. I prune and tie up as much as I can, but my plants inevitably grow out of control.

This year, I hope things will be different. I have two main rows of tomatoes—one row of six plants (three ‘Brandywine’ and three ‘Cosmonaut Volkov’) and another row of four plants (two ‘Indigo Rose’ and two ‘Green Zebra’). At the ends of each row and between every two plants, I have driven into the soil very thick and very tall canes of bamboo. (I made a pilot hole first using a long metal rod from a quoits set and a small sledgehammer. I was then able to sink the bamboo into the ground about 18 to 24 inches, leaving 7 feet above ground.)

I will weave twine around the plants and the poles, adding another length of twine every 8 inches or so as the plants grow. By August, I should have a nice, neat wall of tomato vines.
For more detailed instruction on the Florida weave, go here:

As with most things, bamboo doesn’t last forever. It will eventually dry out, become brittle, and render itself useless—which is why I go back each year to cut more. And when I go back, I always cut more than I need, because giving a fellow gardener or two a bundle of fresh-cut bamboo is like adding fresh compost to your gardening karma.

Tips on Starting Your Own Seeds

Organic Gardening  provides this great article with 14 tips on how to start your own seeds.

Ensure that your plants are organic from start to finish by starting your own seeds.
Start your own seeds and you can be sure that your plants have been raised organically from first to last. And by sprouting and nursing your own seedlings, you don't have to wait for warm weather to get your hands dirty. Best of all, starting your own seeds is easy and fun. Here's how to get started now:

Place sure bets
Some plants lend themselves to home germination better than others. Surefire vegetables include basil, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, chives, leeks, lettuce, onions, peppers, and tomatoes. Some reliable annual flowers are alyssum, cosmos, marigolds, and zinnias. Perennials include Shasta daisies, columbines, and hollyhocks.

Get the timing down
To calculate when to sow your seeds, go to our seed-starting chart, print it out and then fill in the blanks. Then you will have a planting plan you can follow through the season.

Gather containers
Reuse last year's nursery flats if you have some around. Otherwise, any container 2 or 3 inches deep will do. Punch holes for drainage into the bottom of containers and set them into trays. Protect against plant disease by thoroughly cleaning all used containers: Wash them in hot, soapy water, and rinse with a dilute solution of household bleach and water. If you want a less-irritating substitute for the bleach, use distilled white vinegar.

Pick the right growing medium You can buy bags of seed-starter mix or you can make your own seed-starting mix by blending equal parts of perlite, vermiculite, and peat. Add 1/4 teaspoon of lime to each gallon of mix to neutralize the acidity of the peat. You'll eventually want to repot most of your seedlings into larger containers before setting them into the garden. But lettuce, melons, and cucumbers are finicky about being transplanted and should go directly from the original containers into the garden. When starting these fussier plants, always add two parts well-aged, screened compost to your mix to give them a healthy beginning.

Sow carefully
Moisten your medium in the containers before sowing the seeds. Next, drop seeds onto the surface of the mix, spacing them as evenly as possible. Cover the seeds to a depth about three times the thickness of the seeds. Some seeds, such as ageratum, alyssum, impatiens, petunias, and snapdragons, should not be covered at all because they need light in order to germinate.

Top it off
Lightly sprinkle milled sphagnum moss, a natural fungicide, over everything to protect against damping-off, a fungal disease that rots seeds and seedlings. In the case of seeds that need light to germinate, sprinkle the moss first and then drop the seeds onto the moss.

Keep seeds cozy
Cover the flats with plastic wrap or glass to keep the environment humid and place them near a heat vent or on a heat mat made especially for seed starting. Most seeds germinate well at about 70 degrees F.

Keep them damp
Mist with a spray bottle or set the trays into water so the mix wicks up the moisture from below.

Lighten up
At the first signs of sprouting, uncover and move the containers to a bright spot—a sunny window, a greenhouse, or beneath a couple of ordinary fluorescent shop lights (4-footers with two 40-watt bulbs). The lights are worthwhile, especially if you live in the North. They provide a steady source of high-intensity light. Short days restrict window light, and your seedlings need 12 to 16 hours of light a day. Suspend the lights just 2 inches above the plants and gradually raise them as the seedlings mature. If plants have to stretch or lean toward the light, they can become weak and spindly. To turn the lights on and off at the same time each day, hook them up to an electric timer.

Cool down Seedlings don't have to stay as warm as germinating seeds. Move them away from radiators and air vents, or off the heating mat, as soon they have germinated.

Feed them
If youre using a soilless mix without compost, begin to fertilize your seedlings as soon as they get their first true leaves. (These leaves emerge after the little, round cotyledon leaves.) Water with a half-strength solution of liquid fish/seaweed fertilizer every week or two. Use either a spray bottle or add the fertilizer to the water you set the trays in if you're using the wick-up method described above.

Give them room
If the seedlings outgrow their containers or crowd one another, repot them into larger containers filled with a mix that includes compost. Extract the seedlings with a narrow fork or flat stick, and handle by their leaves and roots to avoid damaging the fragile stems. Tuck the seedlings gently into the new pots, and water them to settle the roots.

Pet them
Lightly ruffling seedlings once or twice a day with your hand or a piece of cardboard helps them to grow stocky and strong. Or, set up a small fan to gently, continuously blow on your seedlings.

Toughen them up
About 1 week before the plants are to go outside, start acclimating them to the harsh conditions of the big world. Gardeners call this hardening off. On a warm spring day move the containers to a shaded, protected place, such as a porch, for a few hours. Each day—unless the weather is horrible—gradually increase the plants exposure to sun and breeze. At the end of the week leave them out overnight; then transplant them into the garden.

Its Pumpkin Seeds Time: Check Out The Benefits of Pumpkin Seeds

Perennial Garlic

If you love garlic, here is a good tip on how to plant it once and have it grow, over and over again.

I love these garlic growing tips from the Centerfordeepecology.org.  Literally, plant garlic once and harvest it over and over again.

There’s a way to grow garlic without replanting each year. A Washington gardener explains how.
Joe Capriotti doesn’t plant garlic, but every year he harvests hundreds of pounds from his backyard in Montesano, Wash. His technique goes against the common practice of planting and harvesting garlic each year as if it were an annual plant. Most people don’t realize that garlic can be grown as a perennial.

Capriotti, who once worked as a chef and as a logger in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, developed his technique over many years of experimenting on his 1-acre homestead. Now, at 80, he proudly displays the fruits of his research. When I visited his place in western Washington, I found Capriotti to be an active man with a sharp wit and a delightful sense of humor. His other experiments have ranged from testing apple, peach, plum and pear varieties to new techniques for growing strawberries and potatoes. But his real love is garlic.

“This patch of elephant garlic hasn’t been planted or plowed for more than 20 years,” Capriotti says, leading me to a 25-by-40-foot area where healthy garlic tops of various sizes grow without apparent order. “When the plants are about 2 feet tall, seed buds will form. Be sure to pinch off the buds or you won’t get any garlic. The large plants will form cloves. The other, smaller plants will die back, but will come up again the following year. Did you ever dig clams? Well, the small holes the young garlic tops leave after they die back look like little clam holes all over the soil."

In August Capriotti pulls up the largest plants that have been pinched. “I just pull ‘em out of the ground by hand or use a garden trowel if they won’t come,” he says. “I have never weighed how many pounds have come out of this bed, but it’s 200 pounds or more.” Capriotti also inter-plants garlic with berries and young fruit trees. Volunteers may be found almost anywhere in the garden.
After harvesting, Capriotti uses a hand-push cultivator to lightly till the surface and uproot weeds that are already growing. He waters the bed to cause the weed seeds to germinate, then cultivates the surface to eliminate those young weeds. In September the area looks bare and abandoned. “My neighbors used to look at it and ask, ‘Hey Joe, aren’t you going to plant garlic this year?’ “ he says. “ ‘No,’ I’d answer, ‘I never plant garlic. It’s already in there.’

In October, Capriotti spreads a 3- to 4-inch mulch of cherry and apple leaves. The mulch keeps any more weeds from sprouting and would prevent the garlic from coming up, too, if it weren’t for the timely arrival of the wood thrush, or winter robin, from the local forest. These birds, which move to the open lowlands with the first cold weather, eat insects that live under the leaves. They turn the mulch, disturbing it enough for the garlic to sprout through. Last year, for some reason, not many thrushes came, but robins took over and did the job nearly as well. Capriotti has built bird boxes all around his house and watering ponds nearby to attract birds of all kinds. Besides turning the garlic mulch, the thrushes, robins and warblers effectively control insects throughout the garden.

By spring most of the mulch is gone. Night crawlers and microorganisms have turned it into rich compost. “Don’t dig manure into the soil when you start the bed, Capriotti suggests. “I tried that one year when I was trying to get huge cloves just for show. The plants grew big enough, but they were only the leaves—no cloves. If you want to fertilize, spread 1 inch of well-rotted manure on top of the ground. After a patch has had no fertilizer for many years, it is necessary to do this. By not plowing, and by spreading a little manure once in a while and a mulch of leaves every fall, I get elephant garlic bulbs of all sizes — some weigh over 1 pound. The shopkeepers I sell to don’t like it when they get that big. It’s too weird — the customers have never seen anything like it.”

Garlic likes full sun and grows well in most soil conditions, but the soil should not be too heavy and it must have good drainage. “Garlic hates to have its feet wet and will rot in boggy areas,” Capriotti says. “Don’t water in the summer, especially with an overhead sprinkler. I don’t even sprinkle my strawberries or raspberries nearby because I’m afraid some of the water might get on the garlic. If it rains heavily after the Fourth of July, it rots some of the plants and you get a lot of culls. I replant the culls later in areas that look kind of sparse.”

This way of growing garlic has emerged from a lifetime of living and working close to nature. It requires no machinery or chemicals — only a hand cultivator and a garden trowel. “You have to have the right soil conditions,” Capriotti says, “and you have to be aware of everything going on in the garden.” The technique is simple yet sophisticated, and closely follows the natural cycle of garlic, a perennial plant. Capriotti is proud of his way with garlic and loves to remind his many visitors, “I don’t plant garlic — I only harvest it.”

Organic Gardening, April 1987

Top 10 Tips for Storing Seeds

If you have leftover seeds or aren’t ready to plant your seeds when they arrive, you’ll need to store them properly to ensure good germination.

 

I love this article from OrganicGardening.com.  

1. Think dry and cool no matter where you store seed. Humidity and warmth shorten a seed’s shelf life.

2. Keep seed packets in plastic food storage bags, plastic film canisters, Mason jars with tight-fitting lids, or glass canisters with gasketed lids.

 

3. The refrigerator is generally the best place to store seeds.

4. Keep your seed-storage containers well away from the freezer section of your refrigerator.

 

5. To keep seeds dry, wrap 2 heaping tablespoons of powdered milk in 4 layers of facial tissue, then put the milk packet inside the storage container with the seed packets. Or add a packet of silica gel. Replace every 6 months.

6. Store each year’s seeds together and date them. Because most seeds last about 3 years, you’ll know at a glance which container of seeds might be past its prime when planting season comes.

7. When you’re ready to plant, remove seed containers from the refrigerator and keep them closed until the seeds warm to room temperature. Otherwise, moisture in the air will condense on the seeds, causing them to clump together.

8. If you’re gathering and saving seeds from your own plants, spread the seeds on newspaper and let them air dry for about a week. Write seed names on the newspaper so there’s no mix-up. Pack the air-dried seeds in small paper packets or envelopes, and label with plant name, date, and other pertinent information. Remember, if you want to save your own seeds, you’ll need to plant open-pollinated varieties. They’ll come back true; hybrids won’t.

9. Or dry saved seeds on paper towels. They’ll stick to the towels when dry, so roll them up right in the towel to store them. When you’re ready to plant, just tear off bits of the towel, one seed at a time, and plant seed and towel right in the soil.

10. Even if you’re organized, methodical, and careful about storing seeds, accept the fact that some seeds just won’t germinate the following year. Home gardeners will find that stored sweet corn and parsnip seeds, in particular, have low germination rates, and other seeds will only remain viable for a year or two.