How to Grow Tomatoes, Complete Growing Guide

what's going on growers it's james pigeoni coming to you live from jersey 10 years of growing tomatoes has led to this today me and tucker are going to show you how to grow your own tomatoes in your backyard let's go tomatoes are one of the most rewarding crops to grow in the garden and there's thousands of varieties everything ranging from beef steaks to small cherry tomatoes there's even colors like yellow orange red white even blue so our tomatoes are bred for specific reasons we have tomatoes that are good for slicing like our big beef steak tomatoes one of my favorite ones of those are the saldaki tomatoes so perfect for sandwiches some tomatoes are also bred for things like salads and snacking those are a lot of our little cherry tomatoes one of my favorite of all time of those is the sun gold cherry and then we have what are called paste tomatoes these are perfect for things like cooking canning and making juices when it comes to growing tomatoes one of the toughest and also one of the most fun things about them is trying to choose which variety of tomatoes to grow and if this is your first year you could pick up some plants that are already started at your local nursery or your local big box store they're typically going to have some hybrids that do well for your local environment but if you want to tap into the thousands of tomato varieties out there all the incredible different kinds then you're gonna have to start your own tomatoes from seed later on in the video i'll go into detail of where i like to get my seeds from and more about variety selection but for now let's get into the actual act of planting the tomatoes growing them and so we can get closer to harvesting after we choose which varieties of tomatoes we want to grow the next thing to do is start prepping and planting generally it's suggested to plant your tomato seeds about six to eight weeks before your last expected frost date this way your plants can get relatively large before it starts to get too nice out but if you're a new gardener then i suggest that you don't plant your tomatoes any earlier than six weeks before your last expected frost date sometimes planting too early can be as big of a hassle or even more than planting too late so the secret is to actually record in your garden journal when you're transplanting your tomatoes into the ground this way the following years you can reference that and then count back the weeks of when you should plant your seeds specific to your location when starting seeds i prefer using a good quality seed cell one that will last a couple years and when it comes to potting mixes i like a good organic one my favorite potting mix of all time is happy frog soil and when we're getting our potty mix ready to use into the cells we want to make sure that it's damp we don't want it to be dry and we don't want it to be soggy just damp if you may need to just add a little water to yours and mix it up to get that good damp consistency because again we don't want that dry soil going into those blocks when i fill my blocks up my seed sales what i like to do is kind of shake them up just a little bit to make sure all the soil settles to the bottom i don't want to push or force the soil into there just shake it up and let it go in naturally after they're full i just dust the top off and then my seeds are actually ready to be planted into the cell so what i like to do is just to take like the back of a pen or something or the back of a marker because tomatoes like to be planted about a quarter inch deep so i'll just make a depression about a quarter inch deep with the back of a pen then i'll go around and just place all my tomato seeds right into there then just lightly cover it up with a little bit of soil after that i do a light watering just to help settle the soil down and also to help fill any air gaps that might have been there after that i take my plastic little plastic greenhouse cover and cover up my seed cell what this does is create the greenhouse effect so there's higher humidity and my the top of my soil doesn't dry out too quickly the tomato seeds that we planted will germinate based on the temperature of the soil for instance if the soil is about 75 to 85 degrees fahrenheit the tomato seeds will only take about a week to germinate but if your temperature of the soil is like 60 degrees fahrenheit then your tomato seeds will take up to two weeks to germinate so what i like to do is try to create ideal conditions for germination what i do is after i have my whole cell planted i'll leave that cell inside and underneath my seed cell i'll put a heating mat i don't leave this heating mat on all the time but i like to just keep it under underneath it to try to raise that soil temperature to about that 85 degrees then after about five days i'll check on my seedlings and if i start to see some of the seedlings bending out of the soil then i'll bring that tray into the greenhouse what i like to do is bring that tray in the greenhouse before my seeds actually pop out of the soil because if they pop out of the soil when they're in the house in a relatively dark spot then those seedlings are going to get really weak and leggy and that's what i'm trying to avoid if you don't have a greenhouse like i do you can start your seedlings on like a south facing window in your house just know that you may need some supplemental lighting if you want some strong and sturdy plants to make sure my tomato plants are strong and sturdy what i like to do is before they even pop up i'll bring them into the greenhouse and once they're out of the ground i'll make sure the temperatures are in the high 50s low 60s i'll also make sure i have a fan consistently on my young seedlings this helps make them strong and sturdy also helps mimic the wind and what they're used to at this stage you want to make sure you're not drowning your plants you want to make sure they have adequate water but you don't ever want your plants sitting in water that's really negative for the young seedlings you want to make sure that they're damp but you don't want to over water at this stage once your plants start to show their first true leaves now you can start actually transplanting them into larger pots so at this stage you can either use some homemade soil or you can use the happy frog soil my favorite stuff or whatever organic soil works for you when transplanting we want to make sure we step up into a larger pot for instance i'll go from my small seed sales to like a four inch pot or even like solo cups but we don't want to go to a huge five-gallon pub pot we want a gradual step up i fill my pots to about halfway with soil then i get my tomatoes and i gently transplant them into my new pots while i'm doing this i make sure to inoculate my roots with the mycorrhizal association this helps with all stages of growth then i gently put my new tomato plants into their pots and when i backfill the soil i make sure to bury them a little deeper than they came out of the cells because the tomatoes will actually root from their stems so i'll bury them in after that i'll water the plants in gently just to make sure i fill any gaps and stuff and then bring that back into the greenhouse after your tomatoes are transplanted into their new pots you want to try to get them more light at this time now that they have the true leaves this is the time where they're going to start really showing rapid amount of growth and if you use the good potting mix you shouldn't need any additional fertilizer at this time when the weather starts getting nice out and our tomatoes have gotten larger we must make sure that we start hardening off our tomatoes this is one of the most common mistake that new gardeners make we have to realize that it's a big transition to go from a plant living inside to going outside we don't want to do that immediately there's a big change in humidity and airflow temperature and even the amount of sun so we want that to be a gradual transition and that's what hardening off is so to harden off our tomato plants at least two weeks before we want to start planting them into the ground what i like to do is to bring my tomatoes outside on a nice day between around 12 and 5 o'clock when it's nice and sunny out on a calm day and to just give them a couple hours the first day just to adjust to the outside temperatures and then i'll bring them in and then i'll gradually just give them more time outside until they're to the point where they can spend a few days outside 24 hours after that i know that they're ready to start transplanting transplanting out your tomatoes is a very important process and one of the processes that a lot of new gardeners make mistakes on so i want to tell you right now do not transplant out your tomatoes too early i repeat do not transplant out your tomatoes too early i have done this a number of times so let me tell you when i transplant out my tomatoes to give you an idea my last expected frost date is april 19th but i don't start transplanting my tomatoes into the ground until the second week of may almost four weeks after my last expected frost date in a lot of the books and stuff they'll reference they'll tell you you can plant yours out about two weeks after your last expected frost date but i've had some issues with that you don't really want to plant your transplants into the ground until the nighttime temperatures are no lower than like 45 50 degrees even if you get those plants in early and the temperatures aren't great and a frost doesn't come they're just going to sit there they're not going to grow incredibly well and if a frost does come think about it you just wasted like 8 to 10 weeks and put your tomatoes all the way back or potentially even kill them i'm telling you it's not worth the worry it's not worth the hassle because they will not start having that vigorous beautiful growth until the weather changes and it gets a lot nicer out when you've decided it's a good day to start transplanting out your tomatoes what you want to do is choose a location that gets full sun tomatoes will take about as much sun as you can give them but the day of transplanting it's good to choose a day that there's like overcast or maybe a little bit of rain just so your tomatoes aren't shocked too much when they have to go into the ground and it's super sunny and overcast is better a better day in my opinion so what we'll do is we'll find our location we'll start digging back our wood chips if it's a location that we have mulch down then i'll dig my hole about twice the size of my pot that i'm planting from for my tomato and then i'll take some compost or some homemade soil put it at the bottom of my hole after that i'll inoculate my roots with the mycorrhizal association using this mycos just to help with the transplant shock and every other form of growth then i will start burying my tomato back in i'll use some of the native soil and also a little bit of homemade compost mixed in with that then i'll bury my tomato plant up to the first set of leaves the reason we do this is because tomatoes will root from the stem so any part of the stem that we bury will actually create roots so what we're doing is creating a bigger root system so i can support a bigger plant in the future after i'm finished with that i'll pull the mulch back over and then water my plants in the spacing of your tomatoes will be dependent upon how you want to grow them but i highly suggest you either stake your tomatoes with something like a bamboo and tie it to the steak or you build a tomato trellis and tie your tomatoes to a trellis this is how i get huge harvest because both of these styles of growing tomatoes have to do with utilizing height if we were to just let our tomatoes sprawl along the ground then tomatoes would need about three to four feet per tomato plant but when we utilize the height and we go grow tomatoes up things then we can grow tomatoes one per square foot so we get to utilize so much more space the only thing with this is if you want to grow tomatoes up steaks or if you want to grow them up trellises then you have to prune your tomatoes i have videos that are specific on how to prune tomatoes and how to build the tomato trails if that's something you want to do tomatoes prefer a nice deep watering so if i feel like we haven't had enough rain i'll go around and water my tomatoes about once a week with a good deep watering and then once i start to see flowers forming on my tomato plants i'll go around and give a top dressing of some compost around the bases of my plants just to make sure they have adequate fertilization heading into production there's a few issues that you may run into when it comes to tomato plants some of the things are like spider mites or aphids things like that if i have little issues like those what i like to use is a spray made of cold pressed neem oil and dish soap that's one of my favorites another issue you may run into is blossom and rot and also splitting and cracking from your tomatoes so this commonly comes from uneven watering so one way to help negate some of these issues is to use a nice thick mulch that's what i like to do this helps with this a lot but if you're still getting a lot of splitting and cracking your tomatoes it could be the varieties that you're actually growing some varieties are more prone to cracking and splitting than others and then some varieties don't crack or split at all when we finally get to the part of harvesting our tomatoes we don't want to do it in haste we want to make sure that we're a bit gentle too with the harvesting process so we don't want to go out there and just start especially the beef steak ones we don't want to just start ripping the tomatoes off the plant the best thing to do in my opinion is to take some pruners and gently cut the tomatoes off the vines this way you're not disturbing the vine and causing any unnecessary stress to the plants because a lot of these plants will produce all the way up to the frost for us we so we need to make sure we're taking care of them if you want to grow tomato plants that will basically get as big as trees you need to grow healthy plants and stay on top of the tying and pruning process but you also need to grow varieties that are super prolific varieties like the cherry bomb tomato and the super sweet 100 that's why i suggest that a lot of you grow some hybrid tomatoes along with your heirlooms hybrids like the sun gold cherry one of my all-time favorite and like i mentioned the super sweet 100. i do love my heirloom tomatoes ones like my saldaki tomato and my rosa de burn but being good at growing tomatoes i feel like has to do with playing around with different varieties and finding the ones that grow well with your location and ones that you actually like to eat if you want a little more information on the varieties of tomatoes that i grow i have a video specific on exact varieties that are my favorite to grow in the garden what you plan on doing with your tomatoes after you harvest them will help steer you towards the types of tomatoes you want to grow there are really two types of tomatoes we've got indeterminate and determined tomatoes first i'm going to talk a little bit about determining tomatoes these are the ones less common to backyard gardeners so determinate tomatoes will only grow about one to three feet tall and these ones only set fruit one time and then they finish producing that's why they're called determinate tomatoes on the other hand we have indeterminate tomatoes these are about 75 percent of most tomatoes and these are going to be the ones most common for us to be growing in our own backyard the indeterminate tomatoes will grow anywhere from like 6 feet to 20 feet tall you guys saw last year i had tomatoes well over 10 foot tall so these tomatoes will continue to produce flowers and fruit all the way up until the frost so as long as we keep these plants healthy they're going to produce for an extremely long period of time almost all the tomatoes i grow are indeterminate tomatoes the only real reason in my opinion to be growing some of the determined tomatoes is if you want to make some tomatoes used for canning or if you want to do make things like ketchup and stuff because the big thing about the determined tomatoes is that they all produce fruit at the same exact time when it comes to ordering tomato seeds my two favorite places to get tomato seeds from are baker creek seeds and fedko seeds i'm not saying that these are the only places i'm not saying that these are the greatest places these are just the places that i've used in the past and have had a good experience with that's today's video girls thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed it i hope you got something out of it this is a video that me and tuck have wanted to make for a long time but we felt like we wanted to be more experienced before we did so because we want to just provide you guys with as much value as possible that's our goal provide you with value so you can grow as much food as possible if you guys enjoyed the video hit the like button hit the subscribe button share with your friends don't forget to check out the merch down low grab some of this new spring merch this is only a limited time thing so make sure you get one before they go and the kneelers this is only a limited thing as well so if you do want to kneeler make sure you grab one before they're sold out i also wanted to thank one of the new channel members brandon hanley thanks for being a part of teamgrowdude we appreciate it so much and also all the new members thanks for directly contributing to the garden it means so much to not only me but also the the boss tuck we're going to be back to you guys with another video uh real soon so just hit that subscribe button don't forget to hit the notification bell as well tuck and james we back you again real soon we

Channel: The Gardening Channel With James Prigioni

Views: 224,351

Keywords: how to grow tomatoes, how to grow tomatoes in pots, how to tomatoes, how to grow tomato plants, James prigioni, tomatoes, tomatoes James prigioni, tomato seeds, tomato harvest, tomato plants, organic tomatoes, epicgardening, garden answer, grow tomatoes, grow tomatoes now leaves, self sufficient me, tomatoes in raised beds

Id: xZr9jSx5fhA

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2022