Complete Comprehensive Guide to Growing Tomatoes - Care, fertilizing, staking, pruning, and MORE!

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my gardener channel i am so excited about today's video and i hope you guys are as well because we're going to be doing a complete comprehensive tomato care guide this is going to be walking you guys through every single thing that we do to our tomatoes because we do get asked all the time luke how do you do it what do you do how do you do it can you walk us through the steps that you that you take every single year to get your tomato plants looking so amazing so that's what we're gonna do we're going to walk you through spacing plant selection fertilizing just miscellaneous care tips and tricks that are going to help your plants stay healthier and produce more we're going to go through it all so stay tuned it's going to be a jam-packed episode i cannot wait let's get into it so the first thing i want to talk about is tomato selection you have determinate and indeterminate tomatoes determinate tomatoes are basically a tomato plant that are determined for size yield things like that you do not want to determine it tomato because we grow in a method called single stemming single stemming means that we take off all these side growths which i'll show you up close in a second and those side growths inevitably will produce a whole other plant essentially those will produce more lateral growth and those will also flower and it becomes more of a bush you don't want to bush because it restricts air flow and it also does not grow upright it does not promote that upward growth it promotes more of a outward bushing growth so to prevent that outward bushing growth we come in here and we prune off all the side shoots keeping it to just a single stem which is where it gets its name single stemming and then what that allows us to do is allows us to support up a single stake which we'll get into that in a little bit as well but that single stake allows us to grow a lot of plants in a small area which also kind of ties into how we grow which is high intensity high intensity is basically relative to how many plants you can fit in a certain space every plant is different with spacing you know tomatoes are a lot different than lettuce a lot different than garlic but in this space here we're essentially getting the maximum amount of tomato plants that you can possibly get without causing stress this allows you to grow far more food in far less space it's a really great method but it's important you go with an indeterminate tomato so that it can so it can be grown like that because an indeterminate tomato will grow all season long a determinate tomato will stop after a certain time because it's all determined it's you know determined how high it gets how much fruit it gives out so once that's done it stops growing and stops producing an indeterminate tomato will produce all season long and since we're using eight foot tall stakes you want a nice long season so you can get a nice long harvest just makes more sense that way so an indeterminate tomato is the first thing you want the next thing we do is fertilize this is a very important step to making sure your plants stay healthy and produce all season long when you're growing in a high intensity setting you have a lot of plants in a small area this means your soil has to be very fertile so we use trifecta plus to make sure that the soil is as healthy and as fertile as it can be it also makes sure that it feeds all season long so we have a lot we have a lot of nitrogen that we get in the beginning that gives us our nice green growth that helps speed up the growth helps get the plant established and then it also has a slow release phosphorus which gives your plant the flowers and the fruit production that you really need it also has a high amount of potassium which helps with fruit set it also has a lot of calcium which helps with blossom end rot that's why we use trifecta plus on well we really use it on everything but we really love it for tomatoes because you're going to see the best you know the best results when using it so that's what we use but again just make sure you're using an all-purpose fertilizer at least something that's really well balanced something that's going to give your plants not just nitrogen but also phosphorus and potassium that way you have a really well-rounded plant you're going to want to fertilize heavily in the beginning right when you plant and then as soon as you start seeing some fruit and flower production it's smart to go back a second time and just give them a little bit of a top dress we'll sometimes go through and we'll give them two or three tablespoons after we start to see some flowers and fruit just to make sure they have enough fertilizer to keep going all season long the next thing that i want to talk about is pruning this is what we get into when we start talking about single stemming this is very very important if you want to grow just like how we grow and that's because we take off all the lateral side growth a lateral side growth can be seen in the armpit of each tomato so coming in close you can check this out because this is very important in identifying what you want to pull off and what you want to keep because you want to essentially keep it to just one main stem everything else can go right here is a tomato plant that's got a lot going on it looks absolutely beautiful don't get me wrong but it's got a lot of side growth this is because we let this one kind of go rogue for this example here you can see there's this stem that looks like a tomato plant there's this stem that looks like a tomato plant there's this stem that looks it's got a tomato plant there's the stem that looks like a tomato plant this den that looks like a tomato plant and so on and so forth there's probably 10 or 15 suckers on this plant and what you don't want is you don't want all of them because if you leave all of these these will all produce whole plants that's why these all look like their own plant because if i take it down to the base you'll see they're all coming from one main stem one main stem is producing all these so why is that well tomato plants produce what's called suckers these suckers are pretty easily pulled off but they look like whole tomato plants that's because they are these will fruit and flower just like a regular tomato plant but you can see if all of those grow not only is energy being divided up between all those plants but also air flow is being really restricted so what we want to do is we want to come in and pull all of those off before we start pulling off stuff willy-nilly though i'm experienced done this before so i know what i'm doing but you want to be able to find what is the main stem and how we do that is we start at the base we start at the base of the plant peel everything back and you're going to see this main stem going up follow that main stem going up all the way up it's going to keep going all the way up and it normally has flowers on it already all of this new growth all these suckers here they can be snapped off pretty easily with a twist on both sides and if they're not mature enough you'll see they don't have any flowers on them if they have flowers on them it's really time to get them to get them gone but generally they won't have any flowers on them because the main growing stem is typically the thing that will be the first to fruit so you're going to have flowers here flowers here and since there's no flowers anywhere else that's pretty much your main stem it's also the most straight growth a lot of times suckers will come out on a 45 degree angle and start growing outwards the main growing stem will be pretty much a straight line from the top to the bottom that's also how you pick your main growing stem because obviously you want to grow it straight up a pole so you don't want something growing on a 45 degree angle so pick your main growing stem and then just start pruning off from there usually like i said these suckers pop off pretty easily but if you get some stubborn ones having a pair of hand pruners helps because you don't want to do damage to the tomato plant come in here and pull those off and as you can see we're really getting to more of a single stem now then what i want to do i got one more down here there we go then what you want to do is you want to prune off this lower foliage this is also very important because you'll see here this stuff is starting to curl and it's got a lot of dirt on it see all that dirt that dirt well soil i guess is the proper term it's got soil on it that soil has soil borne funguses like blight blight is a fungus that will land on the leaves and colonize the surface of the leaves causing those blotches that you see those yellow spots and eventually it's going to kill the plant so we want to do is we want to remove all those leaves and prune the plant up this is going to make sure there's lots of good air flow around the base of the plant and it's also going to ensure that the soil can't splash up on the leaves so we're going to prune it all the way up to the very first flower this seems really drastic this seems really drastic but it's important if you want to keep the leaves off of the soil so here's our first flower here's the last leaf node that comes out and we're good so we pruned up about a foot and a half almost two feet of plant but we're left with this plant up top here that's going to continue growing and that's going to ensure that the plant is off the ground has really good air flow and that's going to keep it disease free almost all season long and if you're worried about wasting these suckers don't worry they actually will grow all new plants all you have to do is make sure you take off the bottom couple leaves stick them in some soil and they'll actually root and produce all new plants so if you want to give someone to friends or sell them at a farmers market no one will even know the difference just make sure they're properly rooted and you'll be fine i like to keep if i'm going to keep some on hand i like to keep a little vase of water so that way they can keep nice and perky and they don't wilt in the in the hot sun i just like to keep them invasive water so they stay hydrated and then i'll move them over to their containers where they can grow and these will be ready to root in about five to seven days they root pretty quick but in our case we have so many that those are actually going to go to the compost pile all right so now let's talk about staking that's the next most important thing because now we've got the tomato pruned up it's ready to stake it up so these are the steaks we use these are eight foot furring strips now it might seem kind of crazy to stick an eight foot tall pole in the ground next to a two foot tall tomato plant but remember you're not staking this tomato plant at two feet tall forever you're staking it up to eight feet tall this tomato plant is going to grow for you for the whole season so you want to prepare for that it's definitely not uncommon for us to actually have to top the tomato plants because they get too tall we've had 10 foot tall tomato plants without even trying before and it's absolutely amazing the amount of tomatoes you get so you want to make sure you have a nice firm foundation to stake them on these are dimensionally one inch by two inches they're very inexpensive as well which is why i love them furring strips are around 1.50 at our local hardware store so they're not going to cost yarmouth and a lag they're really structurally sound we've used the same furring strips for about three or four years now and sure the bottoms rot a little bit but at the end of the day it's really an expensive option how we connect the tomato plant to the furring strip is with stretchy elastic twine this stretchy elastic twine is made by a company called cloud city i'll have links to them in the description box below but it's by far the best method to tying up your tomato plants as you could possibly find we absolutely love this stuff we've been using it now for three years and truthfully we have no reason to go with anything else this stuff stretches so it's easy to cut but it also does not cut into your tomato plant it's one thing you don't want if you don't have something that's not stretchy and elastic it won't grow with the tomato plant so it'll constrict the stem if it constricts the stem it'll crimp it and it can fall over or it can cut off circulation entirely and then it can cause the plant to die so you don't want to do that but also it's stretchy so it actually moves with the wind when the wind blows your tomato plants you want the tomato plant to be able to sway if it sways nothing's going to happen if it can't sway what's going to happen is the material is actually going to cut into the tomato plant because if it's not swaying that pressure from the wind is pushing on the stem and it will actually start sawing into the stem ending up cutting it severing it or making it crimp and fall over you don't want to do that so that's why this stuff is very very inexpensive and it's very amazing to have with your tomato plants the actual intent for this stuff is for like waistband material but you get 300 yards of it for like eight to ten dollars it's really inexpensive really amazing stuff and like i said i'll have a link in the description box below to this there's a lot of other things you can use you can use pantyhose material you can use stretchy tomato tape but at the end of the day this video is about what we do and we've been doing this now for three years and simply cannot find a better way to do it so like i said there'll be a link in the description box below you'll thank me later all right so now what we're going to do is we're going to take the steak and we're going to simply stick it in the ground you guys always ask me luke what do you do to prepare the steak to go in the ground and the answer is nothing i literally just got these from the hardware store right now i just picked them up and they're ready to go in the ground i leave them blunt like this you can cut them on an angle but i don't like to lose any length off these so i just keep them all blunt like that and i just push them into the ground you guys always ask how do you secure them into the ground well i just push them in i don't do anything special i just push them in and i let the weight of the tomato plant secure the basically be the anchor the tomato plant has a root system which is anchored into the ground all it needs is a support stick to go up it so the tomato you'd expect the the the post to be swaying all over the place and it really doesn't and that's because the tomato plant for the most part is pretty strong it just needs direction to go and since this post is straight it keeps your tomato plant growing straight and since the root system is so established on your tomato plants it keeps pretty much right where it's at it doesn't move around that much so just push it into the ground eight inches 10 inches i prefer close to 12 inches if i can if the ground's really soft but if you can't get it that far just make sure it's like eight inches and you'll be fine so we're gonna go over here to this tomato plant and it's really important how we do this that you put it on the inside of the tomato plant this is the outside the outside of the bed it's on the outside of the tomato plant it just makes it a lot easier to maintain tie up and work with if you put the post on the inside of the tomato plant now we don't put the we don't put the tomato plant so close to the post that when we push this in it risks damaging roots you want to make sure that the post is about four or six inches further than the tomato plant is because you want to make sure that if you are going to cut some roots you want to make sure you cut just some small fibrous roots you don't want to cut the main root system of the tomato plant because that's going to cause some stress so all we're going to do stick it here about four to six inches away from the plant make sure it's nice and straight up in the air and simply i just put my body weight on and let it sink in the ground and sometimes you got to push on a little bit but at the end of the day it sinks in it's sinking in if you can get up on a ladder and hit it with a hammer it's obviously going to be far more efficient but at the end of the day this is what we do so there you go now that you've got the stake in the ground it's not in there very far it's about eight inches so it's not that bad all we're going to do is tie it up now so all we're going to do is we're going to take our elastic band here we're going to pull out about 8 10 12 inches or so it doesn't really matter just something you have enough to tire on the plant securely without really having to stretch it nice and hard there take the tomato plant stick it right up along the post here and remember you put the post a little bit further away from from the plant so it's natural that the plant won't be touching the post the whole way but once you get about a foot off the ground the tomato plant should be up right firm to the post this is going to make sure that your plant grows exactly the way that you want it i just tie two knots and we're good to go and cut it again come up here and i like to make sure that i secure it about every foot i'll put a a new string this is because after a while if you let the plant go without any support it will fall over and you don't want to do that so i just like to make sure that i keep it nice and secured and that's fine you'll see here how it it actually can sway with the wind here it's not restricting the stem and it's good to go and at the end of the day this is what your tomato plants should look like they're growing single stem up a steak tied up with elastic twine two feet apart with a nice organic all-purpose fertilizer this is what we do to make sure that our plants are super healthy and produce tomatoes for us all year long now i know you're gonna be asking yourself luke my tomato plants are already looking super raggedy i haven't pruned them they're all over the place what can i do still try it still try single stemming them find that main growth stem pull off all those suckers trim them off with with pruners if you have to but get it to a single stem prune off those lower leaves you have good air flow and i promise you the results will be far better than anything you could ever imagine not only that but it will also taste better it's been it's been proven time and time again that tomatoes will actually create sugars that they can that they generate from the sun so if your tomatoes can have access to sunlight and they're not being blocked by all that bushy foliage your tomatoes are actually going to be sweeter that's how you get sweet flavorful tomatoes is by having tomatoes that can touch the sun so by having a really bushy plant it looks beautiful and you might have a few more tomatoes at the end of the year but you're going to have larger and sweeter tomatoes by growing them this way you're also going to probably get more tomatoes growing this way because you can fit more plants in a given space so at the end of the day that's why this method is one we've stuck with and continue to grow with to this very day so i hope you guys enjoyed i hope you learned something new if you guys have any other questions or comments post them in the comments box below and if you have not yet subscribed make sure to do that it'd be a great idea because we got lots more content coming out so all right i'll catch you guys on tomorrow's episode i hope you guys enjoyed i hope you learned something new and as always this is luke from the emmy gardener channel reminding you to grow big or go home we'll catch you all later see ya bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 516,246

Keywords: MIgardener, vegetable gardening, organic gardening, tomato, growing guide, complete, comprehensive, how to grow, tying tomatoes, tie up tomatoes, trellis, trellising tomatoes, organic tomato, mi gardener, garden tip, tips, tricks, turorial, fertilizing, pruning tomatoes, single stem tomato, fertilizer tomato, care tips, guide

Id: MO5D1Y3sBoI

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2019