How to Plant Tomatoes the Best Way | Gardening Advice and Tips | Roots and Refuge Farm

Hello everyone, I'm Jess, welcome back to the Region Shelter Farm. It's a beautiful spring morning here and today I'm going to

plant

the rest of my tomato

plant

s for the 2019 summer garden. I've been getting a lot of questions lately about planting.

tomatoes

I have shared them to pass on some of my

tips

and

advice

for growing

tomatoes

. I love growing tomatoes, it's my favorite thing to grow in the garden, so today I just wanted to make a quick video showing you my planting methods. tomatoes and just answer some of these questions that I've been getting a lot lately, first, let's go ahead and get this little guy in the ground and then I'll talk to you a little bit about spacing the pruning and the trellis, how it's placed. your tomato plant in the ground this is pretty universal.

I'll talk to you here in a minute about pruning and trellising and those things can vary depending on your

gardening

style, but planting your tomato plant in the ground. It doesn't matter if you plan to prune it down to a single stem or just let it grow completely and go wild, putting it in the ground is the same as tomato plants like to be planted deep, if you look closely at this plant, you will see these little bumps. and nodules on the stem of this plant, as well as these tiny hair-like fibers, and if you notice these fibers going all the way up the stem of this plant all the way up here to the top, the tomatoes, actually, if you let them. they grow on their own if you don't intervene if you don't tangle them jam them bind them they actually grow along the ground and are a climbing plant at least indeterminate tomatoes are like this one and like most of the ones you are going to buy a plant to grow in your garden and basically the way they grow is that everywhere their stem comes into contact with the soil, like when this plant grows and falls and grows along the ground, they root all the A along the stem, that's what those little fibers are our future

roots

, so whenever you have a transplant like this, which I started from a seed in my greenhouse a couple of months ago and I take it out of the cup, you can see the root system. everything here and this is obviously a healthy transplant, but if you just planted it in the ground up to here, this is the only root system it would have and it would come out of this and it would probably do fine. however, the deeper I plant this, I am giving it much more room to create that healthy root system.

Healthy

roots

will lead to healthy plants, meaning more nutrients they can absorb and more water they can absorb, basically at any time. that you are transplanting a tomato plant, the

best

thing is to go ahead and pinch the bottom leaves and I like to do this all the way to the top crown and I'm going to dig a very deep hole where I can plant So here's a trick you can do and obviously you didn't do it This time if you want it to come out like the day before you plan to repot or two days before and you want to place your plant on its side in the bed.

So tomato plants will always grow towards the sun, so if I put that plant aside here in the bed, you want to make sure it's well watered before you do this because it can dry out quickly in a day or two. this stem will bend upwards so if you are planting it in a bed maybe it's like a raised bed where it might be difficult to dig a 12 inch deep hole if you do that trick by placing them on those sides and letting them grow towards the Sun, you can place them in the hole on their side and place the stem underground without having to worry about the stem breaking when you bend it because you're basically just giving it time in the situation to bend.

I have no problem digging a hole in the bottom of my raised bed, so today I'm going straight down with this guy, so the soil in my raised beds, the bottom half, is a very mediocre top layer, honestly, it's Quite heavy and yet not great. We don't till these beds, we just add a few inches of compost each year and have great success with that. As you can see here, I have all this compost on me. I dug the hole deep and it's basically even. although the soil is not good at the bottom of my bed, I am going to put my plant there and then I will scrape all the compost that is on the top and on top so that it is surrounded by compost, now my only Tomato Hack The only thing I I would say what I always do with all my tomatoes, it's not planting them deeply, it's the egg and the whole trick.

I don't know the science behind this. An old man told me this years and years ago. that he had a garden in this area for 50 years to lay an egg in the hole every time I planted my tomatoes and I did. I just listened to him, he seemed to know what he was talking about a few years ago, however, one of my Instagram followers decided I did a little test and planted several tomatoes of the same variety, the same soil, the same growing conditions and halved It gave them the egg and it didn't give the other half, it was the only variable that changed in those plants and there was a marked difference in those that had the egg, bigger plants, more fruit, better production, I don't know, it's one of those things that I've always done, you know.

I don't change it because I figure you know the year not putting the egg in the hole would be my first bad year with the tomatoes I've had so in the past I didn't break them and for the most part when I was going to pull the plants of tomato, I could find some pieces of peel because the root system would break, however last year I had an egg that remained intact and when I went to pluck my tomatoes it was a completely traumatic experience, so this year I dropped these eggs. In the hole I took my shovel and not only did I completely crush them but I made a small crack in the shell to make sure they had a little head start and started to break and again I have the All the leaves are broken so this one tomato plant will sink into that hole and I will push the compost around.

I'm going to go ahead and remove the extra leaves, so I just have this. The top crown of this plant now protrudes. One thing that sometimes happens when you are planting and if you are not careful with this it can cause problems with tomatoes. You know, sometimes you dig your hole and, like here, as you can see, there's a little bit. There's a little bit of drooping here and what I want to avoid is creating a situation where water can pool around this tomato because tomato foliage is very susceptible to getting sick every time it gets wet, so basically what I'm going to do .

When I place this tomato, I'm going to build the soil around it and I'm actually going to dig a little moat around this plant, it's not a big deal, just a little bit to create a little hill so that when it rains, instead of the water rises around my plant, bursts here around the edge. Basically, if you have created a depression and your tomatoes are right in the middle, the water will rise. At that time, if it continues to rain, the dirty water will splash on your leaves again. It's a perfect storm to end up with fungus, leaf spots, and all kinds of things you don't want with tomatoes.

However, if you create this little indentation in this little moat, it will cause the water to flow away from the tomato, so you won't have as much splashing, but it will also cause the water to soak in six inches around the tomato and you're going to encourage the root system to branch out to absorb that water, so again you're encouraging healthier roots as well as healthy foliage, tomato plant in the ground, that tall plant is barely sticking out, it's going to take a few days. to really settle in and then start growing, now at this point you should normally go ahead and give this plant some water, being careful not to splash it all over the leaves as they are very close to the ground at this point.

However, I'm going to plant the rest of this row of tomatoes here in just a minute, as soon as I'm done with this video, so I'm not going to go ahead and water this plant right now, real quick. talk about pruning, spacing and trellising. I live in central Arkansas in zone 7b and it is hot here, very very humid and very very hot. In fact, I had a conversation with a man who lives in Ohio a few weeks ago and we broached the topic of growing tomatoes and he said he grows his tomatoes in large cages, which allows them to fully bloom since no pruning gives them 4 feet of space. around and gets bountiful crops every year that wouldn't work here.

There is so much humidity here that the year I let my tomato plants bush. I lost them at the end of July. They were all ruined because there wasn't enough airflow to combat the humidity. That's just a reality of living in Arkansas, so I started growing my tomatoes this way. It is the one that produces the most for me and my plants last the longest. I want to encourage you to experiment in your garden. Obviously, if you clicked on this video you are the type of person who wants to find the

best

way and do it that way.

While I think this is a great method and works great for me if you want to do this if you want to create cattle panel trellises and you want to space your tomatoes like mine and prune them like I do. I hope it is as successful for you as it has been for me, but I encourage you to maybe dedicate a small part of your garden and try letting the Bush tomato plant out. I did it just to get a good look, maybe I messed it up. year, let me try this again. I let one go completely last year and lost it due to illness so I realized this is the way I should do it with my conditions, don't be afraid to fail if it means learning a lesson - you must consider success of your

gardening

not just like this crop and this year's, but throughout your life, developing methods that work for you, where you live, in your conditions, in your soil, in your climate, so you can See that here I have all my tomatoes and all of these are slicers.

We just finished planting them the day before yesterday, so our next step will be mulching. Mulch is very important when planting tomatoes because it helps. with that fungus I was talking about in the disease every time you put mulch around your plants and not only does it help them retain moisture, but it also prevents splashing every time it rains, another good tip with tomatoes and from the beginning here. Water the bottom, do not water them like a sprinkler which will cause the water to go down. The drier you can keep the foliage of your tomato plants, the better for their overall health.

My plants here are spaced about 18 inches apart and give or take a couple of inches. I didn't actually measure it when I put them 18 inches apart, that's pretty close, but the way we prune our tomatoes is to allow them to have a main stem that we use these cattle panels on. T posts to create these trellis walls and essentially as these tomato plants grow, I'll do a video later on pruning, when I actually have something to show you, they're too small to show you right now, but I'll continue cutting. the lower branches of these plants as they continue to grow and essentially once they are fully grown and have grown on this trellis there will be no branches in the bottom 20 inches at least I keep it completely free of any additional growth because for example, I said We want to create that air flow to keep these plants as healthy as possible.

Now we allow one main stem and I use a ribbon to tie that to this trellis and I prune the shoots and for the fact that we keep them. So pruned we can grow these tomatoes 18 inches apart. Some square foot gardening methods suggest growing them 12 inches apart for me, giving them that extra six inches or so, it's a little bit out of an abundance of caution because like I said, we do. Here we deal with the moisture problem, so we prune 18 inches apart on a single stake and tie these to these cattle panel trellises. I have another video that talks about growing tomatoes and I share some of my

tips

and

advice

and just some of the research I did.

I have done. I'll link it below and post a link here if you'd like to see it. If you have any questions, you can write them below. I also want to invite you to join our Facebook group. Just one free group that we've created is called Friends of Roots and Barb's Shelter and the idea is to create a community of people who love gardening for a support system to answer questions and just be interested in things like tomatoes. I hope this helps you, thank you very much for watching. I bless you until next time.