For a lot of gardeners,
tomatoes are THE crop. It's the one that we all seem to care
about the most. The sign of summer. The thing that lets us know that
gardening really has started, especially when you start actually getting
those tomatoes coming out. You know, there's so much variety
in the world of tomatoes. I actually went to a tasting panel
once where we tried 32 different tomatoes and ranked them for
their juiciness and their flavor. And there was this crazy tomato tasting
wheel with like a hundred different flavors and sensations that you would
rank these on. I really, at that moment, discovered how deep the
world of tomato goes. But there are some things you can do,
in fact there's more than just some, when it comes to making a
mistake growing your tomatoes, which is what we're
getting to in this video. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening
where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb and grow some
truly amazing tomatoes. So in this video we're going to go over
five different mistakes that you might be making, including a little bonus at the end as
to different types of tomatoes that I think you'll enjoy. So
without further ado, cultivate that Like button
for 20,000 heirloom varieties, and let's get into the
video. Mistake number one, which is an easy mistake to make, is not knowing the type of tomato that
you're growing or just selecting the wrong one. And when I say
type, I mean type in two ways. Now I've talked about the first way in
a tomato pruning video which I highly recommend you check
out, but it's basically, are you growing a determinate
or an indeterminate tomato? One that will stick to a determined
size and kind of all come to fruition relatively around the same time,
easier to manage, good for containers, et cetera. Or are you growing an indeterminate one
where the growth is not determined and the season kills it due to weather, which means that your trellising and
support strategy has to be different. Now that's one type. The other type has less to do with your
success in supporting and growing that plant and more to do with
if you're actually going to
like the resulting tomato. And that would just be the actual specific
variety that you're growing. So like, do you want a cherry tomato? Do you
want a roma? Do you want a grape? Do you want a beefsteak
salad slicing style? Or would you rather have an heirloom
variety that has a lot of visual appeal but, you know, sometimes those can be a little more
susceptible to disease or sometimes they tend not to grow as well just because
a lot of these improved varieties are improved for a reason, right?
They have a disease resistance, they might have the resistance to like
a bacterial blight that tomatoes really often suffer from. So two different
types to choose and mistakes to avoid. The second mistake you'll make will be
tying in a little bit to the first and it's the method that you choose
to support your tomato plant. So I've rigged up just a couple of
random supports here as an example of some good options, and we'll talk about
some bad options. So first of all, the bad option, the worst option really
would be to not support it at all. But the second worst option would be to
use one of those flimsy metal conical tomato cages that you can
find at almost every nursery. Sometimes they're so flimsy you can just
pull down on one of those horizontal support rings and it'll actually just
break right off cause it's so poorly constructed. And the reason that's
bad, besides the construction quality, is the actual structure of it. You'd much rather have a cylinder instead
of a cone so you have more support at the base for when the tomatoes grow up
and they have a lot of crazy growth on them. So speaking of options that
might be a little bit better for you, you have something more like this.
So this is a cylindrical cage, as is this one. In fact, this one is designed to go on top
of this one to stake up and support indeterminate tomatoes. But for right
now, I just have it a little bit lower. So this is called a Vertex tomato
cage from Gardeners Supply Company. What's really nice about it is again, it's cylindrical so it goes down
nice base of support at the bottom. But then you have all these different
areas that you can rest a branch or a stem that's just
absolutely laden with fruit. So you have a lot of
different areas to support. Now you could also just DIY this by
getting cattle panel and bending it into a cylinder. So that's one
fantastic way to do it. All you need to do is kind
of zip tie it together, stick it into the ground and you have a
really nice and relatively cheap tomato support. If you're growing tomatoes on a little
bit larger scale and perhaps not in a raised bed and perhaps more in a
row style planting, first of all, congrats cause you have a lot
of space. But second of all, you have a cool option available
to you called the Florida Weave. And so let's say we have a post here
and we have a post here and in between these posts is our row of tomatoes,
right? So as you plant these tomatoes, they're going to grow up
and they need support. So what you can do is you can take some
string and you can actually weave it in between the stems and then tie it
around the other post, move up, weave it in between the stems,
tie it around the other post. And so as you move up, you get these little areas where the
string has been supported via pressure almost, and it's nice and taut. So it will hold them up almost in a
little bit of a sandwich or a weave. So that's a really good
technique for a very, very cheap and effective
bigger support system. We're back in the side yard of the Epic
Garden to talk about mistake number three, which is improper watering
techniques. And you know, tomatoes, it really feels that they are the plant
to NOT make these mistakes for sure, because they have some serious problems
when they're either watered incorrectly or watered carelessly. So the number one thing that I would
avoid doing is dumping water all over the top of a tomato, being
very sloppy about it. Because tomatoes are susceptible
to a ton of soil borne diseases. And if you're doing that, number
one, you're getting the foliage wet. So you're kind of putting them in
a more moist humid environment, which a lot of fungal pathogens
like to live in. So avoid that. But then number two, it's hitting the
ground, we're hitting the soil surface, and that soil is going to splash up and
you have the potential to just introduce disease onto the underside
of those leaves, which I
really recommend not doing. Another way to prevent that, as you
can see, is laying down some mulch. So when the water does hit
that surface of the soil, it's broken up more and
the soil is not splashing. Maybe you get a couple of pieces of mulch,
but the soil itself is not splashing. Now other watering mistakes that
you can make is irregularity. Tomatoes really want a
consistent amount of water. They don't want to go through
these feast or famine style cycles. And so if you do that, number one, you're probably going to cause
more blossom end rot. Which is, as the name would imply, the blossom end of the tomato
starts to go brown or black. And then eventually the tomato will
fall off and it will die. And you know, a lot of people will say well, it's
a calcium deficiency issue and it's, it is true. And I know I've talked
about this here on the channel. But it's really more a calcium transport
issue caused by irregular watering. So really make sure
that nice dose of mulch. This bed in particular is a
passively sub-irrigated system, so it's a very consistent amount of
soil moisture which is really nice. And then also try to water
at appropriate times of day. I have a whole video on watering
mistakes that you're probably making, which I could recommend
checking out, but cliff notes, just water in the morning if possible.
And then water in the evening, if that's not possible and then
water when the plant needs it, if that's not possible. So avoid watering
mistakes, just keep it nice, smooth, and easy and take care of these plants. We're going to remain in the side yard
garden to talk about some pruning fails for mistake number four. There's a couple of different categories
of things you can go wrong with in pruning. And one of them would be to
leave too much of this bottom growth, especially as the tomato has matured.
So this one's nice and mature. I don't really need this
little shoot right here. And I could probably do away
with this shoot right here, because it's putting off another
little sucker. And again, I've talked about suckers very
extensively in my tomato pruning video. So I won't really go into that too
much. I just recommend you watch that. But you can see one right here,
see how this is coming out. We don't really need this and
it's low on the plant. Again, this is a leaf that's low on
the plant that we can clear out. Low on the plant just means it's
probably going to get shaded out anyways, and it's a closer to the ground leaf. So it's more susceptible to getting
some of that soil borne disease. A massive pruning mistake that I've
seen people make is topping off their tomatoes. Either way if you've
done that to a determinate, that's a really bad idea because it
doesn't have the ability to grow anymore unless you've left a sucker shoot
there to now become the new main stem. But even on an indeterminate, you typically don't want to prune
off the top of your main leader stem. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. Now there are some other plants
where this doesn't apply. For example you know basil, it's a
fantastic way to bush out that plant. But with tomatoes the
game is quite different. You're actually removing a lot more
low growth and managing airflow, managing overgrowth rather than
trying to get it to bush out too much. So here's the before of a tomato plant
before I've done a bit of a cleanup on it. And there's the after. It's
really not that much different. I just took off a lot of non-necessary
low growth and came through and cleaned up the suckers. And now we have more
airflow and less propensity for disease. So the fifth mistake you may run into
would be anything that falls under a fertilization error. And so the first
of course would be underfertilizing, right? So if you don't give it enough,
if you're putting it in poor soil. Tomatoes are a notoriously
heavy feeder plant. And so you may want to give it a nice
healthy dose of compost early on. I don't really bury like an egg
in the soil or anything like that. It doesn't seem to really do that much
just from a scientific point of view. It doesn't make sense you know, to
add a lot of calcium, for example, to the soil, with egg eggshells. But giving it a nice dose
of compost at the beginning, giving it a side dress or top dress of
compost halfway through the season can be a really good idea. Now on the flip side, most people probably fall
into the overfertilization
category and within that, they will either give it too much
nitrogen early on and promote a ton of vegetative growth and not
a lot of fruit and flower. On the flip side of that you can also
give it just too much phosphorus and potassium, and there's no reason for
it. You know, people say, okay well, you know, if it uses a lot of phosphorus and
potassium to produce those fruits and flowers, if I give it more, it will
make more. And it's really not true. You know, especially with phosphorus, most of our soils have more than enough
in the soil itself and you don't need to add a whole lot extra to it. It's just going to be a
waste of your time and money. And also potentially has some worse
effects on the soil in the longterm. And so what I would say is just keep it
very simple with your tomato fertilizing and give it nice healthy doses of
compost or organic granular fertilizer, maybe in the planting
hole at the beginning, and then do a top or side
dress throughout the season. I actually will give it some
fish fertilizer here and
there or kelp fertilizer here and there. If I want to give
it a liquid soluble fertilizer, that's kind of what I'll do. Some
sort of organic formulation like that. But besides that, I keep it really simple and my
tomatoes are usually pretty Epic. So there are a lot of mistakes that
you can make when growing tomatoes, but that's the joy of gardening - is
sometimes it is making that mistake, learning from it and then never
making that mistake again, you know, as long as you just don't keep
repeating the mistakes that you make, you're in a good spot. So as we
hang out in my cornfield here, I just wanted to say one more thing about
tomatoes. And a lot of people think, you know, a paste tomato, you can only use to make tomato sauce
and you can't use a cherry tomato or whatever. All tomatoes can
be used for all purposes. So don't think that perhaps, because you grew one for sauce that you
can't just eat it straight up. You can, it's just that they have some qualities
that make them a little bit more favorable. So don't feel that you're stuck to any
particular use for a tomato that you grow. But that's it guys, if you
have any tomato mistakes and/or tips, drop them in the Comments. We're always trying to learn in
the Epic Gardening community. My goal with Epic Gardening is to teach
10 million people around the world, if not more, how to grow their own food. And that's not something I can do alone. I need you guys in the
Comments adding some context, adding your own experience and helping
some people out. So thank you guys. Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
