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growing tomatoes (productively)
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Posted by Eamon Melb Aust (My Page) on Sun, Aug 14, 05 at 7:17
| Guys,
a spot of advice required. I grew tomatoes from seed last year and they grew very well (grew over my head at 6'1"), however the yield was pathetic, with only one or two tomatoes per plant.
I have read that if you treat the seedlings poorly you can get them to start flowering early and then you plant them, is that right?
I don't want to waste another season trying to work it out for myself. How does everyone else do it?
Thanks
Eamon |
Follow-Up Postings:
RE: growing tomatoes (productively)
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| By depriving the seedlings of water and not molly-coddling them the toughen up and transplant more readily. What variety (varieties) did you try? |
RE: growing tomatoes (productively)
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| Big, leafy plants and not many toms is a fairly classic symptom of too much nitrogen-based fertiliser. Did you fertilise the plants? Providing the soil's good, toms don't need a lot of feeding, but fertiliser higher in P and K than N - and highest in K - is what they prefer. |
RE: growing tomatoes (productively)
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| They do respond favourably after the stress of transplant. But like our Italophile friend says, too much food and they sit back and relax, much to the detrement of the fruit numbers. |
RE: growing tomatoes (productively)
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G'day Eamon,
Like they said. Go gently on the nitrogen. Got a load of manure the other day and the lady delivering it said she delivers a load of sheep manure every winter to a guy who grows his tommies in it. He piles it into his growing containers, keeps it damp, and lets it rot down over winter. He plants out in November (too cold here before then). Apparently he gets bumper crops. Leaving it to rot down over winter would ensure that a good part of the nitrogen would have disappeared before planting - it gets used up in the composting process. |
RE: growing tomatoes (productively)
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- Posted by Eamon Melb Aust (My Page) on
Sun, Aug 21, 05 at 6:06
| I had a load of mature compost in the soil before i planted them, but that was about it for fertiliser. I grew Grosse Lisse and a 'Big Beef' variety, from seeds I bought at Mitre 10. This year I am growing Tigerella, 'world's lagest' (I have a competition on with my brother), and a 5-colour mix from Diggers. I will treat my seedlings with contempt and see if this helps. (The seeds have just germinated and broken through the potting mix yesterday). I will no doubt be checking back in as i go. Thanks to all for your help. |
RE: growing tomatoes (productively)
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Hi Eamon
Try this...
Plant your seeds and get them to germinate and when ...say 3-4 inches high transplant them into individual containers and get them to grow as fast and as big as you can...you want to get them say 18inches tall (1/2m)... then...stop watering them about a month before transplanting so that they become quite stressed...you should see wilting of the leaves but make sure you do not kill them...they need to be staying alive but not dying and not growing... What happens is that they feel they have been through their normal cycle and had a dry summer...when you transplant them then they will very quickly produce flowers...at this stage you treat them normally...they will produce early fruit but not an overabundance of fruit...its a good trick to do using a couple of plants but not a good idea to do with all of them
The trick with this is to get seedlings going a month or six weeks earlier than you would usually do, in order to get the size into the plant early and you can only do this with artifical heating, light shade, and nutrients.
They will be sappy and weak so they may need staking...when you harden them off (really hard) they will toughen up a lot
I have used this method (a while ago) to get very big seedlings but I did not stress them overly because I was intent on getting big seedlings and not in getting early fruit...what I was doing was laying the plant in a trench instead of planting in a hole...this way I had about 15inches of plant laying just under the soil and all the hairs on the stems turn to roots and the plant takes off really well and grows very strongly...but thats a different story
As I said above ..try it with one or two but don't waste all your seeds doing it
cheers
Peter |
RE: growing tomatoes (productively)
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- Posted by Mabb Melbourne, Aust (My Page) on
Tue, Aug 23, 05 at 9:22
| Peter's advice above is pretty much what fellow Tasmanian Peter Cundall says to do. Treat em mean and they are forced into flower. I saw something interesting the other day on an American gardening show (LOVE the How-To channel :-). He says to strip off the laterals up the first 4 inches and then plant the seedling into a 5-6 inch hole, burying that extra 4 inches as well as the existing roots. As Peter says above, they make roots from the stem, and are therefore very strongly "rooted" in the ground because so many roots come out of the buried stem. I think this tip is only for indeterminate tommies tho. Thought we'd try that ourselves this year. |
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