3 Fantastic Tips For Growing Great Tomatoes!

[Music] hey guys welcome to the homestead today I may give you three tips three tips to grow great Tomatoes every year I get lots of emails from people who say you know Zack I just don't have a green thumb I just don't do well with tomatoes and so you know what can I do to help you know get a better crop of tomatoes and there's three things I'm going to tell you to do that I would suggest that will give you a good crop of tomatoes the first tip very simple it's a tip I give out every year we repeat it often in our videos and I repeat it a lot of times in my podcast that we do on Saturday night and that is to make sure you grow more than you know you're going to need you know if you grow four tomato plants and you lose three of them to pests or disease or whatever you know you've lost 75 percent of your crop but you know if you grow tube plants and you lose one tomato plant you watch half your prob so you know but if you grow ten plants or if you grow like four in our case we grow every year about fifty plants is what we shoot for fifty or more and if I lose ten plants it's okay I still have 40 other plants that are going to produce for me expect that you're going to lose some to disease you're going to lose some to pest pressure whether it's a Fedor you know tomato hornworms or whatever you're going to lose some and so if you plan on that and you plant more than you know you're going to need you're going to come out on top and if you have more than you need if all your plants do amazingly well that year you have some to share with neighbors and friends and what and family or whatever but you're always going to have enough for you to sustain yourself and family so that's my first tip always grow more than you know you're going to need the second tip I'm going to tell you is to try to grow plants this is where it's going to vary a little bit try to grow plants that are good for your area it took us about three years of experimenting with different types of heirloom tomatoes before we found a tomato that we find that grows remarkably well in this area and it's by talking to people find people in your area other gardeners and say hey you know people in your neighborhood and say hey you know what are you growing for tomatoes every year you know what works for you and see what works for them for us it was the Arkansas traveler it's a great tomato for the Ozarks it works well with the high humor in high heat it's pretty much pest-resistant although there are varieties that are more pest resistant but when it comes to heat humidity this does amazing amazingly well and so the Arkansas traveler is what we grow here in the Ozarks if you're living in a neighborhood and you don't have somebody that you can talk to who is a gardener go to a local nursery and see what they tell you they'll be happy to say go to the nursery and tell them that you're looking for an heirloom type tomato and you know what do you recommend and I'm sure they'll be happy to tell you and share with you what will work well for it because they'll know I mean they've been that's their business to know try to stay away from from non heirloom varieties from hybrids things like that try to find an heirloom variety and if you don't have a gardener in your area or someone you trust who's been doing this for a while then find a nursery there's lots of organic nurseries nowadays who will be more than happy to help you order it and you know you always do research on the Internet so tip number one always grow more than you need tip number two grow a tomato that works well in your area that has a proven successful track record my third and final tip okay and you know this is going to be you can find different ways of making this but my third and final tip is to have some super juice on hand some super juice and I'm going to show you today how you make super juice so come with me first thing I'm gonna do is come over here pick up my hose this is the hose that goes comes underground from our outhouse over there all the water tanks where the water runs off and there's a pipe buried over here that comes to our garden so I'm gonna hook up my hose this is gravity fed water just natural rainwater and what I'm about to show you has work really well for us I'm gonna turn it on follow the hose wherever it goes oh here it is let's take the water I've got the hose right there when I take the end of this watering hose go upside my garden here I'm going to put it inside this barrel [Applause] oops I need to fill this barrel up because I've been using my super juice this is my super juice I have two barrels each with super juice and I've been doing this for the last three years now and just go find you know a couple or one even one 55-gallon barrel plastic barrel at your local trash dump or somewhere and fill it up with water and then what you do is you go out and you find any of a dozen or two does there's a little lots of them out there hundreds of organic tea recipes the super teas the the growth teas the the compost teas all of those teas you know there's lots of great natural organic ones you can get recipes you can make them yourself and then put it put the recipe inside your barrel and the other thing I put in my barrel is fish protein it's protein powder fish protein powder I put in each of these barrels I put a half a bag so I bought a half a pound bag one pound bag of fish protein powder I bought ours at home what's name with it it's a boogie brew boogie brew net and I also use their compost teas and I bought a bunch of it and I put it in there last year a half a bag in each so one full bag for both of these and what I do is I just fill up these barrels and then I have a little water spout that I dip it in there gets the super juice because it's just been sitting in there rotten and just fermenting on its own producing this amazing amount of nutrient you know liquid and I put that on my tomatoes and folks I'm telling you man the growth is second to none when I was growing up my neighborhood there was a guy who went fishing an awful lot and he was he was a big bass fisherman and I would love to go over and watch him clean ish when he came home from his fishing trips because his whole boat would be filled with all these you know and the two little fish traps inside the boat he'd pull all these fish out he'd clean him I'd watch him do this and that's how I learned to clean fish and then as he was doing that he would take the guts so you know the remains you know the leftovers of the fish and he would put those in his garden and he would get amazing remarkable growth from his garden I learned early on you know he told me he said you know this is the best way to grow a garden is to put your fish remains inside your garden use bury it he'd take a shovel out there and turn over some ground and then put the fish remains and then turn the ground back over on top of the fish and he said he got remarkable growth out of it and as I was growing up I saw his garden was amazing an amazing production well today you can do that if you're not a fisherman you can go out and you can get some fish fat fish protein powder which is just basically ground-up fish that's been turned into a powder and it's just all natural let me know chemicals in it it's just ground-up fish you know fish products and they put that on you can get organic variety the stuff all the stuff at Boogie brew is 100% organic milk chemicals so it's not farm raised fish that have been fed a bunch of junk they're getting they're sourcing their stuff from good places that are going to be healthy for your ground okay so find this fish protein powder it's called pure proteins the brand I use or there's lots of other ones out there make sure it's an organic variety and then make some super juice and man I'm telling you that is one thing to really up and nutrient levels in your ground I have found it works amazingly well since I've been using it for the last couple years three years of using this now so works great make some super juice that's tip number three make some super juice you're going to love it your plants are going to love it you're going to love the results so there you go there's my three tips and if you notice it's starting to rain here the raindrops are coming down from Lex needed rain so looking forward to that wow the storms are coming clouds are coming I got to get the camera back inside but I hope you enjoyed the video if you liked the video give it a thumbs up check out this list of amazing folks these are our patrons they make all our videos possible we couldn't do what we do here on the homestead without them so thank you very much if you want more information you can go to patreon.com/scishow cuss out and steam it we're over it steam it a lot of you guys over there are joining us so we really appreciate that and our Joe enjoying the community that's being built over there check out the video over on the left hit the subscribe button and we'll see you next time on American homestead starting to rain [Music]

Channel: An American Homestead

Views: 509,289

Rating: 4.8195853 out of 5

Keywords: growing great tomatoes, easy way to grow tomatoes, 3 tips to grow tomatoes, growing tomatoes in your garden, gardening, homesteading, homestead, tomatoes, veggies in your garden, organic tomatoes, natural food, survival gardening

Id: 2Zf49vnZAJE

Length: 9min 22sec (562 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017