- You know, tomatoes are
the crop of the season. They're the crop of the year. They're the crop that everyone
loves to grow no matter what. And I'm growing some juicy, squishy, delicious delectable boys here. So we have some hacks
for you in today's video, nine tomato hacks that actually work plus a bonus one at the end. So cultivate that like one for
the juiciest toms on Earth. And let's get into the video. Let's get a hack on
the plate for you guys. Don't fertilize your tomatoes
in a very specific way. I don't mean don't fertilize at all, but I mean be very strategic about how you fertilize these bad boys. These tomatoes wanna
put out a lot of leaves, especially early in their life. Why? The leaves are basically
the engines for the plant. They're gonna help produce
these juicy tomats right here and that's what you want them to do. But if you keep too much nitrogen in your fertilizer too
long into the plant's life, especially when you start to
see flowers and fruit develop, it's really not what the plant
needs at that point in time. You wanna switch over to a more phosphorus and potassium-heavy fertilizer. I've got one that we love here. It's called Tomato Tone
from Espoma Organic. It's a 3-4-6, so N-P-K. Obviously, that three is the lowest there. It's not super high in nitrogen. Now, you can have somewhat
high nitrogen early on, but if you over fir it
with nitrogen early, what you're gonna do is
produce a ton of leaves and not a ton of tomatoes. - When it comes to saving tomato seeds, this hack will actually ensure that your tomato seeds
last for a long time and have less disease. So what are we doing here? We are fermenting tomato seeds. The reason why we're doing this instead of the classic paper towel method, which works totally fine
if you're growing a tomato and you just wanna save a couple seeds to immediately plant next year, you're more than welcome
to just throw them on a little sheet of paper. Let 'em dry that way. Totally fine. But if you wanna save your
tomato seeds for a long time, like even up to 10 years, you're going to wanna ferment your seeds. The way you do that is
that you're actually going to be pushing all
of the juice and seed pulp into a jar. Now, you need some of the
tomato juice and flesh to aid in the fermentation process. That's why I'm just going and squeezing this whole tomato in. And I am getting as many seeds as I can. If you want, you could just
carefully remove the seeds and not eat the tomato, but
this is a over rip tomato, which is actually more
ideal for this process. Now, the advantage to
having a fermented seed is that it fully breaks down
the outer little gel coating on a tomato seed, which
means that it'll be easier to plant next year. It'll store longer 'cause it'll be able to dry more properly. But the other nice thing about
fermenting your tomato seeds is that it actually can have an effect to remove some bacterial
and fungal diseases that might otherwise transfer
onto your seed for next year. So what is the hack here? The hack is fermenting your seeds. They last a lot longer and
they will be more disease-free. - For gardeners who, like
me, need to harvest unripe, rock hard, green tomatoes
at the end of the season, whether it's due to early
frost, pests, or late blight, you can still ripen or soften and get color on these tomatoes
by using a piece of fruit, like an apple or banana. And this is how the hack works. These fruit are a great source of the plant hormone, ethylene, and in its gas form, it diffuses out of the plant
cells of this ripe fruit into neighboring plant tissue. So if you put them side by side, this is going to trigger
ripening in these tomatoes. And here are two more
tips to do this right. When you go to lay your
fruit in a single layer in your cardboard box, you wanna make sure that the
blossom side is facing up because that side ripens first. If you place that at the bottom, it's going to get mushy fast. And another reason why
you have to pay attention to how fast it ripens is because once the ethylene
triggers this ripening in all of the fruit in the
box, it's a one way, no return. Everything's gonna ripen really quickly. So keep an eye on it every day to make sure you don't get
overly ripe fruit in there. - Next hack for you is to chill
out on your tomato planting. Just chill a little bit
because what happens when you plant all these
tomatoes at the same time with roughly the same maturity date? You get way too many tomatoes at once and actually what is a beautiful bounty and a delicious treat in the
garden becomes your nightmare as the tomatoes rot and
get all weird and messed up and you start being sad because
you don't know what to do with all of them. You don't want that. So two different ways to approach this. Number one is my personal favorite way. It's sort of a little clever twist. Get tomatoes with
different days to maturity. So for example, I have sun gold cherries. Cherries, smaller tomato,
grows faster, right? 57 days to maturity on this one. Next up, I've got hybrid
beefsteak, pink-a-licious, 70 days to maturity. I just bought myself two more weeks for these ones to get mature, right? Cherries coming first, two weeks later, I got
these pink-a-licious guys. Next up, Tasmanian chocolate. This guy, I believe, 85 days to maturity. That's another two weeks
and that's 85 days plus. So that's one way to do it. You could plant all those
at the exact same time and they would still ripen successively. The other way to do it. Let's say you just love
pink-a-licious for some reason, it's the only thing you wanna grow. Well, then, stagger your plantings. So go two weeks, two weeks,
two weeks, or maybe a month, something like that. And then you'll actually stagger
out the ripening of a plant that has the same days to maturity. So a couple different ways to
make sure you don't get sick of these juicy tomats. - At the start of the season and especially if your
seedlings have gotten a bit tall and leggy, you may have
come across that hack that if you bury the plant deep, it's gonna be healthy and robust. How does this work? Well it's because the plant stem has all of these adventitious roots ready to turn into roots. So I'm not talking about those fine hairs, which are trichomes, but those bumps actually turn into roots. And when you bury it deep, so let's say about a
third to two-thirds deep, so for this thing, maybe around here, you are going to have roots
that spread and allow the plant to anchor itself into the soil. Not only that, it's
gonna send out more roots to seek out more nutrients and water. And that's how you get a healthier plant. And a quick note for
the cold climate growers who want to try this technique. If you are digging a hole deeper, that means you're accessing colder soil, which is not ideal for
these heat-loving plants. So you wanna grab yourself
a soil thermometer and test it at the bottom of the hole and make sure that it's
at least consistently 55, ideally 60 Fahrenheit before
you plant your plants deep. Another option if you can't go too deep because it's too cold. You can try planting it horizontally, which will give you very similar results. - Our next hack is actually hacking off the top of your tomato plant. So called topping or top pruning, whatever you wanna call it. Sounds like sacrilege, sounds like something you
would never do to a tomato, but there's a couple
compelling reasons to do it. Number one. If you are in a climate
where it's about four weeks until you get a frost, but your tomatoes are still growing up and you have a lot of unripe
tomatoes hanging on the vine. So let's just pretend
that's my situation here. Well, why do I care about
it growing more vertically? I really don't care. It has enough leaves on the
plant that I can come through and snip off all the growing tips, force it to stop growing
vertically and vegetatively, and really force it to think
that the season's coming to a close sooner than it actually is. And it's gonna start
ripening those fruit up a little bit faster. So that would be one reason. The other reason you might wanna top off is let's say I didn't have much more to support my tomatoes with. So they're at this point here. They're on this Florida
weave style trellis with these tea posts and I
don't have anything else, well, I might as well prune off the top instead of letting it flip over. So that's another reason to do it. And then the third reason to top off is just because if you feel
like you have enough tomatoes and you just wanna manicure
and control the space, what'll happen if you top off and it's still early in the season is you'll have another sucker that's growing from down below. It's gonna grow up and sort
of replace your main leader. So a couple different reasons to snip off the tip of your tomatoes. - If you have limited access to full sun or if you have a shorter growing season, then this tip is for you. So with the larger fruiting varieties, so let's picture beefsteak where they're really, really big and they can get over a pound in size, they require more sunlight
in a day to produce fruit when compared to their
smaller fruiting counterparts, like the cherry varieties and also the current size tomatoes. For those large fruiting ones, you want to give them
at least 10 to 12 hours of sunlight per day in order to allow them to produce the fruit that you want. Now, I don't personally
grow those large ones. For my medium-sized ones, I still give them the
sunniest spot that I have. And then for the smaller ones, I have them on the other side of the bed where they still get lots of sun, but maybe a couple hours less per day. And they do just fine. And they still produce a lot of fruit. - I've got a dirty little hack for you if you love a particular tomato, but you don't have enough time
to start another seed of it and you still want more of it. So let's take a look
at this guy right here. I have to say beautiful looking tomatoes. These are dwarf indeterminate tomatoes. We'll probably do a video
on that particular category. It's a fascinating category. However, let's say it's August right now. It actually is August. And I want more of these
and I still have some time, but if I started from seed, I would not have the time at all. But what you can do is just
clone off of this plant. Clone a sucker off. So take a really healthy growing tip. Let's just say maybe this guy right here. It's much like pruning a tomato sucker like I've showed you in multiple videos. So here's what you can do with this. You can water root this by
putting it in a little vase or a little jar, transplanting
that into the garden. You can put it into a fine mix of soil, much like a seed starting mix. Just make sure it's nice and moist. Don't even have to dip
it in rooting hormone. Or if you really just
wanna get going with it, you can just dig out a
little area of your garden and plant it directly
in, firm that soil up. And what you're basically doing here is you're starting a clone of this plant. It's already at this phase instead of starting it from seed. So this probably saves you about two to four weeks of growth. If you have enough time to
get another ripening fruit out of this plant and you
can multiply your harvest, well, it's a great little hack for you. - If you are a space-limited gardener and you wanna grow as many
tomato varieties as you can, this hack is for you. And that is pruning your tomatoes to a single or double leader. Now, there are a lot
of advantages to this. As you could see, this
plant started off as one and split into two main leaders, whereas this plant started as one and then all the way at the top split into multiple other leaders. The advantage of this
is that you could cram way more tomatoes into the same bed. In this case, you could
get away with like 16, 18 inch spacing rather than 24
to 36 if you were to grow it and determine a tomato in,
say, like a Florida weave. So what that means is
that for the same bed, I could fit four tomatoes in
this row instead of just three. It also means that I will get
a lot more tomatoes earlier. The cool thing about this is that since you could
also fit more tomatoes into your same space, you could grow more varieties,
experience more flavors, and actually find your favorite tomato. So if you are limited on space, really consider leading your tomatoes down to one to two leaders. - What if I told you that there
was a way to grow tomatoes without any water at all? If you're familiar with
viticulture or growing grapes, dry-farmed vineyards
are kind of a thing now. They're kind of popular, kind of pop in, same on social media. Well, you can actually
dry farm tomats as well. There's very specific use
case that you can do this in. It's basically just don't water it at all. But how do you actually get away with that without killing off the plant? Well, you're gonna need to be in a climate that has relatively heavy clay
soil or somewhat clay soil and it's a climate
that's somewhat temperate and a climate that gives a decent amount of late winter rain. To hydrate that clay soil, you wanna get a early
producing tomato in the ground right when you can, so
early in the spring, and then hill it up over
time with more of that clay. And the whole point of this is like why would you do this, right? Why would I not water it
when I can just water it and solve the problem? Well, in viticulture, the whole idea there is that you're forcing those grape roots to get down in the soil,
search for nutrients, hunt for them. The flavor's supposed to be intensified as the plant has struggled more. Think about it. If you're just sitting in a little chair and everyone brings
you pizza to your face, you're the guy from "WALL-E". Now, it's kind of the same with plants. If you give them
everything they need 24/7, yeah, they're gonna grow well
and they're gonna look good and that's totally fine. There's a totally different
philosophy to growing things where you purposefully stress them out to produce certain flavonoids
and certain flavors or textures that might
be really advantageous. So something to think about dry farming. Not sure I'm gonna try
it out until next season, but hopefully you got some hacks that actually work in this video. Until next time. Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing. (bright music)
