Have all the advantages of vertical growing without the bother of pruning and tying: grow your tomatoes in cages. Buy them commercially or construct sturdier ones yourself. Use concrete reinforcing wire with six-inch mesh. (Wire used for cages should have openings large enough for your hand to reach through for harvesting.) For each cage, cut a section of wire five feet three inches long: the three-inch pieces can be hooked to the other end of the mesh to form the cylinder. Each cylinder holds one plant. You can make the diameter of the cylinder larger (three to four feet) and put three plants inside. Open the cylinders and store flat in winter. Read the rest of this entry »

Always harden off transplants for eight to ten days before you set them out in the garden. Expose them to short, then gradually longer periods outdoors. (If you purchase transplants, find out if they’ve been hardened off. If not, make sure you do it.)

If seedlings are in flats, slice the roots into squares with a knife about a week before transplanting. Repeat the process before removing from flat.

Feed transplants with fish emulsion the day before setting them out. If possible, transplant on a cloudy or drizzly day. Or set out seedlings in the late afternoon or early evening. It’s more comfortable for you, and the plants will thrive without requiring shade or constant watering. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Prevent Tomato Blossom end Rot

Blossom end rot can be a killer. Your tomatoes may be growing just fine and starting to ripen, when suddenly there’s a hot, dry spell. After a few days you notice large brown or black spots showing up on the bottom side of all your tomatoes. This is blossom end rot. The rot spreads and the prospects for a great harvest suddenly go out the window.

There is no cure for blossom end rot once it hits your tomatoes. The best thing to do is pick the tomatoes that have been hit and toss them on the compost pile. No use wasting any of the plant’s energy on damaged goods. Read the rest of this entry »

Rotate the crop each year to avoid diseases that live in the soil. I like to wait 3 years, if possible, before planting tomatoes where I’ve had them before. I never plant tomatoes where I grew potatoes or eggplant the previous season, since some diseases attack all these vegetables and live in the soil from year to year.

Plant resistant varieties. Many varieties are resistant to verticillium wilt and fusarium wilt—two troublesome diseases for which there is no cure. Some seed companies list resistance to these diseases by putting “F” (fusarium) or “V” (verticillium) after the variety name. “N” stands for resistance to nematodes, the tiny worms that plague many southern gardens andcause stunting of the plants and poor crops. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody has a favorite way of growing their prized tomatoes. My way is to support them with cages. After many years of experimenting, I’ve settled on caging as the easiest and best way to care for tomatoes. Tomato plants support themselves easily inside a cage. Because they receive very little pruning, they grow enough leaves to shade the tomatoes. This protects them from sunscald and helps them ripen evenly. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not necessary to prune tomatoes. However, in my garden all the tomato plants get a little pruning. Staked and trellised plants need the most because you want them to grow only one or two main stems which will make the plants easier to tie up.

Pruning means pinching off the shoots, or “suckers,” that grow out from stems right above leaf branches. By restricting the vine growth somewhat, you’ll get bigger tomatoes. If you let these suckers grow, each becomes another big stem with its own branches, blossoms, and fruits— even its own suckers. I prune my plants in cages and those growing freely early in the season, and then I let them grow. You should go on sucker patrol at least twice a week during the heavy growing season to keep your staked plants from getting hard to control.

In a very hot, sunny area, you can let some of the suckers put on a couple of leaves and then pinch out the top to stop its growth. The extra foliage will help the plant manufacture food and will help shade tomatoes. Read the rest of this entry »

Without a doubt, the most popular garden crop in America is tomatoes. Approximately 35 million families grow them. They’re growing varieties that bear tomatoes from the size of marbles to the size of grapefruits; pink ones, red ones, and even yellow ones. There are tomatoes which grow in the coolest, cloudiest, and shortest growing areas and there are those developed to withstand the heat of hot southern summers. No matter where you are, there’s a tomato variety for you.

Almost everybody grows tomatoes by setting out transplants. How you treat these young plants and transplant them has a lot to do with your harvest. For more and better tomatoes, here are my best planting tips:

Shop for the best plants

I’m amazed each spring when I stop at the greenhouses and nurseries and see people selecting tomato plants that are too tall and leggy! Perhaps they think that bigger means better; but with tomato transplants that’s not the case. Read the rest of this entry »

In the days when half an acre was regarded as a small garden the idea of growing vegetables in window boxes would have been a huge joke. Today, with our smaller plots and smaller families, the idea is not so laughable. Seedsmen, too, have been working for us to produce dwarfer, tidier plants that can be accommodated in boxes, tubs and other containers. There are, too, the ubiquitous growing bags so that anyone with a fancy for home-grown beans or peppers or tomatoes or other salad crops can easily indulge this. All right, you will hardly have surplusfor freezing but you should be able to enjoy good early pickings. And what a triumph, to be able to serve French beans with a real snap to them, freshly picked from your own window sill. French beans, especially the dwarf varieties that need no staking, are a vegetable particularly suited to container growing. Read the rest of this entry »

Description: An annual, fast-growing plant, with many branches, all covered with soft glandular hairs, which give off the characteristic tomato smell. Leaves are interruptedly unpaired pinnate bearing in their axils yellow star-like flowers arranged in clusters. The fruit is usually a multichambered, juicy berry, but in cultivated plants it greatly varies in shape, size and colour, and can be globose to irregularly lobate, smooth or deeply grooved, red, yellow or orange. Read the rest of this entry »