How to Plant, Grow & Harvest Tomatoes in Containers | Best in Tomato Sauces, Paste & Salsas

today's video is sponsored by black gold compost company i want to thank the good people over at black gold for the generous domain donation of all this beautiful black cow cow manure that we use in our video today and it's made a tremendous success in our garden i've been using black cow for many years ever since 1980 and it's always made a tremendous difference in my garden and i've been very pleased with our product i highly recommend it thank you black gold for sponsoring our channel well good morning homestead family miss nancy says she wants some roma tomatoes this year so she can make some fine tomato sauce so we'll be right back after the break we'll talk about our aromas see you in a minute [Music] well welcome back today we're going to grow some roma tomatoes and this is called martino's martino's roma i got these seeds at baker creek heirloom seeds online if you never checked out their website you need to they got some really good vegetables and their seeds are very reliable i highly recommend them so anyway let's um get these seeds in the little seed starting cups we're going to grow these in containers this year so i thought you might want to take a look at this video on container grown romans because a lot of folks don't have a whole lot of room to grow things like that and um container garden is really easy and it doesn't take much room in your yard or your patio so let's get these into cups if you've never seen how i plant my seeds nancy's got a little seed starting a video on our channel go check it out you know it's how to start seed successfully and i always start my seeds outside because i live in florida now and it's nice and warm down here and i don't have to have a greenhouse or i don't need to start them inside anymore so that's a that's a big blessing so we're going to get these into seed starting uh trays here and we're going to get them in a seed starting rack and let them get going let's get started okay there's our little roma tomatoes i'm just going to stick these in here with all my other tomato plants that i got already in the seeds starting racks so i'll stick them in there there you go y'all happier like that there to go we got them in the rack we'll watch them grow all the way out to harvest so i look forward to the day i can make me some a nice plate of spaghetti that nancy makes out of these beautiful roma tomatoes we'll see you back here in a couple weeks well happy new day friends well today's april the 3rd and we planted these on march the 1st and so it's been right out about a month four weeks and uh the seedlings are ready to go uh we've had kind of a rogue cold front that came down we've had five days of really unseasonable weather i mean we had two days that were in the 30s here in florida in in you know late march so i was pretty concerned about some of these um that's why i always plant extra so you know i wanted to plant five of these in containers so you know i planted i started 12 cups all 12 have germinated and uh grown so what i'll do is i'll pick five of the very best of these and that's what i'll use in my garden and then the remaining uh seedlings that are in here i'll give away to uh folks that are in the area that would like to grow some of these for themselves in their garden so um come on up here and take a close look and uh you can see how the seedlings look at four weeks they they're a little puny you know from what i'm normally seeing these are determinant uh tomatoes so they should be a little bigger than this but it's what it is you know you can't control the weather so anyway let's take a look at these up close and see what we got there you go as you can see some of the uh leaves are showing some some stress like that right there got some browning and yellowing the stalks are good the stems are all pretty healthy they're looking good and we got plenty of true leaves and they're actually starting to look a little bit on the leggy side so i want to get them out of these little cups here's the other one you can see there's a little bit more worse uh worse looking plants on here but that'll actually recover you know in the days ahead if i just get them on some warmer weather and get them out in the sun which i'm going to do i'm going to keep them out on the hardened table until i can give them away but these um these are the romas martino roma's determinant variety so let's pick out five five real good looking ones out of here and we'll plant them in containers so if you've never planted any uh tomatoes and containers today we're gonna do a little bit of uh container planting we'll do it together and that way you can do this in your spring garden this year if you so desire so let's go over oh uh let's head on over yonder to the grow table and get these things started well here we are at the grow table i got out five 15 gallon containers that's what i'm going to be using for my roma tomatoes a determinant tomato i want to do at least a 15 gallon for these plants because they will get pretty high you know they'll get three four feet and and they'll bush out pretty big too so i didn't want to crowd them up or put them in a pot that's too small because they just get root bound and then they don't produce the the beautiful little fruit so i give them plenty of root growth plenty of room for expansion and i spread them out so they're not compacted together so there's plenty of air flow in between the plants so you know it reduces some of the common tomato diseases that you get which is usually caused by poor ventilation over watering so anyway i got the uh the pots um if you want to get some of these pots check out some of your local landscape companies a lot of times they'll have a bunch of these pots they'll go install a big landscape job and they have hundreds of these things at their shop and they're more than willing to get rid of them and i got these for free doing just that they gave them to me for nothing and it's they're very good containers if you can't find any anywhere you can also go to places like lowe's they sell all kinds of uh food grade containers and in fact they sell 15 gallon as well so anyway we got the um the the containers on the grow table i mixed up my own um container mix here this is what i use in my uh all my containers we have a video on how to make this at home if you want to make this for yourself uh nancy i'll put a link to that um video on this video so go check it out how to make container mix at home so let's go ahead and get started on these and get these things planted okay the first thing i do is i fill the container up with soil until it's about five or six inches below the rim at this point i start adding my amendments that i'm going to be needing the first thing i put in is pulverized dolometic limestone this is pure calcium and this really helps with um reducing blossom end rot which is very common on these determinate tomatoes so i put that in there pretty good and i mix it down i want to go down about four or five inches into the soil in the container with that limestone and we give it plenty because it's going to need it see how i've actually changed the color of that that's what i'm looking for the next thing i'm going to put in is epsom salt this is magnesium sulfate you can get this at any garden center and this really helps with the with the plant as well i put in about a a half a cup of that and i mix that into the soil okay next thing i use is bone meal this is going to add the phosphorus that i'm looking for this is a 0 10 0 gives plenty of it stimulates root growth as well as blossoms promotes blossoming and you want plenty of blossoming when you're trying to grow tomatoes i put in about a half a cup of that mix that in with the soil next thing i put in is the blood meal this gives me a shot of organic nitrogen which helps to promote lots of foliage you get lots of good foliage on the plant then you're going to have a healthy overall plant because it's really sucking up that photosynthesis okay there's my my first initial amendment of the pot and notice it's only about six inches deep because when i plant the uh the seedling in there i want this to be below the roots so it can grow down to it now that i've got it amended what i want to do is flood this a little bit to pre-moisten this soil that will be underneath the plant um okay let's give that about 15 minutes to soak down i want it to pre-moisten all that container soil i put in there because there's you know a lot of dry compressed peat in there and that's that's pretty dry stuff so we'll be back in about 15 minutes and we'll take it to the next step our pots have uh finished soaking and that all that uh water that i put in there has soaked on down so at this point i want to add some more container soil nice and dry that way i've got it up to about an inch below the rim okay just like that now i'm going to take my hand i'm going to put poke a hole in there and i like to go from the tip of my finger to the middle of my palm that's about how deep i'm gonna need this next thing i do is i'm gonna add about a tablespoon of garden lime tablespoon of bone meal tablespoon of blood meal and another tablespoon of epsom salt all right in the hole now i take one of my best looking ones once my best looking plant seedling there we go and i only put one plant per um container because these things will get pretty big if we're successful in growing these if the weather will just cooperate with us there we go next step is i take some of these bamboo canes and i trap this seedling in a triangle pattern with the stem right in there see see how it did that and what that does is it's going to help it give it some support in the wind see how it's it's contained in there and it it'll help it survive winds because in april we get a lot of wind down here i don't know how it is in your area but april gets a lot of wind and a lot of rain so there we go we got the bamboo steaks in there you can get these bamboo steaks really at any um garden center if you can't find them anywhere take a look at um our amazon storefront link on the back of our channel and we've got some we got some of them on there if you can't find them nowhere next thing i do is i'm going to put a tomato cage on here and i put it right over the plant and you want to put it on now instead of coming back later and trying to fit it over the growing plant which only that's gonna do is end up tearing up your plant okay the last step here for today is i lightly water in each of the seedlings and when i say lightly i mean really lightly because remember we've already pre-moistened the bottom 75 of these containers so really all i need to do is just get those little seedling roots dampened just like they were still in the seed starting tray about the same amount of water as you did then and you'll increase it each you know as the weather gets hotter and the plant gets bigger you increase a little bit of your water enough to where you keep the soil moist not saturated if you're coming out and you're you put the back of your hand down in that soil and it feels wet and damp then don't water it it's okay because if you keep watering it all you're going to do is create root rot problems and mildew and all other all kinds of diseases related to tomatoes that you know really come from too much water in so right there that's all i really need i got all my uh i got all my cages up and they're ready to grow so we'll be back in the days ahead and we'll take a look at these as this weather starts to get warmer and warmer these plants should start to grow more and more so we'll be back soon well our martino romas have been growing for 54 days we started them from seed 54 days ago today so they they're just now getting some uh some good progress we've had two road cold fronts come through which you know a tomato plant's not a big fan of cold weather so we had two cold fronts come through the first one even got down in the upper 30s but the second one was a little bit less severe it was down into the low 50s i kept one night was 49 but they survived it they made it through and they finally started to make a comeback and not only did they have to to struggle through those two cold fronts we had like eight days in a row i mean a solid saturating rain we got 11 inches of rain in eight days so the whole garden had a rough time of it but the aromas are doing pretty good come on up and take a good look at them i just trimmed up the bottoms to keep them up off the off the bottom of the containers because i don't want to get any of that early blight on there which these things you know they do tend to do that so get them trimmed up from the bottom and try not to wet the leaves whenever i water them and if i trim up the bottom like that it makes it much easier to water without getting the leaves wet so we got some warm temperatures coming in the days ahead i think we're heading into summer now we're finally getting there been a real long cold spring but now that summer's going to fix and set in i think these rumors will really start to show off what they can really do so we'll be back in a few weeks and we'll take another look at them and check on the progress of them see you then well good morning aromas have been growing for nine weeks and uh they're they're starting to get some pretty good traction i'm i'm pretty pleased with them but i wanted to show you today how i trimmed the bottom of these plants i get them up off of the bottom several inches up high and i strip all this bottom limbs off that way i can keep the water from splashing up on the leaves which causes all kinds of mildew problems and disease with the uh with the plants so at when you get your plants up about this big make sure that you trim up the bottoms and when you water you want to water by sticking your watering wand right underneath as best you can so that you don't get the leaves wet you just really just want to water the soil and water the roots and that's a pretty easy thing to do as long as you raise the bottom limbs up high enough to where that canopy is up well above the container so you can get your nozzle in there without splashing so these things are doing really good that i'm really starting to put on a lot of i see a lot of buds already coming out so they're going to grow much bigger than this in the days ahead so we'll be back to watch the progress and all the way up until we can um come out here and pick a whole bunch of them make some spaghetti sauce so we'll see you back here shortly [Music] well good morning friends our martino romo tomatoes have been growing for 72 days today and they've made some great progress they're bushing out very healthy they're showing lots of blooms and i've even got some little teeny weeny greenies on there so it's getting there now uh last week we had the first appearance of a horn worm we sprayed got the caterpillars completely under control uh it rained real heavy yesterday so nancy came out this morning and did another application of the bt just to be sure because if normally if you spray the bt it lasts a couple weeks you know really pretty good but if you get a real heavy rain like we did yesterday it's a good idea to go ahead and reapply the bt to let it get back on there because as you know a hornworm is relentless so you really need to stay on top of it because they can decimate your tomatoes in just a matter of a couple days and you don't even really realize it until it's too late so keep an eye out for them and if you've never used the bt on your tomato plants before we have a video nancy can put a link on this video of of the video it's called how to get rid of a tomato hornworm using the thuricide bt check it out it'll show you step by step how to do it there's really nothing to it and it'll help you to protect your beautiful tomatoes from the evil tomato hornworm so we'll be back in the days ahead we'll continue to watch the progress of these beautiful aromas until we can make us some spaghetti sauce with it we'll see you soon well good morning friends well our our roma tomatoes are finally starting to come in um remember these are determinate variety tomatoes so once they come in they usually come in kind of all at one time and you'll also see your plants really start to decline and you know give up we've also got some some blight getting started in these tomatoes so what we're going to do today is we're going to start picking them there's some of them in here that are turning red and what nancy and i normally do on romas is we go ahead and just take everything at one time red green all of it get it all off and we take the green greenies and we leave them in the pantry up on the table you know and you know a few more days they'll be red anyway and i've never been able to tell the difference in the taste of red on the counter or red on a vine on these romans so anyway it's um it's best for us to go ahead and get them off before something happens like worms or insects or something like that so go ahead and get them while we can and uh and we'll get these started so you about ready to peel off some of these uh aromas oh yeah beautiful and see that they're starting to change colors some of them are still green some of them are actually full blown red yeah there's some beautiful ones in here yeah like you know see they're already fully red they're fully red and here's something just starting to turn barely so what we do is we go ahead and get everything we can get so let's get started [Music] [Music] well there we go we got aromas off the uh off of the uh the bushes out there and uh ideally you know these would all come in at the same time being that they're determinate like we were talking about earlier but however that in a perfect world that don't always happen so what me and nancy did is we just picked um as many as we could get that looked like they were you know the right size like this is the right size green and we'll bring it in here and let it ripen on the rack and of course all the red ones and they don't even have to be all the way red just starting to turn pink is good enough and you bring them in and let them finish out in here we only got about half of what was out there because the rest of them weren't quite big enough yet so hopefully they will continue to grow and make roma tomatoes so we'll get these up here on the rack and see how they do and miss nancy will come out here in the days ahead and i'm sure you're going to make some spaghetti sauce out of this right oh yeah yeah she'll be she's she's working on a lot of videos for y'all this year so i've been real proud of her on the uh i've been real proud of her on her cooking videos because they're really getting pretty good mm-hmm i'm enjoying it having fun doing it so anyway there's what we got today there'll be some more coming in the days ahead and miss nancy will come out and do some cooking videos with you so we always want to be thankful for the lord for everything that he gives us especially spaghetti sauce so tell me and nasa see you next time always remember buy us hands we are fed give us lord our daily bread amen have a blessed day [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Hollis and Nancys Homestead

Views: 86,455

Keywords: hollisnancyshomestead, how to grow tomatoes, garden, gardening, roma tomatos, tomato paste, tomato sauce, stews, complete growing guide, baker seed rare seeds, sauces, paste, salsa

Id: uHxryuCbrZs

Length: 26min 54sec (1614 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2022