Tomatoes are the most
popular crop in summer. And we want to make sure that we're
growing our tomatoes correctly, which is why we're talking
about care in this video. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening, where it's my goal to help
you grow a greener thumb. We have this massive wall of tomatoes.
If you haven't seen the trellising video, check that out because it shows how we
built this. But four, four, and four. So 12 different tomatoes here in
three different trellising methods, all growing really nicely. I
think the last time we checked in, they were probably one-third
to one-half the height. So a lot has been growing and a lot has
been going on. That's why in this video, we're talking about some pruning, some
interplanting, some watering techniques, everything you need to know to make
sure that you have a successful tomato harvest this summer, this season. So cultivate that Like button
and you will be blessed with 55% juicier tomatoes, and
let's get into the video. The first thing we're going to talk about
is managing the growth of the tomato over the season. So pruning, training,
supporting, all that kind of stuff. This is the Florida weave style trellis,
this is one of the easier ones to do. So I haven't done a whole lot as far
as supporting these tomatoes goes, except for just stringing
up a new line of the weave, which is the whole point
of this system. But, what I might want to do is start
taking off some of these suckers. Now it really depends on what
you care about in the garden. If you really want like a nice
clean, precise tomato patch, then you can take off every
single sucker if you want to. I have a whole video on how to prune
tomatoes and how to think about pruning them. But in this particular
instance, for example, I could take this one off right
here. I'm probably not going to. Why? Because the plant's already up off
the ground, it's going to spread out, it actually will provide a
little protection for the
tomatoes when they actually start to fruit. So there's a lot of benefits to leaving
the sucker at this point in time. But I'm going to show you down below why
I will do a decent amount of pruning. Here's the bottom of one of the tomatoes
here in the Florida weave system. So, what do you see? Big
old sun leaf right here. This is actually a
sucker that I've let go. So I'll figure out a way to
get that up into the trellis. So let's just do that right now. So
we can keep on talking about pruning. We're going to weave this up in here.
We'll secure that. It's pretty old. I don't want to really remove it
at this point. We'll let it go. But what I do want to do is
come in and clean up the bottom here. Why? Number one, you're going to get potential disease
when all these are sitting on the surface of the soil. Number two,
you're opening up the canopy. You're opening up the airflow a little
bit. That's going to be helpful. And then number three, you
can actually interplant. I mean look at some of these leaves. These weren't really long
for this world anyways, maybe starting a little bit of disease. I'm going to really clear up maybe
the first foot or so of growth here. And then I'm going to replicate
that across the entire planting of tomatoes that I have. I have a lot
of them. So I'm going to do that. And that's going to be a really good way
to clear up this whole inner canopy and I can plant stuff around the edges,
protect the surface of the soil. We are all pruned up, it's time to
do a little bit of plant training. There are a lot of different ways to
approach this, like I've mentioned before. I'll show you a clip of a tomato that
I just have done absolutely nothing to. I put it in a Gardener's Supply Company
Titan tomato cage and it lives up to its name. It just sits in there and
it's completely well-contained. But, if you do want to do some training,
depends on your trellising method. One thing I'm really partial to are these
tomato clips that you just attach to your string and then just adhere. So
every like three, four inches or so, I like to come in and just clip it in.
So we still get more vertical growth, especially if you're doing a conduit
trellis like this one over here or this lower and lean style. You want to get it up as quickly as you
can because you pruned it to a single leader so you don't really want it
to be flopping all over the place. If you did, you probably wouldn't have pruned it and
just let it go in a cage or something like that. So I'm going to tie a couple of these up
and then we will talk about fertilizing and watering tomatoes across the season.
Before we get into our fertilizing, one final little note. Depending on how you're trellising
or staking or caging your tomatoes, you just want to keep an eye on things
that want to go a little wonky. And so, you know, this one's growing
faster than this one. I can put a line here and when this
one grows up to size, that's fine. I'll just tuck it in and it's completely,
completely fine. So fertilizing. These tomatoes are at the stage of their
life where they are starting to put out early young fruit. It's time to fertilize, but it's time to really
strategize around how you do it. You don't want to be dumping a ton of
nitrogen onto the plant at this point in its life. So what I have here, this
is my favorite tomato fertilizer. It's a Espoma Organic's Tomato-tone.
They are the sponsors of the video. We've been working with Espoma for
like two years now, two, three years, family-owned company, organic from
the start before it was even a thing. So huge, huge fans of them. I'm going
to talk to you about what's in this one, it's a 3-4-6 NPK. So it's
lower on the nitrogen, higher on the phosphorus and potassium, and also has a little sulfur and calcium
to potentially stave off blossom end rot. Now, blossom end rot, for
those of you who don't know, it's when the tomato has a little sort
of rot or black spot on the blossom end where the flower was. That's
usually a calcium deficiency, but not for the reasons you might think. I'm going to do a little granular
application while we talk about this. It's not really necessarily because
there's not enough calcium in the soil, although that can be a problem. It's typically because you
haven't watered adequately. So as I sprinkle some of this
granular fertilizer around, you know, if the soil was deficient
in calcium, sure, now I've probably solved that
over the course of the season. But we do have to talk about managing
your watering with tomatoes cause I think a lot of people can make some mistakes
here that can mess with your crop. So let me fertilize all
of these real quickly. I'm just doing a little handful
around the base and we'll water it in. And then we'll talk about some watering
care that I think you really need to know. Watering your tomatoes can cause
all sorts of headaches for gardeners. I actually have a problem
in this little grow. Bag. My own fault. I overwatered. A little bit and this tomato split. So
I'm going to show you that in a second. This is just another way that you
can grow tomatoes and care for them. Another Titan tomato cage from Gardener's
and then their self-watering grow bag. I probably should have heeded the
warning and let it water itself. But let's show you what
happens when you overwater. This here is an indeterminate Socolades
tomato and you actually see a couple of different interesting problems on this
one. The weirder one is this right here. See this zipper type of look? That is called zippering and it actually
happens when you have a semi-poor pollination and it causes this little
tear or sort of hybrid tear type of thing coming up here. That's a separate
issue than this right here. This is the bigger issue
obviously, this splitting. This happens when you don't water it
enough and the skin gets sort of tight, and then you water it a lot. All the
interior tissues swell up and of course, POP goes the weasel. So this is
one of the issues you can run into. But now let's talk about
watering in general. We're talking about
watering your tomatoes. There's a lot of different techniques
to do this. You could have irrigation, you could do it by hand in
a can. You could, like me, have a hose with a long handle
attachment and make it rain all over your tomatoes and myself cause it just
blew into my face. But that's fine, we're just keeping on
and living our lives. So what I'm going to do here is just put
it down at the base. A lot of people, including myself in the past, have said you don't want to water
over the top of your tomatoes, or many other types of plants.
I would say on a base level, that's a good practice,
but I wouldn't freak out if you got like a tiny bit of
water on one of the leaves. You're not going to have a
completely decimated crop. Most of the reason for that
is if you have, let's say, blight in your soil and
you know it's a problem, and then you're splashing up those blight
spores onto the underside of the lower leaves. Remember, we just
took off the lower leaves. So that was a good strategic
move. Also for watering, what I'm doing here is I'm just taking
my hose and I'm coming in and just lightly hydrating the soil
at the start. Sometimes, especially with tomatoes cause you're
watering deeply, but not very often. You're not watering every single day. You want to make sure that you rehydrate
that soil before you actually come in with a deeper water. Now that I've given
my tomatoes a once over with water, I've waited a little bit of time, a few minutes or so for the water
to actually penetrate the soil. Now we'll come in and
give it a deeper water. And you can make sure that your
nozzle goes maybe a little bit slower. Really give it that time to sink in.
A couple of things I'll say here, mulch is going to be crucial. If you're watering something deeply but
less often then mulch is going to help you do that really effectively because
it's going to keep that water in. So that's number one. And
then number two, I will say, don't freak out if your tomato
leaves wilt in the middle of the day. That's a natural heat response. You'll be a little bit more worried and
know that your tomatoes need water if they're wilting outside
of the heat of the day. So in the morning or in the evening,
if they're wilting at that point, then you know you probably
need to water them. There's a potential that
something else is going on, but that's the most likely thing. So let's
finish this up and onto the next tip. Now we want to talk about the flowers.
That's what we care about, right? We're trying to get these juicy toms.
This one's a little guy right here. Actually has a couple of
aphids on it. Get off! A lot of the times with aphids you can
actually just blast them off the plant. They're not really strong enough
to get back on sufficiently. So, I have a toothbrush here. Why? Well, this is a really common technique that
is often promoted and it certainly does work. So the tomato flower has both the
male and the female parts within it. And so it will pollinate itself.
It's helped a lot by pollinators. If you're growing it out of season like
winter, trying to push it into fall, you get some flowers, not a lot of
pollinators around at that time. At least less. You might have
some more pollination issues. If you're in an area that
doesn't get as much wind, I get a lot of wind through
this little corridor here, maybe you might still have
some pollination issues. Maybe. You just want to do this, go ahead
and do it. It works perfectly. Fine. So you can take this. I've got one of these little
vibrating electric ones. I don't have a great example of a flower
that I could do this to right now, but let's just pretend that I do. Let's just pretend that that's open
right there. You would come through. Zzzzzzzz, give it that. Little vibration. You could just
do it with your fingers too. You could just do that. I don't know that you really
necessarily need this at all. But it can be a great way to help get
that pollen all mixed up and get a better fruit set on your tomatoes. I would
say if you're at an apartment, maybe growing it indoors,
this is a really, really good tip to help
your pollination issues. An opportunity I think a lot of tomato
growers miss out on is the opportunity to add even more plants in the same space. So I have three different
types of basil here. Basil is probably the
quintessential recommendation
for interplanting underneath your tomatoes. Let's imagine
this one grows up another two, three feet over the course of
the next month and a half or so. I'm probably going to have a little
bit more of the foliage taken off the bottom. Maybe it's dying, whatever.
And that opens up the canopy, the undercanopy quite a bit. And
so let's get some extra yield. What this will do is number one,
we get beautiful, beautiful basil, which is a quintessential
combination crop with tomatoes, both in the kitchen and in the garden.
But we're going to get more yield out. And we're also going to protect the
surface of the soil quite a bit more. Because this basil is going to bush up, provide some shade and it's
just going to do a lot better, both for the basil itself and also for
the tomatoes. So nothing too fancy here. I would say when your tomatoes get to
about this height, you can come in. That soil though is so dark. Ooh, that's what we're talking
about! But you can just come in. And plant in some basil,
you can put in marigolds, you can put in alyssum, sweet
alyssum or alyssum, and there you go. Water this in, this will come up here in no time
and you have a beautiful combination. There's a lot to know when
it comes to tomato care. This right here might be the
pride and joy of the season. This is Kevin's super tomato, not named
after myself. Named after my friend, Kevin40, who's known for having a couple of
Guiness Book of World Records for growing giant vegetables. This is the genetics
that he's provided to me. Amazing, vigorous tomato. One of the most
beautiful ones I probably ever seen. It's just so crazy growing. I have a lot more tomato
videos coming up this season. So fertilize that Subscribe button,
if you're interested in that. And until next time, get out in
the garden, grow some tomatoes. Good luck and keep on growing.
