The tomato garden is often a source of great pride for home gardeners. There is generally a friendly competition among the neighborhood gardeners to see who can produce the first ripe tomato, or the biggest or the most flavorful. In fact, the number one home garden project in our country is invariably growing a tomato garden. Tomatoe gardeners are constantly on the lookout for new ways to improve their production in their quest for neighborhood bragging rights. Growing the best tomato garden isn’t always a matter of using the latest and greatest magic potions from the local garden center. Sometimes all it takes is a little bit of common sense and good gardening practices to produce the best possible tomato garden.
Here are a few simple tips to help you increase your tomato garden’s productivity.
Keep the fruit and foliage up off the ground:
Tomato plants can contract a number of fungal infections and diseases from contact with soil. This can happen when the tomato plant is allowed to sprawl on the ground or even when the infected soil is splashed up on the foliage during a heavy rain. Plants allowed to make contact with the ground are also prime targets for slugs and other insects as well as just plain rot. We can prevent these problems easily by trellising or tying up our tomato garden.
The trellis can be something as simple as a stake driven into the ground to which the plants are tied as they grow. Or, a cage may be used to confine the plant and hold it in an upright position. Cages can be made at home or purchased ready-made, in a variety of styles and shapes. Personally, I like the square style cages because they can be folded flat for storage in the winter and thus take up very little space. These are generally made from 4 panels of woven or welded wire with spacing between the wires large enough for your hand to fit through to pick your tomatoes.
To avoid damage to your tomato garden, it’s best to place your stakes, cages or other trellis around the plants while they are still quite small. As the plants grow, you may have to help them by arranging their branches in the right position for your trellising sytem and possibly, even tying them in place. If you tie the plants, be sure to use a soft material and don’t tie too tightly. Use a soft, bulky twine, or if you have access to them, old nylon hosiery or pantyhose make excellent tomato ties.
Give your plants plenty of room in the tomato garden. Remember that crowding reduces the flow of air through the plants and holds in humidity, both of which lead to a number of diseases which will reduce your harvest.
Remove the early suckers from the plants:
If you’ve ever looked closely at a tomato plant, you’ve probably noticed that there is a new shoot or branch coming out of every leaf node. The leaf node is the point where the tomato leaf stem comes out of the main stalk. These new shoots or branches are called suckers and they make your little tomato plant into a very full, dense bush. Each of these suckers is capable of growing, blooming and producing more tomatoes… which sounds like a very good thing when you want a nice productive tomato garden. However, remember what we said earlier about giving your plants plenty of room to make sure there is good air flow. If the suckers are allowed to grow at will, you will soon have a lovely, bushy plant…. until the high humidity days of summer. At that point, problems will begin to develop because of the lack of air flow. We want the extra production of those new branches but we don’t want to make our plant susceptible to disease. Let’s consider pruning the particularly troublesome shoots.
Start at the bottom of the plant, near the ground. The first suckers to appear will be very low and practically impossible to keep olff the ground. That means any fruit produced on those branches is going to be more likely to suffer slug damage or rot from contact with the ground. The best procedure is to pinch these off with your fingers before they get more than an inch or so long. If they’ve grown longer before you get to them, you can still remove them either by snapping them off by hand or by using your garden shears. Be sure to disinfect your shears before moving on to the next plant, though. You don’t want to risk spreading problems from one plant to another by using infected shears.
Removing these first suckers from the plant will encourage it to put out even more suckers or branches. This is good… up to a point. You will want to keep most of them because of the tomatoes they will produce but you don’t want your plant to become so full that you can no longer see through it. If it begins to reach that point, clip out a few of the suckers so that air is once again able to circulate freely. Remember that lots of branches will produce lots of smaller tomatoes. If you want BIG tomatoes, remove some of the branches. That way, the tomato plant puts all its energy into developing fewer fruits, thereby making them larger.
Toward the end of your growing season, if all has gone well, your plants will still be blooming and setting new fruit. However, late in the season we have to worry about frost killing the plants. If the fruit doesn’t have time to mature and ripen before that first frost, you will lose it. Or, if you’re so inclined, you’ll be eating lots of fried green tomatoes! A better option is to remove all the suckers that form late in the season. This will let the plant expend its energy in developing and ripening the remaining fruits, rather than in producing more foliage and blossoms that don’t stand a chance of maturing.
Mulch your tomato garden:
Always apply a layer of mulch to your tomato garden in early summer, after the soil has warmed up. This will accomplish several things. Mulch will help control weeds and will conserve moisture. It will also discourage slugs and will prevent soil from splashing up on your plants when it rains. And when you till your garden next spring, the mulch will add organic matter to your soil.
