Grow Amazing Tomatoes In Containers 🍅 (COMPLETE GUIDE)

in today's video I'm going to show you everything you need to know about how to grow great tomatoes in containers it all starts with choosing the right variety so over here in my Greenhouse I've been starting seeds since winter time and I have quite a few different options here now when it comes to growing in containers you are limited by the size of the container your ability to support and trellis those tomatoes so let's talk about the different types of tomatoes and which ones are going to be easier and which ones might be a little bit more challenging when it comes down to it the two most basic types of tomatoes that you will encounter are determinate AKA bush tomatoes and indeterminate AKA binding Tomatoes a determinate tomato is growing into a determined period of time at which point it sets all of its Tomatoes pretty much at once not usually literally all at once but maybe over like a month period an indeterminate tomato grows for an indetermined amount of time so it could set fruit continuously I've had them growing from March all the way out until November they could get over 12T tall and even bigger if you let them so those are going to be a little bit more challenging to growing tomatoes cuz you're going to run out of space at some point and the container is simply going to have a hard time holding enough water now there is another option which is very interesting called the dwarf tomato these are tomatoes that are like indeterminates they can make big Tomatoes even so the dwarf isn't about the fruit it's about how it actually grows these Tomatoes will cap out at 5 to 6 fet they'll have branching much more regularly than a standard tomato which might have a branch like every 6 in they'll have a branch every 3 in so it's much more dense easier to contain in a container and that's probably going to be your best bet we actually have an example of a dwarf sort of determinate tomato right down here in this grow bag which I can show you right now I believe it's called the Cherry Falls and it's a yellow style tomato so right here you could see it's setting a prolific amount of fruit there are so many fruit branches and trusses and it's very small for the amount of fruit that it's setting at this point that is why it is semi dwarf and it's why it's very convenient for going in containers right here I have them just growing in a 5 gallon bag but how do you know what size container is best well that's what we're going to talk about next now that we understand the different types of tomatoes it's perfect time to talk about what are the ideal container sizes for those the patio Choice tomato which is the one that I showed you in the greenhouse there is quite perfect in a 5 gallon bag it's perfectly capable of setting a bunch of flowers fruit grow just fine even in the smaller limited amount of soil so what happens when you go up in container size once you get up to 10 gallons you do have physically more soil and by having more soil that means it's much easier to actually water the more soil you have the longer it takes to dry out so if you have something like a 10g b B you could go watering every one or every other day in the summertime you for sure will be watering at least once a day but the 5 gon bag in the summer you're probably going to have to water twice a day if you want your tomato to truly Thrive that is why whenever I go up to a indeterminate tomato I like to stick to a 15 gallon size 15 gallons of soil is going to give you a lot of water buffer it's going to allow that plant to grow for many months without getting fully root bound and it's just going to Simply carry more nutrients in there as well so 10 gallons is what I would choose for something like this determinate tomato so something that isn't going to grow for too long and isn't going to get too ridiculously large and then a 15 gallon bag is what I would recommend if you're going with an indeterminate tomato now let's talk about the different options of containers the most popular I'd say by far is a grow bag for growing tomatoes the advantage of using a grow bag for something like tomatoes is that they're very cheap to get a bunch of they're easy to put away in store at the end of the season and they actually are capable of breathing which lets those roots really Thrive it's a lot harder to overwater your plants in but it can actually be very easy to underwater your plants that's why when I'm am actually choosing a grow bag I am choosing one that has a lined inside this is actually our own epic grow bags here and what we've done is we've added a double liner to the top portion of the bag this will keep the water in there you know like when you go water your grow bag and the water just spurts out the sides that's not going to happen in here it's actually going to be able to go down into the soil now if you don't like growing grow bags for whatever reason a plastic pot is perfectly suitable the downsides of these is that if they get overwatered it could be quite hard for it to recover because there is no breathing in here there's no way for it to evaporate it can only lose water from the top or from the plant taking it up and then any extra water maybe will drip out the bottom so these are cheap but I find that they're a little bit more challenging than they're worth and so that is why I prefer doing grow bags so now that we understand the different container options let's talk about what soty is in this video we will be planting determinate and indeterminate tomatoes I already have my determinate bag full and when it comes to Det terminate Tomatoes you don't have to go too crazy with the soil they're just growing for about 3 months setting their fruit and then they're done and you could reuse that soil for something else but for indeterminate tomatoes they might be growing for something like 6 months I like to go with the highest quality soil I could get locally this is one of the options here Edna's best potting soil but anything from Fox Farms is always going to be a good option as well so when it comes to a 15gal bag one of these 1.5 cubic foot bags of soil should be plenty and now what you're looking for is really just a quality soil something that you've used in the past so had good success with should be just fine for your plants so all I'm going to do here is take this and flip it in to my Lin 15g grow bag it's actually as standing how much soil 15 Gallons truly is so what I've done here is I filled it almost all the way to the top and what I like to do with my indetermined tomatoes is actually top it off with some compost so right here is some of my compost and saving up and it doesn't matter if you put it on top all this is going to do is slowly feed your tomato plants through the season it's also going to help retain some of that water at the top where it likes to evaporate the most but we will be talking about fertilizing and mulching once we get these tomatoes in the ground so we've got our pots full of soil let's get the planting we have our containers full of soil ready to plant so let's get right into it the first one is going to be the determinate tomato I actually went out and purchased this one from the nursery this morning and when it comes to planting tomatoes there's a lot of different ways of doing it I'd say for determinate Tomatoes don't bother trying to go too deep I know the classic example is that you should always plant your Tomatoes as deep as possible I think I think you still get some benefit in a container it's not going to be quite the same as in ground the nice thing about a container is that the soil will be much warmer all the way throughout whereas if you went too deep in ground you could actually pot your tomato into very cold soil which would slow its growth so in a container while you can go a little bit deep I'm not going to try to bury any of these uh suckers that are down here I want to keep every single branch on the determinate tomato because a determinate tomato is not going to set infinite branches like a indeterminate would so if I buried and remove some of these suckers down here it would be literally removing my Harvest later on we'll talk more about that when we get into pruning but that's all I'm going to say about planting the determinates now for indeterminate tomatoes we're going to do a little bit of pruning here cuz I do want this to be a little bit deeper especially since we have a bigger container we could get away with planting it deeper and letting it root more aggressively so I'm going to trim off these lower suckers and then now what I'm going to do is bury it up to this point so this is our 5-in pot and I've been growing this tomato in this for not too long so you could see that the roots are not fully wrapped around every part of the soil block here but it is all the way to the bottom and that's exactly what we're looking for so I'm going to go ahead and bury it right up to that first Branch now with indeterminate tomatoes every one of these branches if you remove them it's not a big deal cuz they will keep going for an indeterminate period of time so let's go ahead and put this so that it's slightly deep but not crazy nothing crazy here one of the benefits of burying the Tomato slightly deep too is that by burying it deep you're giving it some Anchorage now this stem is supported underground it's less likely to flop over and it should be a slightly more robust resilient tomato that's all it really takes for planting tomatoes so now let's talk about some companion planting options fertilizing and mulching when growing in containers I do still companion plant but I try to choose them very carefully so I usually do like a dwarf marold or more often than not I almost always just do an alysum these tend to not get very large they tend to Bush and trail out of the container rather than overtake the entire planting area what I'm going to do here is just come to the edge of the pot I don't want to go right up on the wall but just right on the edge there I'm going to put one in the determinant tomato the determined tomato is not going to grow for that long so I don't feel like it's going to outcompete it over the long run whereas with the indetermined Tomato I have no idea how long I'm going to be growing this for it could be 6 months like I mentioned so I'd rather just leave it as a tomato at this point now regardless of how I end up trellising my tomatoes I almost always like to start every single one with a simple Bamboo Steak going right up against the main stem this does a couple things first of all it gives you some guaranteed rigidity to this tomato plant it also guarantees that at least part of that tomato is going to be growing straight vertical cuz a lot of times what happens is even if you have a good trell system if you don't support your Tomatoes at the early stage they'll tend to like flop over to one side and then you have to battle to bring it back up so I just always recommend starting with a bamboo steak at the beginning to make your life easy so I have the steak in all I'm going to do now is take a little bit of this cotton twine and tie it Loosely with plenty of room here so that the Tomato stem can grow and fill in that space over time and just keep it attached close to this Bamboo Steak so all this is really doing again is keeping that tomato vertical it's not necessarily going to be the actual tring solution although you can do it with bamboo staks but you're probably going to need about four or five bamboo staks to fully support a tomato like this and actually before I mulch or even tie this one up let's talk a little bit about pruning when it comes to pruning tomatoes generally the one thing I like to do is prune any tomato leaf that's low enough that it's rubbing against the bottom so this one here I'm going to go ahead and just prun off just like that so now we have all the leaves off the ground let's go ahead and mulch it for the bag over here I'm going to go ahead and use this Garden straw it's really nice stuff cuz it's easy to spread in containers and all this is really going to do for us over this time scale is simply keep our watering needs a little bit lower by having mulch here it'll stop the primary evaporation from coming up over the top of the bag and it should lock that moisture in for just a couple extra hours every day maybe get you from one day watering to every other day watering for the 15 gon grow bag I'm actually going to be using one of our new products which is a plantable fabric mulch that is basically just made out of a grow bag so this is like having a grow bag go all the way around your plants it's designed for the 15 gallon bags so for this example here I'm not even worried about these tomato leaves rubbing on the soil because they're not rubbing on the soil they're just simply rubbing on more grow bag material what this is going to do is provide me a mulch that I could use season after season it should lock quite a lot of moisture in there but it should still allow me to water from above just fine so we have our primary support structure in we have our mulch down now let's talk about finally supporting and trellising these Tomatoes when it comes to Growing DET terminate Tomatoes cages are actually quite nice now tomato cages are something I almost never use in my garden because it's hard to find ones that will work for in the terminate Tomatoes but this is our new offering here it's a square cage this is going to be great for peppers for eggplants for tomatoes spe specifically determinate tomatoes because they're not going to get that big and outgrow my trus so this is a little bit tight for the 10 gon grow bag but since I'm growing a determinate tomato actually does fit totally fine and it's nice and tight which means that it's not going to tip over and I'm actually going to have a lot of space here for that tomato to fill it out so there's the first level we'll slide on the second one and this this size cage I don't remember how tall it is I think it's 4T is more than enough height for a determined tomato they're not going to really grow up much past this even if they do they could just Trail off over the top here and that's totally fine for something like a determinate tomato so there we go that's all we have to do for the determinate now over the course of this growing habit all we're going to do is make sure the branches are leaning on the edges here instead of flopping out if the stem keeps growing vertically we'll tie it to this Bamboo Steak but we're not going to do any pruning of any branches except unless maybe the tomato leaves lick a little bit sad and that's it for the determinate tomato so now how are we going to solve the indeterminate there are quite a few options so let me go grab a couple things and I'll show you what I like to do the first example here is a similar 15-gallon grow bag with the fabric mulch but this tomato has been growing for quite a few weeks now and what I have done is as you could see I have the central Bamboo Steak to keep everything as vertical as I can but once it starts branching like this one has it's time for the cage to do its work so this is a Texas tomato cage that's the name of the company these are really the only properly sized tomato cages in my experience for growing in the termined tomatoes they're big enough they're strong enough cuz they're made out of steel and it simply will outgrow this at some point but even at that point I could just get rid of the tomato and start a new one so Texas tomato cage probably your best bet for IND terminates if you want a pre-made product but there are a lot of other options that are much cheaper one of the things that I've done in the past for my container tomatoes is that I would build a simple structure just out of cheap wood these are tree staks with a 2x3 this whole build costs maybe like 12 or 15 bucks and then you hang a net on it and you could put four tomatoes underneath it one tomato every 2 ft and all you have to do now is as the Tomato grows you simply take your tomato and you weave it underneath the net every once in a while and what happens is that it gets all wrapped up in this net and that's going to act as a support over time now if you can't fold it through you could also just tie it to the net using a piece of string or you could use one of those pre-made tomato clips as well this is a great way to grow a lot of tomatoes regardless of where you live you don't even need ground to do it I'm just putting it here for an example you could put these in like a bucket of concrete and build a simple little structure to put all all your Tomatoes underneath so Nets work great there's also the string method which I could show you with some that I have in ground so similar to The Grow bag placed on the net you do need a structure for this one but once you have that structure you could tie a string to it drop it down to the ground and either staple it into the ground or bury it and then as your tomato is growing all you're going to do is take your plant wrap it around the string and that's how it's going to be supported for its entire growth now the downside of this is that you could really only support a single branch on a single piece of string so you do have to be on top of pruning and removing suckers or else the whole thing will break because this string can really only hold one branch at a time so now we've covered a couple trellising options and I wanted to actually Circle back to something I forgot to mention which is fertilizer fertilizer is actually something I would say is basically required for growing tomatoes in containers remember these are limited to whatever nutrients are in that soil in this container and that is it they don't have access to anything else they can't just keep sending Roots into the Earth looking for more nutrients so what we're going to do is take some organic slow release fertilizer basically all granular organic fertilizers are slow release because they're basically made out of ingredients that break down into nutrients over time then I'm going to just sprinkle it across the top here brand doesn't really matter honestly just go ahead and try to find a good organic one that you like and then what I'm going to do next is simply scratch it into the surface of the soil a little bit cuz we don't want it sitting on the top we want it mixed into the soil so it could break down get hit by water and incorpor itself into the soil so once we do that we could go ahead and and add our mulch back on that's the nice thing about this it's very easy to sort of remove and mess with the soil and then we could water it so at the beginning when this is still dry it will sit on the surface a little bit more but once this gets the water into it it will now start actually draining deep into that soil so that's it for the fertilizer at the beginning we'll talk a little bit about mature plants but now let's do this one same idea determinate Tomatoes also need fertilizer maybe not as much as an indeterminate but they definitely will benefit from it as well now you can add too much fertilizer and if you do add too much fertilizer what will happen is you'll end up with aits you'll end up with a lot of leaf growth and actually less fruit so don't go crazy on the fertilizer a little bit at the beginning is great and then I'll show you what I like to do to my tomatoes once they're established inside my Greenhouse we now know how to start growing tomatoes in containers and get them established but what do you do once your tomato has actually begun to grow so first of all let's talk about fertilizer when it comes to an established plant I like to use a liquid fertilizer so here this tasty Brown shot of liquid Joy is full of delicious nutrients for this tomato so I'm going to just drop it into here it could be any liquid fertilizer honestly it doesn't have to be one that says Tomatoes it could just be a allpurpose or plant or fruiting whatever it doesn't matter so I have it mixed into my water all you need to do now is take this come to the base of your plant and you'll see that wonderful color of the water turn brown and just give it a nice healthy dose all the way around just follow the instructions on the bottle and this is going to give nutrients to the tomato right away so it doesn't have to wait for all those organic uh granular fertilizers to break down over time it could simply pull these nutrients straight out of the water and it will sit in the soil as well for a little bit of time to feed this plant over those coming days now the next thing I want to talk about is what you looking at here is that I originally had a small trellis that has very much so been outgrown by this tomato so now I started adding steaks I have a bamboo steak there I have another steak there I'm just tying off whatever I can to whatever is around it so when it comes to chising tomatoes you could get crazy with it I'm going to keep adding bamboo steaks into this until I feel like I got enough Tomatoes but the other thing I want to talk about is you'll notice that at the lower part there's basically no leaves left and that's totally normal this is what happens to a tomato as it gets old the leaves start to get disease I can actually see some right here I have a little bit of powdery mildew it's these little white dots that appear on the leaf this will eventually overtake the leaf stop it from photosynthesizing and the plant will slowly start to Die the basic idea is that once a tomato cluster has set fruit all the leaves below it are probably going to get removed cuz they're old and they're going to be more prone to disease so that's the basic idea of why this looks the way it does now let's talk about watering once the plant is this big and it has this much fruit you will have to water it every single day if you do not what you'll end up with is Blossom and rot so a lot of people will take their hose like this and maybe do like 5 Seconds of water that is not enough water you want to put this on here for at least 10 to 15 seconds maybe even 30 seconds maybe maybe even until water is coming out the bottom of the bag in the summertime when you have a plant with this many leaves and this much fruit it's going to just simply need a lot of water which is why I said at the beginning you want to go with a bigger bag so you don't have to water quite as often but that's basically it prune any old leaves to allow air flow make sure you're feeding it over time and you water it plenty of water especially once it's fruiting and you're into the depths of Summer now you know everything you need to know about growing tomatoes in containers but if you want a full guide on pruning check out this video over here good luck in the garden and keep on going

Channel: Epic Gardening

Views: 117,482

Keywords: epic gardening

Id: 6cLZKr1VXfA

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2024