Everybody who has a garden, whether it is in a container or a regular garden, you will find tomatoes planted there. Tomatoes are America's favorite vegetable.
A full size tomato plant needs a container with a soil capacity of at least twenty quarts and a water capacity of at least a gallon. It would be better if you have a bigger container like a forty quarts of soil and at least a two gallon water reservoir. If you have a bigger water reservoir you will not have to water so often.
Tomatoes like sunlight. They like warmth. You will need to give the tomatoes so they can have the longest time in the sun. Tomatoes takes a lot of water. A mature tomato plant will use a gallon of water every day.
Start planting tomato plants is not difficult to do, it just means you will need to have some equipment and a sunny place. If you have the desire, the space, and the equipment, start growing your own tomatoes can be very rewarding for you.
If you start your own plants, you can get different varieties of tomatoes. A well-stocked garden center or nursery may not have a lot of varieties, where as, a seed catalog may have a whole bunch more, like three dozen or more.
You can buy tomato seeds and tomato seedlings. A tomato plant's root system is the key to its success in life, because when a tomato is ready for transplanting, it should be growing in at least a four inch deep pot. Most of the time, you will not find tomatoes in a four inch pot in a nursery, because they will become pot bound and stressed. When you are at a nursery looking for tomato plants, if you see blossoms on a small, skinny tomato plant, this may be a sign of stress, because the plant can not grow more roots, so it goes into the next phase of life long before it has the strength to bear fruit. If you find blossoms on your tomato plants before or soon after transplanting, always clip them off. The tomato plant needs to grow more roots and foliage before taking on the work of growing and producing fruit.
Tomato plants should be short, stocky ones and not tall lanky ones. If you are going to buy tomato plants, always look for signs of insect damage or disease. The leaves should be dark green without holes, brown or black spots, or curled edges.
Do not start your tomatoes indoors no more than five to six weeks before you have your last frost where you live at. You can start your tomato seeds in a seed starter kit. You can used a peat/compost mix or a sterile peat based starting mix. Always keep the soil moist but not soggy and the temperature stay between 75 degree and 90 degree F. If you are using a fertilizer- free starting mix, you will need to fertilizer the seedlings with liquid seaweed fertilizer.
Ten days after your tomato plants have germinate, you will see the first true leaves have appeared then you need to transplant into the four-inch pots. You will need to set the plants so that only the top leaves show above the soil. The soil needs to be just moist all the time. Before you plant your seedlings outside, you need to harden them for two weeks. You can do this by moving them to a shady spot for a hour or two, it can be longer on cloudy days. After a hour or two you will need to put them inside. By the time they are ready for planting in your garden they should be used to being out all day and able to stand the full sun for most of the day.
When the soil temperatures are at least 55 degree F and the night air temperatures do not go below 40 degree F, it is time to transplant. The best time to transplant your plants is in the cool of the day, and shade your plants from the sun for a few days. Plant your tomato plants in containers deeper then you had them in the pots, trimming off all of the leaves that will be buried.
If you are going to put your tomato plants in containers, some of them will need some kind of outside support. They do not like to climb trellises or be tied to stakes, but they love to crawl on the ground like the vines that they are.
Growing tomatoes on a stake, or on a single trellis will required a more drastic style of pruning.All the suckers that appear on the main stem has to be pruned off. Because if you do not do this, each sucker becomes a new stem and the tomato plant becomes impossible to put on a trellis or stake. When the plant grows up to the top of your trellis, stop the growth by pruning the terminal shoot. This is done to keep the plant to top heavy.
A lot of the diseases that affects tomatoes are soil borne and if your tomatoes are in containers, that will not bother them. If you find a tomato horn worm, pick it off and drop it in a can of soapy water.
When the tomatoes get ripe, it is best to take them off of the vines with scissors to avoid damaging the plant. If it is getting close to your first frost, you need to pick all of your tomatoes that have begun to ripen inside and they will finish ripening all the way. Put your tomatoes up in your windowsill to finish ripening inside. If you have a container that you can bring indoors, you can let the tomatoes ripen on the vine.
Summary
Tomatoes are very easy to grow and they are a very popular vegetable that are planted every year. They are many different types of tomatoes to choose from red, yellow, big and little ones.
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