Secrets to Growing AWESOME Tomatoes

hello everybody this is Danny from deep south homestead we're out working with our Tomatoes this morning we're tying them up here you know kind of get them where they don't get broke off on these severe wind storms we've been having and I want to show you all some of the secrets to growing successful Tomatoes one is you have to always understand that disease on tomatoes starts from the ground and comes up and that's because when the leaves are close to the ground like this the rain hits the dirt and splatters it up on the leaves and it leaves us for on the leaves it'll actually cause disease so here at Deep South I take my scissors and I go along and I clip these leaves off the bottoms and get them out away from here because you have to remember we're not growing leaves we're growing tomatoes you want to get a good airflow under the bottom of these plants and if you got one like this one you know this likes it close to the ground you can clip it off up high and still leave some of the leaf on there because it's you may like like I said you're growing tomatoes like there's going to be Tomatoes here and here you're not growing leaves leaves are ok once you get your foliage established up here to help keep the hot Sun from blistering your tomatoes but rule number one we one of the secrets is get the leaves at least 10 to 12 inches from the ground away from the dirt because that's where the stuff splatters up on the plants s your first rule ok I'm going to show you all how I tie tomato plants with the crochet yarn a lot of people worries it's just a hurt I catch one one night and I pull it non-stop before I get to the plant because the plant will grow in diameter and I don't want it tight around it I do it twice and I pull it and that gets a tight knot and that leaves me two loose strings here I'll pull one of them on each side of the thing here and make sure you're not you know damaging the leaves then I just tie once again two knots in behind it kind of pull them tight that takes care of it that holds your plant up against dick and then I come back once again cut cut cut we're getting rid of these leaves away from the ground okay I want y'all to look here I've let this one Fork you know we're talking about sucker sprouts you don't want too many sucker sprouts on a tomato plant now these are inter determinants these are not determinants these will continually grow upwards a determinant is one that turns into just a bush all the tomatoes get ripe but usually about the same time over a couple of week period and it's over this being inter determinant it will last all summer long and there's no suckers down here to see this little one here we have a small sucker coming out right here well we want to get rid of those I usually leave one so that my plant Forks that gives me two tomato plants coming off of one stalk and then I look up into here I see another there's another sucker right here I will usually get those suckers out and throw them out of there that way I have two plants to growing up here now that I can tie up and grow tomatoes off of one stalk I will tie each one of them up to the post and our hot climate I like to have this foliage there from the two suckers because it helps to shade and then once again we got a leaf down here that's too close to the ground to get rid of it don't get rid of that one get them out of the way we're going to reach over we're going to tile this one up you know everybody talks about having a baby a tomato plant tomato plants are extremely Hardy plants you don't have to be as babyish with them as you think you would they're pretty tough ok the sucker sprouts you hear this word used on tomatoes a lot that's this little plant that comes out between the leaf and the main stem now this will grow another little plant and with tomatoes on when they're little you can take them out by hand like that but now once they get up to be larger if we look over you get over here a little bit once we right in here once they get up larger you can see this one right here it's coming out at the leaf now this makes a big long plant if you go to try to break this out by hand what you do is end up tearing the plant so I like to take a pair of scissors that's my gardening scissors and I'll clip this I'll show you how long it is here get it out there see how big this was that was just that's just too much for that plant especially right in the top like that okay once again we've got our airflow underneath the tomatoes here now down south or the humidity is a problem that's what you want to make sure you have happening here even though there's some leaves like here these are I've cut them off these are still protecting the tomatoes from the hot Sun down here but you can see when the tomatoes get to be about get to be like this the plant is really sucking up some nitrogen at this point and what you want to do at that point is come in you want to rake your leaves back like we do here you rake the leaves back and I put a tablespoon of Epsom salt and a tablespoon of your favorite choice of nitrogen whether it be chemical or because some people use chemical nitrogen or if you use an organic form of nitrogen a tablespoon around the bottom of the plant water it in real good and then rake your mulch back up around it so that the Sun doesn't draw it out because tomatoes need that nitrogen about once every two weeks during the growing season while they're like this and they need water at least an inch week so make sure you do that and a lot of people will take these little tuna cans that you get or chicken cans are an inch thick and about that big around and they'll bury them in the ground right here and they'll take your sprinkler system and sit here and you don't want to ever wet the leaves you want to wet it right at the ground here and when that can when you sprayed enough water around that plant that that can is full of water that's one inch of water and you're going to want that at least every week to have a successful tomato crop now looking up I'm going to go through this plant here and I see right in here is another sucker I'm gonna reach right in there and get that out another one down in here we want all of our growth to go to Tomatoes we're growing tomatoes we're not growing leaves that's where a lot of people make their mistake is they all they think about is growing a beautiful plant like you see this sucker right here it's got blooms on it and everything here now you can take this and stick it in some wet dirt and you grow another plant real quick but I don't need it this year so I'm just going one reason I come in here I take these and I cut that out of the way because to me that's just sapping this plant down and I don't really need that on this plant okay now that my plant has reached its height of the cage what I usually will do is come up here and find the very tip of the plant right here and I snip it out now what this will do and here's another one over here what this will do this stops the upward growth of this plant now because I have it as high as I want it I don't mind if a couple of suckers come out in here now to start filling up my cage like I have one right here this one will come up and go on this side of the cage and I'll allow another one or two to come up in here like here's one right here I'm allowing this one to come up and when these get to the top of the cage I will snip them off also because I don't want the plant just falling out all over the top up here I want to start getting my growth in around the bottom now that I have the height and you can see in here we've already got some really nice to meet us any there you know my hand you can see how big they are they're against my hand probably won't be too long we start having some of them turn right but that's just another one of the secrets that we use here at Deep South about how we train our tomatoes because because tomatoes are a lot like children if you don't give them boundaries they tend to go everywhere and a kid's the same way a small kid if you don't put boundaries on that child it just gets out of hand and the tomato plant is exactly the same way if you don't keep it within its boundaries it starts growing sprouts and it just gets everywhere and that's why I always liken my tomato plants are like children so you kind of got a reel and then a little bit to kind of let them know where they where their boundaries are and when you do that they flourish you know so that's another one of our secrets here at Deep South that we use we treat our tomato plants just like we would treat the children we don't get abusive with them but at the same time we prune them back and we keep them within their boundaries because that way they do the best another thing we do in our tomato garden is you look down in here you see these we put the pepper plants in between our tomato plants because peppers and tomatoes are both nightshade and we do come along and grow them in there between them like that that kind of helps peppers love to hold hands and if the peppers grow up and grow into the tomato plants we've learned that it really doesn't hurt them and it's a it's an additional way here's another one right here these are Marconi's they seem to do extremely well mixed in with the tomato plants okay you'll notice here too we have two strings tied up high like this where are we like our Tomatoes get up about six feet tall and what this is we have our sticks are only so tall some of our four-foot some of them are five-foot but we put two strings up here and what we do with this this is what we called our basket weave system we get our tomato stalks on one side of this string and then when it reaches the top we flip it over to the other side of that string and that kind of helps hold them where the wind won't whip them around too bad so that's a that's another tip we use here to only Center determinate tomatoes that we grow is about six feet tall about as tall as we want and we'll use a basket weave system at the very top of them we only had so many of these concrete reinforcement wire cages I think we had 30 something love them and we usually plant like 75 to 100 tomatoes in this patch right here so what we do is we space our cages out and our tall sticks and that way we can run our our strings from cage to cage and stick to stick so that these shorter sticks when the tomato plants gets up we can weave these tomatoes into them and our whole crop ends up being the same height through here Oh

Channel: Deep South Homestead

Views: 756,958

Rating: 4.8798075 out of 5

Keywords: Deep South Homestead, tomatoes, secrets to growing awesome tomatoes, how to grow tomatoes, suckers on tomatoes, secrets to growing tomatoes, tips for growing tomatoes, tips for growing tomatoes in pots, tips for growing tomatoes from seed, grow awesome tomatoes, how to grow bigger tomatoes at home, grow tomatoes from seeds indoors, how to grow tomatoes from seeds at home, how do i grow tomatoes from seeds, how to care for tomatoes plants, fertilizer for tomatoes when fruiting

Id: UOsivlgLiKA

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2017