Tomato Growing Mistakes - How to Avoid or Fix Them...How to Grow Tomatoes.

hey guys I'm sitting here in my tomato patch because it's tomato Tuesday and so as you can see I've got a really good amount of tomatoes coming on here I've even got some that are coloring up and so I've got my rat traps out because I'm protecting these fruit because they could be ripe any day and you know rat traps always make the garden more beautiful but I am excited that I'm gonna have a nice flavorful heirloom tomato on my plate probably within the week it's exciting all right let's get going on this list and today I'm gonna be going over ten tomato growing mistakes that you might be making and we're gonna get you to stop making those mistakes so you can have a huge harvest over the next couple of months coming up [Music] I'm Brian with California garden TV and if you're looking to join an online garden community that offers tips tricks and support to grow your best garden ever especially Tomatoes then you're in the right place get started now by clicking subscribe and hit the bell so you never miss anything now let's get growing so getting right into it the first mistake on the list is not knowing the type of tomato that you're growing so that could mean a couple of different things first off when you're thinking about the type of tomato you're thinking indeterminate versus determinant and determinate means a determinate plant is designed to grow to a specific height it produces all of its fruit pretty much at one time and then it's done whereas an indeterminant like these will grow and grow and grow and grow until the frost kills it so depending on when you guys get cold weather is how long your plant will grow so it's not uncommon for these plants to produce you know from May April may be all the way until December you know in a relatively frost free area another thing you could be talking about with type of tomato would be a hybrid or heirloom now a hybrids made a lot of people think here hybrid and they think all of a sudden GMO and that's not necessarily the case most the time it isn't the case with tomatoes I could produce a hybrid right here in my own garden by selecting two different two different types of tomatoes that have good qualities and pollinating them with each other and then saving those scenes and not letting anything else pollinate it a hybrid tomato you're gonna see a lot of hybrid tomatoes at your garden center for instance and those tomatoes and we'll get into more of this on a seed saving video that we'll be doing but those tomatoes are not if you save the seeds from those tomatoes and plant them next year you're not necessarily gonna get the same thing in fact you probably won't where heirlooms are considered open pollinated and if you see any season say open pollinated that means that you're gonna be able to save those seeds and put them in the ground next year and they're probably gonna grow the same plant heirlooms have stories they've been passed down for generations and still they're coming true from the seed ok the second mistake that you might have made already hopefully not if you've watched some of my other videos is planting in too much shade now the only type of tomato that will grow in some shade is cherry tomatoes possibly currants cherry tomatoes they'll take some shade any other tomato that you're gonna grow you want at least six hours of Sun and the more Sun you can give them the better the sweeter they're gonna be we talked about that on our Tomatoes sweet in this video so you want you know six to eight hours is ideal you can give them more than that great now along the same lines the third mistake is planting incorrectly and there's a couple of things here first of all if you watch my tomato planting video I'm gonna link all these videos down in the description so you can watch them again but in planting tomatoes you want to plant them deep you don't want to plant them right on top of the soil like any other plant because the deeper you plant them the more roots they will produce along their stem now if you've already planted your tomato and you didn't plant it deep you can get some a bag of maybe organic potting mix and pile a mound up as high as you can get it maybe up to a foot or at least a half a foot around that tomato and keep that moist when you're watering and that will help tomatoes the tomatoes start to growing new roots even right now now along the same lines with planting you might make the mistake of not giving the plant the nutrients it needs to get off to a good start and to help feed it throughout the season one of the biggest things that the tomato needs for fruiting and flowering is phosphorous that's the middle number on a bag of fertilizer and so if you watch my planting video we added that in the form of the Neptune's harvest crab and lobster shell and that's going to give a nice slow release of phosphorous throughout the throughout the season phosphorus does not move very well through the soil so it's important that you do that at planting time and once again if you didn't it's not too late if you do the whole mound up thing like I just said mix some of that phosphorus in there you can use the crab and lobster I'll link that below you can use bone meal but that is important for tomato production now while we're talking about fertilizing a lot of people make the mistake of fertilizing too much and that's usually in the form of nitrogen that's the first number on a tomato or a fertilizer bag so the more nitrogen you give it the more leafy growth you're gonna get and that's the plant just putting its effort into making a big plant we don't want that we want the fruit I don't know the last time you eat a tomato leaf but I'm not gonna do it it's probably nasty that's why I use the Neptune's harvest tomato and veg formula it's got a very low amount of nitrogen a - it's a number on there and a four for the phosphorus so it's got low nitrogen high phosphorus exactly what these tomatoes are looking for now when you're planting your Tomatoes you want to make sure you provide proper spacing that could be another issue if you are pruning your Tomatoes into Corden's like this and I'll have that video linked down below and we'll talk about it when we get to pruning you can you can get away with having your Tomatoes about twelve to fifteen inches apart because you're taking off the leaves as they grow so that gives them space gives them room for airflow if you're growing determinate types two feet would be a great spacing for that or if you're not going to be cutting off the suckers two feet is a good rule of thumb there as well now with current tomatoes like we saw at Tami's last week four feet spacing might be too little so it does depend on the variety and that's why you need to know the variety or the type of tomato you're growing okay so the next mistake is not providing the proper support I think probably the most popular way to support a tomato is those cheap tomato cages at the gardens and unfortunately that's not a good way to support a tomato possibly a determinate type if they're strong but those end up following apart after a season and so you want to make sure if you're gonna get those get the biggest ones you can find and the sturdiest wins you can actually try to bend them around and see if they've been DZ or break apart so with a determinant or dwarf variety those might be good but with an indeterminate I mean that's seriously not going to handle it after it's you know first month of growth and you could have up to six months so I'm not going to go into all of this right here because it's just too difficult to do but I have a nice visual presentation on a video on how I grow my Tomatoes up these string supports it's super easy super cheap and you can fit more Tomatoes in a small amount of space so I'm gonna link that video down in the description so I'm trying not to make this video very long because some of this is recap and some of it is new so I'm gonna try to focus more on the new that I haven't discussed in other videos and if I've discussed it I'm gonna link you right to that spot where you can get 100% more information that I could just give right now unless we turn this into an hour-long video and who wants to sit through that so that brings us to our next mistake that you might make and that is not pruning your Tomatoes now I'm growing these in Corden's and that I feel is the best way to do it and in order to do this you need to prune the suckers out and everywhere you see a leaf come out of the stem you're gonna see it's going to be an armpit and right in the the join there there's gonna be another little sprout coming out and that's gonna make pretty much a whole new tomato plant that gives less fruit than the rest but it takes that energy away so we're gonna pinch those out everywhere we see one all the way up everywhere a leaf comes out in that elbow or the elbow or armpit whatever you want to call it there's gonna be a new growth coming and just pinch those out all the way up and that's going to let the tomato focus on the real production which is right along the main stem it's also imperative that you prune your Tomatoes if you live in a humid climate we don't but I still prune for the other reasons but if you live in a humid climate you need to get air flow through your Tomatoes you can see I can stick my arm right through to the other side and actually see all the way through to the other side because I'm pruning my tomatoes which reduces moisture which reduces pathogens and bacteria that are getting on get on the leaves and cause disease and could possibly kill your plant so the last thing I want to touch on for pruning is if you notice I do have can you see this some browning leaves some yellowing leaves these aren't diseased they're just old but I go ahead and I clip those off as well as they as they turn yellow if I see any issues at all I clip those off it not only helps with the airflow but old leaves yellow leaves are the first ones that are going to be attacked by pests and disease so it just lessens that that issue and it also gets them further from the ground so that you don't have the splash back now that brings us naturally to the next mistake and that is improper watering now going off of what we just said you do not want to water your tomato leaves because that is going to produce a wet environment that gives a lot of breeding ground for bacteria so always water your tomatoes from below if you're going to get a drip system installed that is the number one way that I would recommend I have a video on installing drip I will link below now if you use a hose you want to make sure that you water below but you also don't want splash back if you put the hose down and it splashes up from the soil and gets on the leaves you're now introducing pathogens from the soil onto the leaf and the leaf is wet so that's gonna be even worse so if you are watering with a hose be very careful have it on low and I would recommend putting down mulch so that you have a barrier between the soil pathogens and the plant so if you do get splashed back off of mulch it's not gonna be the same detrimental have the same detrimental effect that it would straight off of this while continuing on with watering mulch helps with watering because it keeps the soil moisture more even it does not allow for as much evaporation quickly so any type of mulch that you want to put woodchips wood shavings lawn clippings dead leaves straw I use actually just homemade compost I just put a couple inches on there at the beginning of the season not only does it help keep the moisture in but as it breaks down further it will feed the plants and feed the soil so in all of my videos that I talked about watering I talked about the finger method you stick your finger two inches to three inches into the soil and if you feel moisture don't water there eh okay the top one or two inches might be dry and that just is because the the sun's hitting that but it doesn't mean they need water if you overwater a tomato you're gonna have the blossoms start to fall off so if you have if you don't have hot weather and the blossoms are falling off it's probably because they're over watered you also don't want to let them go bone-dry do you let them go bone-dry you're gonna get blossom and rut I've actually got it out front on my San Marzano tomatoes because in that garden area I have not yet installed drip because I have to go into the driveway which is gonna be a pain but I have to do it but I haven't installed drip there yet and I had to take away the hose from the front yard because on the other side of the driveway I put in drip and I didn't need the hose so I I had a whole issue with the plants drying out too much and I have blossom and urato out there so keep your plants evenly moist and you won't have blossom end rot and you won't have fruit cracking fruit cracking occurs when there's been a dry period and the plants kind of just set or the tomatoes kind of just sat there and then all of a sudden you watered a whole bunch and they sucked up as much water as they could and just bust it right through their skins so you get fruit cracking which doesn't mean that tomatoes inedible you just want to cut those pieces off that are cracked because mold and things can develop in there and probably wouldn't be the best to eat now another reason the flowers might fall off is if it's getting too hot any weather that gets into the 90s several days in a row the flowers are going to drop off because the plant wants to conserve its energy into ripening the fruit that are already on there and not creating new fruit so it just drops the flower so to help with that make sure the plants are watered and you put some shade cloth over the plants until that heat wave goes away now if you live in a place that has summers that are just 90 degrees for a month or two at a time keep your plants healthy and then when the weather cools off they'll start producing again brings us to our next mistake of not hand pollinating now I think in the past this is probably a non-issue but now we have so few pollinators that come to our gardens you know the bees are really being decimated throughout the country and probably the world I've heard from a lot of you in different countries who say yes there are less and less bees every year visiting your garden and it's sad and it's scary and I really hope things turn around and us as gardeners are on the front lines by not using pesticides and herbicides killing everything in our yard let's do it organically so we can at least start building back our bee populations in our neighborhoods there's not a lot we can do to control big AG and they're gonna keep using the cheapest most effective methods and that is poisons so let's at least do our part as home gardeners but there are less bees and so that means less pollination so we need to become the bee for now and that means doing a few different things hand pollinating by hitting the plant knocking the cage whatever you're growing it on the plants on tomatoes are perfect plants meaning they have a male and female part in the same flower very close together so just a simple vibration will do it you can use a paintbrush which I showed you on a pollination video you can use a electric toothbrush to cause the vibration which I showed you on that same video but we need to do it otherwise the flowers are gonna fall off and if they're not pollinated and that's just that's the way it it ok the last mistake you might be making is not paying attention to your plan and what they are trying to tell you now here I'm talking about pests and disease if you visit your plants often daily you're gonna notice if there's any type of black spots if there's any type of something eating or maybe some droppings from a tomato hornworm and you'll be able to get on top of that quickly now I have a whole video on tomato pests and disease that you guys have really loved so I'll link that down below it's going to go through the different pests how to spot them and how to take care of them once you have them or prevent them but for many reasons you want to visit your plants I mean we love our plants right there are kids you're gonna notice the pests of disease you're gonna notice pollination issues you're gonna notice whether they're wilting whether they're getting leaf curl which I have another video on it's super important to visit your plants all the time because that's the only way you're gonna know if something's wrong and get on top of it quickly it's kind of like your your yearly checkup at the doctor you can get on something quickly and you know don't let it fester and progress without you even knowing it's there okay so that's it ten mistakes that you will never make again I hope you enjoyed it if you learn something please give the video a thumbs up if you're not subscribed already subscribe and I will see you on frightening [Music]

Channel: Next Level Gardening

Views: 451,130

Keywords: tomato growing, how to grow tomatoes, growing tomatoes, tomato, gardening, how to prune tomatoes, planting tomatoes, organic gardening, prune tomatoes, tomato plant growing, epic gardening, how to prune tomato plants, container gardening, urban gardening, gardening for beginners, how to, migardener, california garden tv, james prigioni, gardening 101, pruning tomato plants, raised bed gardening, growing tomatoes in pots, tomato pruning, fertilizer for tomatoes, tomato pests

Id: eqHFUuIEV4k

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020