Great Gardens For Absolute Beginners, Part 15: Terrific Tomatoes!

If there’s one vegetable that gardeners new and old like to grow, it’s tomatoes. There’s nothing like chili sauce, salsa, chutney and fried green tomatoes made with the harvest from your own garden.

Tomatoes come from the Nightshade Family and for a long time were considered harmful to people unless the poison was boiled out. Recipes from Europe in the 19th century routinely has instructions to boil them for ten to twelve hours! Only relatively recently did we figure out that, not only weren’t tomatoes harmful, they were downright beneficial. Tomatoes have large doses of vitamin ‘C’ as well as anti-oxidants that retard the aging process. (A word of caution here; plant breeders have spent a lot of time and money selecting tomatoes to be less acidic. With less acidity comes, less Vitamin ‘C’ and a lowering of anti-oxidants. If you want the original combination, select heirloom or non-hybrid varieties.

Small yoghurt containers made ideal pots in which to start tomato seeds. Get your friends to save them. Stack up six containers and drill three holes through the bottom. All the containers will be ventilated at once, so excess water will drain. You can repeat as often as you have containers.

Tomato seeds come in sealed packets of approximately 50 seeds, (less for new hybrids and rare heirloom seeds). Fill your containers with soilless potting mix and use an empty container to tamp down the soil in the full ones. You don’t want any gaps in the medium to foster fungal or bacterial growth. Then water them generously, tamp down again and add soilless mixture to bring it up to a half and inch from the top. Plant three seeds per pot (a sharpened pencil make a great dibble to open holes for the seeds), a half an inch down in the soil, put them in a tray so you can water them safely and place them over a source of gentle bottom heat. The top of your refrigerator or a hot air register are perfect. Either be prepared to mist the soil whenever it appears to dry out or put plastic wrap across the tops of the containers. Remove the wrap the minute the seeds break the surface.

When you are lining up your yoghurt container supply, also put the word out for one quart milk containers as these are the key to great tomato starts. Tomatoes will grow roots on their stems if they’re covered with soil. The more root you can encourage on your plant, the quicker start you guarantee them when you set them out in the garden. Here’s how:

Be sure to clip off the two seedlings that lag behind in either germinating, growth or irregularities. It seems heartless but you’re growing seeds to get the variety you want and the largest quantity of fruit and only by encouraging the fittest plants will you do so. When the start has two to three leaf bracts above the original germination leaf, it’s time to start transplanting. Here’s where the milk containers come into play. Using a tile knife or other sharp blade, cut down one side of the milk container by three quarters of it’s length. Gently fold this flap down and fill the bottom with soilless mixture. Then tap your transplants out of their plastic containers and plant them in the milk cartons. The folded down side allows you to let light in to the plant. Secure it with a strong rubber band. If necessary, fold the flap down and under the carton to hold it down.

Now next time your tomato gets big enough to be repotted, open up the side of the milk carton and pinch out the leaves a third of the way up. Secure the flap up another third and fill up the carton with soil. You should be able to do this once more, before moving the transplants outdoors and it will have almost a foot of flourishing roots to support it’s growth and fruit production, when you set in the ground.

Once the starts have been hardened off outdoors, dig a hole a foot deep and twice as big as the container. Take off the rubber band and work the rest of the carton gently off the root mass. Put a big scoop of well-rotted compost at the bottom of the hole to insure a quick start. Plant the tomato in the hole and firm the soil down around it to avoid air pockets. Water generously.

If you have cut worms in your area, you can foil then easily by putting a ring around the stem that the worm can’t climb over as it cuts off the seedling exactly at ground level. You can cut 2 inch rounds of paper towel roll for this purpose, making sure the cut where you slipped it around the stem is tightly closed.

There are two kinds of tomato plants, indeterminate and determinate. The former grows upwards to the sun until it is cut back by frost in the Fall. The latter grows branches all the same length and all the fruit ripens at once. Not surprisingly this is the kind planted for commercial canneries. Indeterminate plants must be staked to keep the fruit from rotting in contact with the soil. Some people pinch out leaves to let the sun making direct contact with the fruit. Most people pinch out lateral branches so the energy of the plant goes to tomatoes produced by the center stalk. Even if you ignore them entirely except for watering, both kinds will provide a multitude of delicious tomatoes and nothing tastes as good as a home grown tomato on fresh bread.

Hints

This article presumes that the weather in your area gets cold enough to need to protect the seeds indoors and transplant them outdoors. If your soil is well balanced, no fertilizer is necessary except more compost from time to time. Make sure after the plants have died from the frost that the stalks and spoiled fruit are composted and not allowed to lie around over the winter. Try not to plant tomatoes in the same place two years in a row. Green fruit can be ripened in a paper bag by the addition of a couple of apples. They secrete ethylene gas which makes the tomatoes ripen rapidly. Heirloom and open pollinated seed can be saved. Hybrids can be saved but will not grow true to type.