Plant your tamatas!
The arrival of Mother’s Day and the forecast calling for upcoming nights to stay reliably in the 50s means that we have the opportunity for an early and safe tomato planting date! (And yes, that means you did jump the gun if yours are already in the ground, especially if your tomatoes live (or are expected to) out in the Northern burbs, where nighttime temps dropped into the frigid 30s earlier this week.)
How ‘determined’ are your tomatoes?
Determinate varieties — often touted with phrases like bush, patio or container — are bred to stay small and relatively upright, but they are still vines. They tend to top out at around 4 to 5 feet in height and generally produce their small-to-medium sized fruits fairly early in the season. Determinate varieties are the best choices for container growing, and only require medium-level support.
Indeterminate varieties are the opposite of well-behaved determinates. This category includes the big beefsteak and treasured heirloom varieties, which produce their fruits on big, rangy vines that often reach 10 feet or more in length over the course of a season. They produce that treasured “true tomato” flavor, but need strong support to do so, which is why mine grow inside homemade cages of welded wire fencing. (Detailed instructions on making such cages can be found below.)
If your plant tags do not display this important information (often noted in the form of the single letter D or I), look up the variety online for its designation.
‘DTMs’ are the key to a full season of tomato eatin’
Are you tired of seeing nothing but big green tomatoes in your garden in August? Would you prefer a steady supply of ripe tomatoes from early July through the first frost? The secret to tomato success can be found on a little thing called “days to maturity” or “DTM” on the plant tag and/or catalog description. It’s a very important number, but one that many gardeners don’t check.
Specifically, DTM is the number of days it will take, on average, for a good-sized transplant to produce its first ripe fruits after the plant is gently tucked into warm soil. (It is not the number of days from seed.) Plant a 50-day hybrid variety like Burpee’s excellent “Fourth of July” on Mother’s Day and you should be enjoying its ripe fruits when the fireworks begin; maybe even a few days earlier if the weather stays warm.
On the other end of the DTM scale, big, super-tasty heirloom tomatoes like the legendary “Brandywine” and “Mortgage Lifter” generally take around 85 to 90 days to produce their first (often huge) ripe fruits. So you should not expect to taste these dreamboats until well into August. (But they’re worth waiting for!)
Choose tomatoes with a wide range of DTMs (say a 50, a 60, a 70 and some 85 to 90s) and love apples will always be in season in your garden. (If your plant tag doesn’t display a DTM, look up the variety online or check seed catalog sites.)
Oh, and if you have already planted your tomatoes and now note that all of the DTMs are 75 or greater, consider picking up a 50- or 60-dayer to start your season off sooner!
Plant correctly now to prevent problems later
- Pick a site that drains well and that gets morning sun. More than most other plants, tomatoes need morning sun to dry off their leaves.
- They also need 6 to 8 hours of sun a day to produce good fruit.
- Don’t plant tomatoes in the same spot where tomatoes have grown for the past two or three years; soil-borne wilts will cause this year’s plants’ leaves to turn yellow from the ground up. Just a few feet away from previous sites is safe.
- When you find that perfect place, dig a deep hole, pull the leaves and branches off the bottom two-thirds of the plant and drop it down so that most of the stem is underground. Tomatoes (and only tomatoes!) develop auxiliary roots along that buried stem, giving them access to more water and nutrients.
- Add calcium to the top of the root ball in the planting hole in the form of crushed eggshells, calcium carbonate pills or even Tums. This added calcium will totally prevent blossom end rot, the heartbreak of late summer when tomatoes turn black on the bottom (the blossom end) and rot out just as they begin to ripen.
- If your tomatoes are already planted without calcium, feed them with an organic tomato food that specifies it contains added calcium like “Tomatoes Alive” from Gardens Alive or “Tomato Tone” from Espoma (the Holly-Tone people). Cover any kind of granulated fertilizer with soil or compost to help activate the nutrients.
- Do not use chemical fertilizers; they will not prevent blossom end rot, but will produce tomatoes with a watery, diluted flavor.
- Fill in the hole with the soil you removed. Do not improve the soil in the hole (Yes; all those gardening books and articles are wrong.)
- Then spread a 2-inch-deep mulch of compost (not composted manure!) over the surface of the soil. Don’t till the compost in; layer it on the surface, where it will prevent weeds, suppress disease and supply slow, gentle feedings to your plants all season long.
- Be sure to support small-to-medium sized (determinate) plants with regular tomato cages. Grow monster-sized indeterminate heirlooms inside big cages made from welded wire fencing. Then stake the cage, not the plant — unless you have 14-foot high stakes and really long arms.
- We repeat: All tomatoes are vines; you must provide support to keep the plants upright and off the ground.
- Don’t crowd your plants; you’ll get more tomatoes from two plants that have a foot of open space between them than from four plants jammed all together.
- Always mulch tomatoes with 2 inches of premium yard waste compost (like Maryland’s Leaf-Gro) or a premium bagged product like Coast of Maine Lobster Compost.
- Do not use composted manure, which will give you 20-foot-high plants with three tomatoes each, or any kind of wood, bark or root mulch. Wood mulches breed plant disease; compost mulch prevents those diseases from getting a foothold. (With tomatoes and roses, it’s better to go without mulch than to use wood mulch.)
- Always plant in the evening, not the first thing in the morning. This gives the plants time to acclimate and get over their transplant shock before enduring a day of full sun. (This is especially important this season, as we are expecting some 90-degree days next week. Plant in the early morning of what later becomes a scorching 90-degree day and your plants will lie down and take a long nap. Perhaps forever.)
- Water your plants deeply right after planting by letting a hose drip at their base for a few hours. Water the same way — deeply and only at the base — once a week any week we don’t get an inch of rain.
- Do not water frequently or for short periods of time.
- Don’t wet the leaves of your tomatoes when you water. If you have no other choice, water early in the morning and turn the sprinkler off just as the sun hits your garden.
- No matter what, don’t wet the leaves of your plants in the evening.
How to making cages
- Buy a roll of either 5- or 6-foot-tall welded wire animal fencing — rabbit wire, turkey wire, concrete reinforcing wire — anything but chicken wire, which is too flimsy.
- Lay it out on your driveway and use wire cutters to cut sections of 6 linear feet. As you cut, cut into the next section over on the roll at every other junction to create rows of natural twist-ties.
- Form it into a cylinder, which will be less than 2 feet in diameter.
- Use your wire cutters to create little spikes on the bottom rung. Center a cage over each heirloom and/or indeterminate variety in your garden, allowing a foot of open space on all sides for airflow.
- Now take some rebar or stakes and drive them through the sides of the cages until the cages don’t wobble. Do not stake the actual plant — and don’t skimp on the support; a big beefsteak will be loaded with 30 to 40 pounds of fruit in August and you don’t want it to fall over.
- The now-safely-confined tomato plant, being a vine, will grow upward toward the sun; but being an unsupported vine, not directly so, instead curling around the inside of the cage. Because you didn’t force it to stay upright, all 10 to 12 feet of vine will stay tucked inside that 5- or 6-foot-high cage. Pretty clever, eh?
