How to Grow The Best Tomatoes | Gardening Tips and Tricks

hey YouTube I'm sitting out in my garden and as promised I'm here to give you some tips on growing great Tomatoes it won't take you long to notice that my garden is far from perfect yeah it's pretty awesome I agree with that however I was really tempted because I knew I was gonna shoot this video to come down here and pick off all the little lower leaves that had white and tie everything up and water everything really well so it looked really great but instead I decided to go with a more honest approach I've got 115 tomato plants of all kinds of varieties in this garden and I probably put a little more time into them than a lot of people do however I am NOT babysitting these plants I have got six kids a whole herd full of goats alive hobbies and one of those hobbies is definitely growing tomatoes it's not the only one so I would say I maintain these tomato plants maybe just a little bit above what your average person might but by no means am I taking care of these in any sort of way that is unattainable to just see the average grower I grew tomatoes for the first time probably about 10 years ago in a pot on my front porch it was just like a hybrid plan I'd bought at the Home Center put it in a plastic pot and when the tomatoes came in which there weren't a whole lot of them I was pretty disappointed because the flavor wasn't anything exceptional they tasted a lot like what I was able to get at the store fast forward a few years and I visited a farmers market and whenever we were still living in town and I got a little container of these yellow cherry tomatoes that quite literally changed my life they were amazing they were so sweet they were so good I went back week after week and bought these tomatoes from this farmer and there were sungold so it was the kind of little yellow cherries and then like later I decided I'll grow myself which I got the same variety I put it in the ground and mine didn't taste as good and I thought what is going on here so wildly disappointed with that set me on the journey of doing a lot of research and learning how do you grow great Tomatoes so I'm really excited to share with you guys some of the things that I've learned when it comes to growing great Tomatoes however first I want to cover some basic tomato vocabulary these are just some things you may already know but you might not so I'm just gonna go over really quick some terms that you need to know when talking about growing tomatoes first let's talk about different sizes of Tomatoes here we have what we call a cherry tomato probably something that most people are pretty familiar with in your same classification on grape types which just have a little bit more elongated shape there are current tomatoes which are teensy tiny little things and there are pears which also fall in the classification of a cherry tomato the next size up from cherry tomatoes or what we called salads or salad it's these are generally 2 to 4 ounce fruits they're not large enough to be constituted as slicers but they're definitely more than one bite there are pastes which are typically really meaty varieties using for making sauces and pastes they don't have a lot of seeds or juice and there are slicers these big Tomatoes often called beef steaks beef steak actually originated as it's made a variety and you can still buy yellow beefsteak red beefsteak but at this point that's kind of taken on the same thing as like in the south when somebody says hey do you want to coke it'll actually mean do you want to coca-cola they mean do you want any array of carbonated beverage but it's kind of the same thing with a beefsteak tomato people say that but that originated as an actual strand and now it's kind of just taken over to be a word that's used to describe those big meaty slicers that we love so much for tomato sandwiches there are two other words that come up a lot when you're talking about tomato varieties now it's determinate and indeterminate now what that means essentially is a determinate tomato plant will just keep growing and growing and growing as you can see this plant here has reached the top of my trellis which is quite a bit taller than me so that plants like seven feet tall that's an indeterminate tomato variety a determinate tomato variety is often also called a dwarf and they set a certain and amount of fruit and they don't get real tall you know they only they can get just maybe up to a few feet tall and they stopped growing and when they stopped flowering and they stopped setting for fruit it's kind of the same difference between like a bush bean and a pole bean your indeterminate tomatoes are going to need some sort of support and they will keep going and keep producing as long as you continue to give them support and keep them healthy whereas a determinate tomato variety generally has a shorter season it does find with just maybe a steak some of them don't even need any support but they don't put off the same volume of fruit as you would get from an indeterminate now let's talk about that number on your packet that says days 80 days 55 days 65 days what's it talking about that that number is actually talking about the days to maturity from when you put your seedling in the garden to when you have fruit it is not referring to when you put the seed in the ground it's referring to the seedling in the garden obviously there's a little bit of error in that because you might put a you know three-week old sealant seedling in the garden or you might put a plant that's been growing for two months it's already three feet tall so it's kind of referring more to like a young seedling we're not talking about really mature plants then you have to wait eighty days from when you transplant them I know that I started all of my plants in my greenhouse and they got a pretty slow start around mid-february here in Arkansas we had a lot of overcast days and I started harvesting my first tomatoes about the second week of June the cherries came in first and about a week-and-a-half close to two weeks later the slicer started to come in there are a couple terms that you're probably completely familiar with but you may not be entirely clear on and that's heirloom and hybrid so what constitutes an heirloom an heirloom seed is a plant that has been handed down for generations and generations they generally have really cool stories and they've got a history behind them they're incredible especially if you love stories another wonderful thing is is they a very consistent flavor you know what you're gonna get it's kind of iffy on how old the particular type maybe there are heirlooms that date back into the 1700s but there are also heirlooms that were developed by the Heinz company for tomato sauce and you know 60 or 70 years ago some people agree that particular variety has to be at least fifty years old to be considered an heirloom some people say it should be a hundred that's kind of up in the air basically what you need to know is that an heirloom tomato variety has been bred through the years and handed down generation after generation and that particular plant has stayed the same so what's a hybrid now a lot of times we read about hybrids being bad now don't freak out yet just hear me out there are definitely some shady things going on in big AG when it comes to hybridization of plants there's another classification of hybrids and there's one term that makes all the difference open pollination you have to understand that by Nature the term hybrid it just means cross I can make a hybrid here in my garden by taking a couple of plants and cross pollinating them and whatever I got from that that mix of those two heirloom parents it would be a hybrid that would be an f1 hybrid so it's not stabilized it takes it takes several generations of breeding a plant in order to get a stabilized hybrid but that's how new varieties are made every single heirloom in this garden came because either on accident or on purpose somebody crossed some plants so when you go shopping for seeds understand that what you're looking for and that is the most important thing is that you're looking for open pollinated varieties which means that the seeds can be saved therefore it is a sustainable plant I have a philosophy when it comes to farming and I apply it from everything from tomatoes to my animals just all across the board anything that I'm trying to nurture could grow it said if you want to grow something learn how it grows without you you have to understand what tomato plants that the way we grow them which is to put them in the ground have one start growing out stake them up that's actually not how tomato plants grow if you go drop a seed off in you know the the yard and just let it go you see all these little nubs that's because tomato plants actually will grow roots from every part of their stalk that touches dirt because if you understand when a plant is growing its goal is not to make you the delicious tomato sandwich its goal is to spread it seed which means these plants grow into massive things when allowed to sprawl along the ground but the fruit is almost always worthless by the time it gets to the point that we want to eat it because it's laying there on the ground and so all kinds of critters come and and eat the fruit they take the seed with them leave them in their droppings the tomato plants goal is reached but we don't get any sandwiches out of it so what we do my actually staking a tomato plant making it grow up right so we can pick the fruit at optimum ripeness is completely against nature and that to me it's very freeing to understand that means that when things start to go wrong it's just because I'm trying to make that tomato plant do something that it doesn't want to do it's not that I'm a bad gardener so I just have to be on the offensive and learning what it is exactly that that plant needs to grow against nature as effectively as possible okay let's talk about some of the things that can go wrong with your tomato plants I did tell you that I was going to be honest about my garden so I'm going to show you some things that I see right now that are problems and as you can see I shooting a YouTube video instead of freaking out about these things so clearly I'm not that worried about it one of the things that you see is leaf curl this just means your plant is stressed and in this case my plants need to be watered we have had very very hot days I did not water yesterday because we had just gotten rain but I will water in the morning so I'm not freaking out about it right now some of them are not stressed out but some of them are really starting to show some signs of stress but it's okay there are all kinds of issues that come in the form of wilts and spots as you can see here now I really don't have time today to go into this in depth so I will tell you that there is a little bit of that and it's going to be a little bit normal but you always want to keep an eye out for plants that are wilting or showing a lot of spotting because a lot of times you can catch blight early on but really there are a lot of pictures online and any time that I've had stuff like that come up you know I've searched I've looked through it you can't always troubleshoot it but I am going to tell you a couple things that you can do to try to keep your plants healthy one of the very important factors in the health of your tomato plant is spacing and and the second is pruning now the big thing that tomato plants need is they need to be they need to not be left moist and they need airflow which you know if you're getting a lot of rain then a lot of times if there's not airflow it can Harbor a lot of moisture that's where bacteria comes in and you get sick plants a will sir oblige can knock your tomato plants out really fast so airflow is very important last year I planted my plants way too close together and I did not prune them and I lost all my tomato plants pretty early on in the season however you can see this year we've got them spaced out 24 inches apart which is still fairly close together but we have pruned heavily you can see all the lower branches have been snipped off and me this particular plant is print to two main vines here and that has made a world of difference in the health of these plants another thing is you do not want to water your tomato plants from overhead because of the fact that they are so susceptible to funguses and blights that is just asking for trouble now obviously it's going to rain you want it to rain and you can't control that however be aware after you get a heavy rain to come out make sure there's air flue you know prune out some branches if you need to so after the rain is when the blight is the most likely to set in if you're watering your plants do it from the bottom soaker hoses are your friends with tomatoes if you're going to water come through and water along the bottom of the plant to try to avoid a bunch of water splashing up or coming down from overhead mulching is also very important with tomatoes because it keeps water and any sort of you know splash back from happening when it does rain or when your plants are being watered it helps keep keep this lower area of the plants dry which is the area that is most susceptible to blight lower branches are pretty much always always going to get sick on Estimator plant as you can see here I've got a couple that are hanging down and they're starting to wilt these are just it's just pretty typical here's a branch that fell I'll tie that back up but as you can see the parts that we're hanging down starting to wilt wilt wilt this is why you see so much of the bottom of our plants is just completely print that is the best way to keep your plants healthy there's also just the reality that some varieties are just more prone to sickness than others you learn that after growing them and that's why you end up with favourites brandywine's are actually one of the most popular tomato varieties they have a huge following people love them and they are notoriously hard to keep healthy I've got a couple brand new ones down on the end they're already starting to show some blight I might have to pull them out halfway through the season but I like them so I grow them anyway you just tend to learn those things some sometimes you can find descriptions when you're buying your seeds people will say you know this was really resilient I didn't get any sickness out of it and the other thing is is that's also going to vary so much by your climate I can tell you one of my favorite tomatoes to grow is dr. which ease yellow this thing is a beast it grows big beautiful fruits this one's pretty cat face we should tell you what that means in a second but I don't deal with a lot of blight in these I don't deal with a lot of wilt I really like dr. Richie another one that I'm growing this year for the first time but I'm really enjoying is called climbing triple crop if you've been watching my videos for a little while you've heard me say quite a lot about it and I'm starting to get a little bit of coloring on the leaves where I think it might be getting a little yucky but so far it's produced so many big healthy fruits that I will continue to grow it again and again thank look at this tomato massive ok let's talk about a couple of other terms that you might hear or wonder what's going on with your tomatoes whenever you see it ok cat facing this is something that you see that is very typical of heirlooms and this is caused by a ciated blossom they see any blossoms are essentially where multiple Savannah blossoms have fused together to make one kind of super blossoms now this can range anywhere from mild like this one to extreme where you have 10 blossoms stuck together but what it results in is cat-faced Tomatoes which essentially is like malformation because of having multiple Tomatoes fused together now in and of itself it's harmless you can still eat these however these pockets where what would have been the inside of the tomato is exposed and hardened those can Harbor rot in a lot of times what you end up with is a really oddly shaped fruit that you have to cut away a lot of your fruit probably one of the most disappointing things in tomato growing is seeing a bright red fruit hanging on the vine your mouth starts watering you go pick it and turn it over just to discover that it has blossom end rot blossom enright is caused by lack of calcium in your now a lot of terms that can be a calcium deficiency in the soil which can be remedied by putting things like eggshells in your soil but that takes almost a year to break down some people suggest putting tums in your soil as a quick calcium fix in case of emergency I have tried that this year and I seem to be doing better because this is one of the plants that has blossom and rot that did not get tums and most of the ones that did get tums seem to be doing well but that's still anecdotal I'm not a hundred percent sure a lot of people argue that the science of that is faulty either way one thing that is agreed to clump on across the board is that blossom end rot can be caused by by over watering because it keeps your plant from being able to absorb the calcium so this is another thing that's fixed by moderate regular watering I don't have any tomato hornworms to show you because we hunt for ours at night by using a backlight which absolutely does work however I can show you here that there damage is pretty recognized tomato hornworms can wipe out a plant in just a matter of a day or two you'll come across a plant and you'll see long areas where the branches are just completely stripped of leaves the backlight tip has been a lifesaver for my garden this year even though you see here I still have a little bit of hornworm damage because we went a couple of days without diligently checking for them we have been able to avoid most of the crop loss that I have experienced in years past because of hormone another issue you may see on your Tomatoes is cracking another thing that can be pretty harmless but can also cost you your fruit because again this exposes the plant to places that may rot and also it's not beautiful sometimes it can cause places that are inedible a lot of times like in this case it makes for an ugly tomato but it's completely edible because these areas have scabbed over cracking is caused by too much water or really more specifically too much water too fast after not enough water what I'm getting to is that regular watering is really important for your tomato plants now sometimes it's gonna be out of your control my tomato plants looks awesome until about a week ago and we got a ton of rain all at once and I'm gonna be honest I wasn't complaining about the rain because I was sick of watering my garden however it did mess up my tomatoes a little bit most of them are still fine the thing with tomatoes is is they actually benefit from being watered every few days really deeply rather than a quick watering every day if you water deep it actually allows your plants to grow deeper roots which makes her stronger plants the other thing is is it helps tremendously when it comes to your flavor you see I like to wait until my plants show the first signs of stress from being under water just barely leaf curling now I wouldn't want to wait until they were all wilted because then when I watered my plants I would get some serious cracking in the fruit however a little bit of stress is actually not a bad thing when it comes to Tomatoes which brings me to the topic of flavor excuse the outfit change its actually the next morning so let's talk about flavor okay let's talk about how we experience taste because that's a pretty important thing to have a baseline for if we're going to start talking about growing for flavor now humans experience taste in one of five ways they're saltiness sweetness sourness bitterness and umami that was named and discovered by scientists in Tokyo in 1908 which we would typically say savory that's what Mommy is that's that experience of savory taste now scientifically what you're experiencing whenever you taste umami is glutamates most often which are high in foods like brats smoked fish fermented foods and ripe tomatoes it's actually what is being mimicked whenever MSG is added to food so ripe tomatoes are one of the highest carriers of umami flavor knowing exactly what makes tomatoes taste certain ways means that in your growing practices you can sometimes play on those things and bring out the positive flavors however there are some things about different kinds of tomatoes that are just genetic for instance red tomatoes are typically higher in acid therefore this is where you're going to get your more intense and classic tomatoey flavors reds and pinks yellows and oranges however they are higher in sugars and so this is where you get more of your fruity floral and very sweet notes black tomatoes which this one is just a little bit under ripe so it looks very green but even when they are right a lot of times they have very green shoulders black tomatoes things like black creme paulrobinson black from Tula these are higher in and mommy so you're gonna have much more savoring it so a lot of times people describe them as smoky same things with the blue and purple tomatoes that have become popular in recent years now these are colored by the presence of anthocyanins that's what brings that blue in some it shows up in the leaves the fruits that aren't exposed to the Sun are gonna have more of that coloring and these are also high in amami flavor so they are more savory and often described as smoky and they have more intense kind of acid than that rather than sweetness of a Sun Gold which would be a small yellow cherry when it comes to tomato flavor size absolutely matters now on a slicer you're going to have way more meat to seed pulp and skin ratio see inside the pulp and the seed this is where most of the glutamates are carried in your tomato that's where our savoriness comes from but also where most of the saponins are carried now these are so quite chemicals it's the reason why some people experience cilantro very differently from others so in your cherry tomatoes that's why a lot of times you bite one inside whoa that was bitter or whoa that was a really really savory and really really intense that's because there's such a great ratio of the pulp and seeds in this little guy rather than here where there's way more meat there for way more sugar one thing that you'll be told whenever you start growing tomatoes is nitrogen nitrogen nitrogen if you go into the store looking for any sort of tomato specific fertilizer they're typically going to be really high in nitrogen because that does cause plants to grow big and healthy and put off a lot of fruit but the thing is is that if you over nitrogen your plants it does take a hit in the flavor and you end up with a whole lot of fruit that doesn't have the full potential of what its flavour could be molasses is your friend when it comes to fertilizing your Tomatoes put a few tablespoons into a gallon of water pour it along the soil you can put in a spray bottle and spray the leaves which helps them soak up those nutrients has a lot of beneficial minerals and it's high in potassium which offsets some of the excess nitrogen you don't give up on nitrogen your Tomatoes absolutely need it but add in some molasses and what that does is that raises the like pain it helps with the sugars and it brings you a better flavor to your to your crop of tomatoes I mentioned earlier a little bit of stress is not bad for your plans actually it's very good for your Tomatoes to experience a little bit of stress that's because whenever your plants are under attack or they're in a situation where they go into essentially survival mode it ramps up the production of certain chemicals and in a lot of cases these chemicals are the aromatics the fragrances and the flavors that we experience as being positive things so if you go through and for instance spray your tomato plants with an aspirin spray it would be like one aspirin into an 8 ounce spray bottle you dissolve it in there and go through and spray your plants the soliloquy and mimics it's actually a plant hormone and what it does is it tricks your plants into believing that they're under attack and so they ramp up those chemicals to ward off their attacker but really what they're doing is backing your Tomatoes full of amazing flavor not only does it bump the flavor it also pumps the nutrient content vitamin C goes up really high and it makes your plants stronger if they never have any sort of stress they typically are going to be more weak however whenever you mimic this stress what happens is you have a much stronger plant and then if your plant actually does get attacked by real bugs it's got that the defense is already in place to be able to ward them off another huge factor in the flavor of your Tomatoes is your watering practices unfortunately over watering Tomatoes completely wrecks their flavor if you've ever had a big juicy tomato you couldn't wait to bite into and whenever you tasted it it was just completely watered down and flavorless it probably came from either too much watering or too much watering recently the best time to harvest your tomatoes is in the afternoon the hottest time of the day when those sugars and that tomato are going to be the most concentrated and please for the love of all that is tasty do you not get your tomatoes in the refrigerator they continue to develop the aromatic compounds that cause their flavor for days after they're picked off the vine in fact some of their flavors are being evaporated into the air so they continue to develop those unless you put the refrigerator in which is that's all of it and their flavor tanks don't refrigerate your Tomatoes they last for a few days on the on the counter they do continue to ripen so you do need to use them but just use them when they're good instead of putting them in the refrigerator and making them taste like store Tomatoes I really hope this helps you guys grow the tomatoes of your dreams until next time [Music]

Channel: Roots and Refuge Farm

Views: 2,935,246

Keywords: gardening, growing tomatoes, gardening tips, tomato growing tips, growing your own food, growing food, sustainability, tomato problems, tomato tips, tomato fertilizer, heirloom gardening, organic gardening, homesteading, homesteading family, homesteading vlog, vertical gardening, how to grow tomatoes, how to grow food, how to garden

Id: AMlxoBuqObA

Length: 28min 23sec (1703 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 29 2018