My One Tip for BIG Tomato Harvests

the one tip for growing productive Tomatoes is that you need to neglect your Tomatoes a bit in this video I'm going to be sharing why and I'm also going to be sharing how I'm going to be neglecting my tomatoes this year more than previous years and part of it is experimental and I thought we' chat about it if you've never grown your own Tomatoes before don't because what happens when you taste the first ever homegrown tomato it's so incredible that any tomato that you eat for the rest of your life that isn't homegrown is going to be a bit of a disappointment so if you want to avoid as much disappointment as possible do not grow your own Tomatoes now at the moment the weather is a little bit grim and dismal and so I've decided I'm just going to go for it I'm going to plant out my tomatoes into the beds under the poly tunnel and I'm going to share all of the basic tips to have successful Tomatoes including the one kind of core tip about neglecting them a bit now I see the process of growing tomato split up into three phases the first phase is the kind of germination and seedling phase the second phase is the neglect phase and then the third phase is the abundance phase so when it comes to raising healthy seedlings it's it's like with with anything you want to be pampering them as much as possible and if you want really good tomatoes most of their life these tomatoes need to be pampered to get you really good results but there is the middle ground where you kind of have to just let them be a little bit independent to bring you more resilient plants and to help improve the yield of your crops so here I have some tomatoes that I've selected to plant out in this kitchen Garden poly tunnel my process of seed starting them was very simple I started them off in cd60 cell tray which allowed me to propagate a lot of tomatoes in a small space using a heated propagator and then I just transplanted them into these 7 cm pots there's a little bit of biochar mixed in to just the melcot P free multi-purpose compost these are looking really really healthy and this is the stage now where it goes to transplanting and so I'm going to show you exactly how I transplant tomatoes to give them the best possible start and then we're going to go over why neglect is so important if you want a good tomato crop the beds in this poly tunnel are just over a meter wide and usually I would plant two tomato plants one at each end and train them up what I'm going to be doing differently this year is I'm going to be planting one tomato plant in the center and I'm going to be training it in a different manner now I've just planted this grape vine the idea is to to grow it over and I think that's going to be exciting but at this corner I'm actually going to be growing my sweet corn so I'm going to be starting my tomatoes a little further down now as you can see here I have got a SOA hose which I use just to make sure that the raised beds that the soil doesn't dry out because that can impact the health of the soil but I've got it turned off for now and I'll install it properly later on once my tomato plants are actually planted and getting underway one of the most important things for having a productive and resilient tomato plant is to ensure it has a really good root system and one of the ways to help benefit that is by digging quite a big hole bigger than the root B and filling it with lots of organic matter so I use compost made from my hot beds from last year to fill the base I then watered that so the water is down beneath the roots I then transplanted this and I removed the two lower leaves because the nice thing about tomatoes is that you can plant them deeper especially if you have leggy seedlings it's a good way of being able to make sure nice and healthy plant them deeper they will then root and when you have deeper Roots if you forget to water they can still at least access the water and then I packed around some more organic matter around then the top but I haven't Waters it in and I'm not going to water it in because what I want to do by focusing the watering beneath the root ball is going to encourage those routs to go downwards and now I'm not actually going to water this for the next next 7 to 10 days for any crop that you're growing the better the roots the better the results tend to be now this is one of the reasons why I love direct sewing because what happens when you're starting things off in modules is that you're constraining the root growth so the roots are starting to go around and occupy that space however when you direct sew you have the freedom The Roots have the freedom to go as far as they want basically as fast as they can and so they they're going to have a much greater surface area in terms of access to nutrients and they create a stronger Foundation plants are a bit like buildings so the stronger the foundation the more resilient a building is and it's the exact same thing when it comes to the roots of plants I had a situation last year in the poly crub where it was a good situation I i' I'd seen that there was a volunteer tomato plant that had self-seeded and I let it grow and I let it grow a few different stems and it ended up being by far the most productive cherry tomato I've ever grown and that was direct Zone and so this brings me into the neglect phase phase two of growing tomatoes I've already mentioned about me not actually going to be watering at tomato for a good s to 10 days and that's going to encourage the roots to go down seeking water but I I don't want to be too harsh so after that time is up I will then start to water and the best thing to do in terms of watering if it's undercover to encourage Deep Roots is to water more but less and what I mean by that is to water deeply but once or twice a week rather than doing a little like shallow watering every day because shallow watering the roots have no incentive to continue going down if all of the water is there you know they what's the point of going down when all of the water is nice and shallow now skipping forward slightly one of the things that causes tomato fruits to crack is irregular watering and very often it's being too dry give them a water then they get lots of water and that causes them to crack open but the simple way of solving that when tomato plants are starting to get nice trusses of fruit is to mulch your tomato plants with things like grass or leaves or wool I've had a great result with all of those and it maintains a constant soil moisture and then it means that you're not going to get your Tomatoes cracking and also you're far less likely to get things like blossom end rot as well now back to neglect and this is a thing that I'm going to be doing differently this year and I'm going to be documenting measuring bit of an experiment and I want to invite you to do the same and this is for indeterminate tomatoes which are known as essentially Cordon Tomatoes but more accurately indeterminate tomatoes are tomatoes which grow and continue growing and flowering and producing until the end of the growing season effectively until they get killed off by the first Frost within the poly tunnel or the first Frost outside determinate tomatoes are bush tomatoes they they grow and then they fruits all in one go and then they die with determinate Tomatoes you don't do any pruning with indeterminate tomatoes there's a whole thing about pruning suckers and I'm going to be doing things a little differently this year because I thought to myself where else in the garden when you're growing something do you remove leaves which are creating photosynthesis which is creating energy for the plant to grow where else in the in the Gard are you removing leaves of annual crops to make them grow better for example when I planted out these spring cabbages I then didn't remove some of the leaves to help them grow or to focus hair growth because what you're doing is you're removing the solar panels the photosynthesis is such an important process to create energy for the plants to grow it's not just about the roots and bringing up the minerals which is important but both are equally important you need you need the vegetation and you need the roots to make a plant grow nice and healthy and so the common practice with indeterminate tomatoes especially undercover here in the UK and it's something that I've always been doing is as soon as a tomato plant creates a sucker common practice is to remove that sucker because it's like oh there's there's a myth that suckers don't flour and produce more fruit they they do I have seen it many times suckers will end up futing and and producing flowers and all of that now suckers is a bit of a negative connotation because a sucker is a sid shoot it's a branch it's a natural growth habit of the Tomato now hear me out because this is just a bit of a theory but I'm sharing it because I like to have a discussion and chat about things and this here is a honeycomb tomato the tastiest cherry tomato I've ever had in my life so of course I'm growing it now my thinking is in terms of neglect is if if I actually let some of these side choots grow for the first four to six weeks of a tomato tomato Liv's of a Tomato's life after it's been transplanted out into these beds then it's got essentially more solar panels it's got more areas where it's creating photosynthesis and it's generating the energy which is pumping it as well down into the roots Roots pump out minerals and sugars that attract soil life which attract Riso bacteria and those in turn help make nutrients more plants available and help build up the defense system against diseases and so my approach this year is for probably four maybe six weeks I'm not going to prune my indeterminate tomatoes at all I'm just going to let them grow now there does come a point where it is important to prune them because being in a poly tunnel in my climate it's the only way to properly guarantee a good tomato crop but there is less air flow and when you don't have much air flow that causes disease issues like late blight which is really not fun because it essentially wipes out your tomato crop I am going to be trying a couple of different experiments outside growing a variety called Mountain magic which I have seedlings of as well Mountain magic is said to be really resilient against blight and I'm going to be trying a few different ways of training it pruning versus not pruning and seeing what happens but back to this my my the kind of the analogy that I have it's like you want your tomato plant to you want to think about it a bit like a rocket or a bit like launching a rocket out into space so when you launch a rocket out into space there is all of these booster engines there's all of these extra engines that helping to get it out of the atmosphere and I kind of see the the suckers a bit like that letting them grow letting the plant create as many solar panels as possible but creating as much energy as possible for the interim period now after four to six weeks of all of this additional photosynthesis I'm then going to remove these just like a rocket when it enters outter space and it's not fighting with gravity will shed those booster engines and then it will go down to its kind of main default engine to just keep on going and that's exactly how I I Vision it with a tomato plant and I'm gonna test side by-side comparisons to see whether it's going to work or not I feel it is now of course I've been doing some Googling and there's been lots of opinionated articles why you should always prune your indeterminate and why you should never prune your indeterminate in some of the Articles they've said that if you don't prune indeterminate tomatoes it doesn't kind of slow down how quickly that plant fruits and what apparently tends to happen is that the plant will get more fruit but they will be smaller and here in the UK with quite a limited growing season is kind of if you're growing tomato plants outside it's said to to to limit to four or five trusses of fruit so the energy is all going into those four or five trusses uh to make sure that they're ready by the end of the season but because I'm also very curious and based on how well the self sewn cherry tomato did that grew on multiple stems I am going to be for some of my tomatoes training under having one root ball or one plant I'm going to be be having two main leaders so they'll be the main leader and I'll select one of the lower suckers or side shoots when I'm doing the pruning I'm going to let that grow and train it away and see what happens look I'm going to be honest I am a little bit of a lazy Gardener one of the other things that is said that you need to prune is cucumbers and I never prune my cucumbers unless they're actually just growing somewhere where I don't want them I had four plants in this very poly tunnel I didn't prune them once and I got almost 30 kilos of cucumbers for very little effort whatsoever and because gardening is fun and I see it's a very creative process and I love to experiment and there's no law that actually dictates that I can't you know not prune suckers and see what happens that's why I've kind of come to the conclusion of extend the neglect period it's not just the first 7 to 10 days without watering it's then the next four to 6 weeks without any pruning whatsoever and also for at least the first three weeks I'm not going to be supporting the tomato plant so I'm not going to be tying it to the top support using string which I then wrap around and then that's what the the stem grows around to keep it upright for as long as possible I'm going to keep the tomatoes growing under their own weight so the stem has to support its own weight just to help continue to build its resilience how I see it is if I let that tomato plant look after itself for a few weeks is going to create a really fantastic strong Basin Foundation to then go into the abundance phase now the abundance phase or phase three of grin of tomato is where you return to pampering it lots and so you want to make sure it's pruned you want to make sure that it's it's being trained correctly upwards you want to make sure that maybe every two to three weeks you're giving it a little supplemental feed what I'm going to be doing this year is I've already made it it's a batch of of comfrey and nettle tea that I'm going to then be feeding every two to three weeks and just keep an eye on it make sure it's nicely watered nicely mulched tucked away and harvest the tomatoes now of course I'm not recommending you to try this prolonged period of neglect it is just a theory I I do recommend not watering your Tomatoes once you've transplanted them for a good seven days but I would love to hear your predictions your thoughts your ideas if there's anything that you think won't work or if you've got experience yourself one interesting book that I'm looking at at the moment is also is called how to grow world record tomatoes and that was tomatoes that had 16 stems I think something ridiculous all completely natural but 16 stems growing off one plant I think gardening is fascinating there is no end to learning it and if you enjoy these kind of videos do make sure you're subscribed I'll see you down below in the comments and I'll see you again soon but I've got to carry on planting out my weird tomatoes

Channel: Huw Richards

Views: 132,571

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Id: _AZiNZ9mU5A

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024