Making Tomato Plants 10x more Productive

heyo farmer dre back at it today I'm gonna show you guys a quick little trick that will make your tomato plants very very happy so as you guys know we grow a lot of tomatoes try on our farm for farmers markets and different farm stands but as you guys know and if you guys know watching my channel for quite some time you guys know that this is my third year growing tomatoes and I'm gonna tell you from the start I have learned a lot in growing tomatoes just from experience know as you guys know I am studying horticulture at Missouri State and I know a lot of the theory behind growing a lot of different crops but until you don't get down and dirty with the plant and you know see the whole season how progresses you don't actually know exactly what to do and how to do it so growing tomatoes you know we got we like to grow a lot of them here in a high tunnel but we do also grown a lot in our field as well for summer production and there are certain things that are critical to tritter to a tomato lifecycle that will make you have a tomato bumper crop every single year and then you just get used to that production so for every plant you plant you could pretty much guarantee you know weather permitting that you're gonna have a great year every year and you guys might ask you know why do we grow so many tomatoes you know tomatoes are probably the most common vegetable in everybody's garden even on a small farm scale like we are and even in your home gardens you know everybody grows tomatoes and they love them because nothing beats a farm fresh tomato and you know during picking season during tomato picking season we eat tomatoes pretty much with every meal so there's a few tricks that I have learned you know from myself just from experience and talking to other farmers other growers that really changed the tomato game and I'm gonna go ahead and get into that so the thing that changes growing tomatoes is fertilization a lot of people a lot of home gardeners and this is what I did my first year I going ahead and planted the tomatoes and I thought you know I'm gonna be hands-off until I get to harvest but I was completely wrong I like to treat Tomatoes like a little kid like a baby you know you got to come through and check them every day inspect them every day and the same thing with Tomatoes you know you got to be inside here looking at them inspecting the plants but one thing that everybody every human does and every single plant does as well is that we eat every day and same thing with tomatoes you know they have to eat as well but their nutrients are you know first of all carbon oxygen and hydrogen which comes from the atmosphere then we have our macronutrients you know nitrogen potassium phosphorus magnesium sulfur and calcium and then you get into your micronutrients you know you get boron and zinc and molybdenum and all that good stuff but you know we eat all of our nutrient nutrients through the foods we eat and we eat three to four times a day and you know the tomatoes should be doing the same thing so us as humans especially me you know I like my I like my nutrients you know secondhand and meaning you know I like I like eating a lot of meat and sometimes you know it's like after you get done eating just me you kind of feel bad it's like man I should have some some vegetables with that same thing with these tomato plants you know we plant them then we kind of walk away and then we realize that our Tomatoes you know they're growing but they're not growing at max production so same thing with tomatoes they require a lot of nutrients whenever they are growing and you know some of the nutrients that are available in the soil are more available to the plants than others so you know nitrogen it is the most available nutrients to the plant and then you get into potassium and phosphorus so believe it or not you know nitrogen is good for tomatoes but it's not the best and the things you got to focus on is the potassium and the phosphorus only talked tomatoes no I'm kind of getting a little too scientific for you guys you know I tend to do that because my background in studying horticulture and you know whenever I talk to another grower you know we speak the same language and we you know most of the farmer that talked to kind of know already are the nutrients and stuff so I'm just trying to break it down for you guys so you know the reason we don't feed our Tomatoes too much nitrogen is because you could get this huge old plant you know you got a six foot tall plant with a lot of nitrogen with very few flower buds and open blooms on them on a balanced tomato plant we want to see you know a plant that is 4 to 5 foot tall covered in green tomatoes and the way you do that is first of all you want to go ahead and spoon feed them like we do on our farm you know every time we water our Tomatoes we go ahead and fertilize them just like you want to do a baby you know on a baby every time you feed it you want to make sure it's getting all the nutrients that the baby shouldn't get same thing with these Tomatoes you know we feed them a little bit of nitrogen but then we fit them a little more portal it'll more phosphorous and then you know for these tomato plants in particular we are feeding them a lot of potassium so let me go ahead and explain to you guys what those nutrients actually do inside the tomato plant what the phosphorous does inside a tomato plant it initiates the flower buds or the reproductive stage of the plant so the the foss the phosphorous is very important to go ahead and initial those buds and let me go ahead and show you guys on our tomato plants what I'm talking about so as you guys can see here on this apical meristem on the stem here we got one flower cluster and then this one barely grew I mean we don't have it we barely have a tip and there is another set of blooms getting ready to open so that phosphorous you know it is very important in the plant to go ahead and initial that the next stage of butts coming on and then let's get into talking about potassium so potassium is very important in the bloom stage and in the fruit development stage so like I mentioned you know we feed them plenty of phosphorous to go ahead and get that buds initiated and growing and then here comes in the mighty potassium you know potassium is called a hidden hunger a lot of people don't talk about it but in pimento production it is very critical so once your tomato plant is open bloom you know you get a nice breeze through here it goes goat's head and pollinate them and tomato blossom is pollinated then it is time to get to work go ahead and start pumping out those green tomatoes like crazy so let me go ahead and tell you guys a quick little story or my experience what I did so in my first year growing tomatoes you know I went ahead an amended the soil with a little bit of compost and some sheep manure and just planted them in here and just let them sit you know and I was getting a lot of growth you know for that compost had a lot of nitrogen in it so I was getting you know some good growth very few flower bud initiation and the fruit the small green tomatoes it was slow to come on I mean it was just sitting at about a dime stage for a couple of months and I was like man what is going on so then I go talk to another grower and then he kind of explains to me you know how a tomato development how the tomato development process works so you know from then I kind of did some own trials on our own farm and now I see the amazing results that are happening like I mentioned once that tomato blossom is pollinated the only thing next to do is to go ahead and start growing that green tomato and you know on our farm we set a standard we want to go ahead and pick 30 pounds of tomatoes per plant you know we said that that that bar really high so that we could be very satisfied with tomatoes you know we got to treat these these are our workhorses you know we put them in here in our high tunnels this is the most precious you know land the precious piece of property we have you know it's the most important piece of soil that we grow in so why not try to get the most production out of them as you can if you guys remember earlier I told them we feed them up a little bit of nitrogen some more phosphorous and a lot more potassium and the reason we want to feed them a lot more potassium is because that is very important you know you get you start off with a tiny green tomato and then they grow into you know a pound and a half tomato so throughout that whole process you know the plant needs a lot more potassium for fruit development so let's say you have you know fifteen or twenty pounds of green tomatoes on your vine you know if you break it down for every tomato that needs to be developed that's a lot of potassium needs to be you know put into the system itself we're in the soil and on any given soil you know we have a lot of it's like a clay loam that stuff that we farm on so you know there's only only so much available potassium that the soil could hold before you get into other problems and other issues so the way we do it is we go ahead and feed a high potassium fertilizer through the drip system let's go ahead and take a look at our drip system this is our system right here we have a hydrant in every tunnel we have a hose I couldn't find the hole that's duty connected to this dosatron and this dosatron tells you how many what what the ratio is from for every gallon that goes through there how much it squirts up and it goes into the system so if we put the fertilizer through there at concentration it comes in here dilutes another concentration and then we feed it down through the header hose down to every single line for all these tomatoes in here so one of the main important fertilizers that we use is it's it's a it's a Millers 915 30 and this year you know I'm trying something different I'm trying to master blend it is a it's a for 1838 so there's a lot more potassium in that fertilizer in particular to get that that fruit development you know set on really early I'm gonna go ahead and show you guys a few blossoms here and a few flower clusters and show you guys you know how it works exactly so this flower cluster here in my hand is a perfect example we had the first blossom that opened it has a tiny green tomato the second flower is already pollinated if I rip off this thing right here we can see a tiny green tomato in there and we got another flower that is pollinated another flower that has a small green tomato and freshly opened blossom so this is what I want to see here they only got two three three tiny fruits on there and then one open blossom so let's take this plant in consideration here this is the first open blossom is Jessica see here this tomato is about you know I'm gonna say about tennis ball-sized this one's not too far behind it we got the you know the fourth bloom there you know about golf ball-sized then a baby tomato here growing and I think we have one we get one more blossom there and as you come up the plant the second the second fire cluster here we got some tiny you know they're coming on Mike's knee we have the same no blossoms coming up here we have a cluster of open blooms so this is what we want to see you know this tomato plants probably a foot and a half tall two foot tall and this is a perfect example what we want to see hopefully this thing in a couple of weeks let's go ahead and gonna start training red same thing with the other one so so we are out here in our second high tunnel as I see here the plants are a lot smaller and the reason is we went ahead and planted them a lot later so this is this is an unheated high tunnel so you know we went ahead and transplant them and now we're just trying to get the plants growing so in here for the first couple of weeks we go ahead and fertilize them with a triple 20 and we just want to barely fertilize these you know you don't want to give a little baby you know a steak to eat so same thing in here we go ahead and barely fertilize them just softly so in here I put on a half a pound of fertilizer through the drip irrigation system so there is roughly 400 tomato plants in here so you know I don't know how to you know I do it on a square foot basis so if you break down in half pound you know to 400 tomato plants you know that is very few that's a little bit a fertilizer but that's all they need you know if you think about it you know there are small tomato plants they can't take a heavy dosage of fertilizer like they do in that tunnel if you feed them a heavy dose of fertilizer then they get they could possibly die of fertilizer burn so you might be thinking why did I just talk about potassium and phosphorus and the other tunnel if I'm just feeding on the light fertilizer in here so I like to feed them you know just that triple 20 a very light until I see our first flower open bloom there to us our first bud and then I know the tomatoes are turning into that reproduction stage so there's thinking about producing the first tomatoes so then I go ahead and start and fertilizing with that high potassium fertilizer because now I know they're starting to get in you know they're starting to produce a tomato crop so there's no point of feeding you know a tomato plant or any other crop in particular nutrients that they don't need so that's why it's very important to know the different stages your crops are in I can hear if I would feed them the high potassium fertilizer it would do no good because they're not ready for that you know that fertilizer and they're not ready to start you know getting that productive stage so I'm gonna go ahead and show you guys this tomato plant you know there's a very few buds coming on here so I'm gonna have to wait a couple more weeks until we see that first open bloom and there might be you know I just gotta come in stuck I said you gotta come to and inspect them to see but I think these are a couple weeks out before we start that high potassium fertilizer so I know this is kind of getting to the nitty-gritty of tomato production but like I mentioned you know you only plant so many plants in your garden in on our farm so why not try to get the most production out of them as you can so like I mentioned in my first year I averaged 11 pounds per plant you know and to some that might sound good I thought it was terrible then in my second season I went ahead an average 23 pounds per plant so I was doing a little better and I did some mistakes in my second year that you know that caused that problem and then I'm hoping that this year in the third year we go ahead and hit that 30 pounds per plant which in that tunnel as you guys saw there is a lot of flower buds so if every tomato on that plant is at least you know 3/4 pounds to 1 pound then you know we all we need is 30 tomatoes per plant and we go ahead and hit that goal and our yield so like I mentioned we're already planting them and we already put we're already putting the labor and all the energy planting them in here and why not try getting the most production out of the same tomato plants being a farmer we have to learn everyday and I'm not saying I know everything about tomatoes which I you know I clearly don't but you know the infirmary I know I want to go ahead and share with you guys so so you guys could get that you know them high yielding tomato plants and you know there are certain varieties that do better than others which I probably should have hit on this early on and you know variety selection is very important but you know at the end of the day you know a tomato plant is a tomato plant and you know they always spawn the same - you know the same nutrient they all require the same nutrient values and they all respond the same to the same nutrients so like I mentioned why not try to get them high yielding tomato plants also grow strawberries you know blueberries blackberries peaches and apples on our farm we already plant so many we already have so many plants in the ground and we continue planting you know every year but like I mentioned why not try getting you know your the most out of your land and you know that's how that's how sustainable agriculture is you know you only plant a certain amount why not try to be as as profitable and as lucrative lucrative as you can out of the same plants and you know the same energy going into so if you guys are more interested in tomato growing and want to see how these Tomatoes turn out this year make sure to hit that subscribe button so you guys can be you know part of my YouTube family here and to be part of our farm and I'll you know I'm the kind of person I like to write down every single pound of tomato we pull out out of these tunnels and you know make at the end of the year see how I did so make sure to subscribe if you guys enjoyed today's video don't forget to hit that like button it really helps out this channel and if you guys are new to here make sure to hit that notifications icon so you guys can be notified whenever I do upload a video I want to say thanks for watching up to this point you guys have a good day we'll see you next time

Channel: Farmer Dre

Views: 1,964,403

Keywords: gardening, growing tomatoes, planting, planting tomatoes, tomato, tomato plants, little tomato tricks, how to grow tomatoes, home gardener, garden tomatoes, 10x better tomatoes, nutrient management

Id: 1Shd8nbuvRY

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020