In our October 2018 newsletter, we offered to answer gardening questions. We also asked that you enter your email address so that we could send you responses to your questions. Unfortunately, several folks did not leave their email addresses, so we set forth those questions here along with their answers. If you didn’t receive a direct email response from us, your question and answer should be below. If you have follow up questions, or you did not receive our emailed response, shoot us another message at [email protected]
Answers to questions left anonymously on our Tomato Survey questionnaire are below (forgive typos and grammatical errors. We copied and pasted the questions exactly as written by our customers). You can definitely criticize grammar and spelling on our answers though. We're responsible for those. Here are the questions and our answers:
Q: What is the secret to great tomatoes? I’ve had some trouble this season.
A: To put it very simply, understand the six “Ss”:
- Sunlight - 6 or more hours for beefsteaks
- Soil - feed it, cover crop it, keep it weed-free, mulch it
- Staking - indeterminates need a big, tall, strong cage
- Spacing - they need space from other plants and each other (two feet minimum)
- Spraying - use a mix of worm casting tea and aspirin for max yield
- Searching - be vigilant about pests, disease, and answers for your tomato issues. Never give up!
Consider taking our Tomato Masters class. We have five scheduled for the spring. Check out website for details and dates.
Q: For mature plants, giving nice fruit, should I cut back watering or leave it as is - 20 min drip at 4am? The drip irrigation started at 4am/4pm for 30 minutes; then reduce to 20 minutes after a couple weeks; when plants firmly established, I cut off the afternoon watering.
A: Watering is tricky. There are many factors that go into it: Weather, temperature, soil tilth, age of plant, size of plant, container or grown in a raise bed or ground, mulched or not. Because these variables are constantly changing from day to day and garden to garden, we can’t give you a timeline or schedule for watering. We do know that watering twice a day is not good. This is too much moisture. The best practice for watering is not to put them on a schedule. Manually turn on the irrigation when the plants need it. Go out to your garden every day and check the soil near the plants. Put your hand into the soil. If the soil is wet two inches below the surface, do not water. If the soil is starting to dry out below the surface, then turn on your irrigation, in the morning, for 30 to 40 minutes, depending on the flow of your drip irrigation. Have at least 4 emitters per plant, spaced all around it. We saturate the entire bed, not just around the plant, as tomato roots spread out and down. At Love Apple, with tomatoes grown in raised beds, if they are mulched with plastic cover or heavy layer of straw, they get watered 40 minutes every 5 or 6 days, depending on the weather. In very warm weather, this is cut down to every 4 or 5 days. But this is dependent on they’re being mulched and the plant being mature and the plant not being in a container.
Q: Aphids and white flies have been very problematic. tried lady bugs and green lace wings, but they didn't stick around to do the job. seeing large green caterpillars now, don't know what to do about it. shishito peppers turned out to be quite puny.
A: Most predatory insects that you can buy are usually not worth the trouble or money. They just don’t stick around to do a thorough enough job. Aphids and white flies can be controlled with an organic pesticide that contains pyrethrin. Large green caterpillars should be hand-picked and placed in a bucket of soapy water to kill them. Worm-like pests such as those caterpillars can also be controlled using an organic spray with spinosad in it. To address the shishito pepper question: peppers need a lot more frequent watering than tomatoes do. If you are trying to grow them in a pot, it’s not recommended due to the intensity of the watering and fertilizing they need. Next year, up your watering and your fertilizing of peppers, regardless of whether they are in a pot or in the ground.
Q: Can I compost the tomato vines? I never do, in case they have a disease that can be spread in the soil. My grandfather used to burn them before putting them into compost piles. One of my friends mulched her soil with oak leaves she gathered in the woods. But I noticed that some of her plants turned yellow, although others were fine. Could the leaves have caused it? I tend to be finicky about introducing "bad stuff," but maybe I'm overly cautious.
A: You can indeed compost tomato vines, with the caveat that if you suspect any are diseased, throw those out. Your grandfather’s method of burning them before adding their ashes to the compost is a fine idea, except for all the smoke the Bay Area has been having. So this year, no. Don’t burn them first. Mulching with oak leaves can be problematic. You just don’t know the sterility of the leaves, plus for me, oak leaves are very sharp and I would have a hard time digging into the soil with my hands to ascertain soil moisture. The plants turning yellow may or may not have been from the oak leaves. But we do like the idea of mulching your beds, particularly tomatoes. We recommend mulching with clear plastic laid on top of your soil over your irrigation lines before you plant (cut an “x” in the plastic to plant the tomato) or with a very thick layer (at least four inches) of straw.
Q: What's the trick with growing good ruffled varieties? Mine seem to become misshapen, or they rot in the folds. I don't water the fruit... only the soil.
A: We love ruffled varieties too. This year we’ve resurrected an awesome one called Beauty Lottringa. Check out our Instagram feed @loveapplefarms for a photo of it or check out our pre-sale site for same photo: http://loveapplepresale.tictail.com/ We like that you’re not watering the fruit, only the soil. But we also think you may live in a high humidity area - note that fog is high humidity. Or in an area that gets a lot of dew in the morning. The moisture is settling into the crevices and rotting them. You may consider capping the very top of the bed and upper half of the bed with plastic. Here is a photo of what we mean: https://www.instagram.com/p/tV_6yINWdN/
Q: How to grow in hay bales?
A: We love growing in straw bales! So much so that we’ve got a workshop on that. The next one is set for April 7, 2019. Click here to view that workshop info:
https://www.growbetterveggies.com/growbetterveggies/2016/10/workshop-straw-bale-vegetable-gardening-.html
Q: My bell pepper produced only one. Is it possible critters are eating the blossoms?
A: Each bell pepper plant only produces four or five fruit at best. So if your plant is not 100% perfectly grown (because of soil, sun, fertility, watering, spacing, critters, whatever), you’ll get even less than that. We recommend growing 5 or more bell pepper plants if you want a goodly crop of them. Also note that peppers need more watering and fertilizing than most gardeners think. So up that game. Also stake them with those short, wire, cone-shaped tomato cages. Don’t let the fruit or plant leaves touch the soil. Consider coming to our Growing Tomatoes, Peppers and Eggplants from Seed class in January. You’ll get more tips about growing them plus you get to sow a whole of seeds to grow yourself. Here is a link to that workshop info:
https://www.growbetterveggies.com/growbetterveggies/2008/12/pepper-and-eggplant-class.html
Q: How do we grow Onion from from seed and when to apply fertilizer?
A: We advocate growing onions from “sets.” These are small plants you purchase in bundles from onion supply growers online. Our favorite is Brown’s Omaha. They have tutorials as well. Onions are not as easy to grow as you’d think! Here is their website: https://www.growbetterveggies.com/growbetterveggies/2008/12/pepper-and-eggplant-class.html
Q: Gophers!!! Uug! What traps do you like?
A: We use cinch traps purchased from www.gopherslimited.com They sell the traps plus publish tutorials on how to most effectively use them.
Q: I planted 3 varieties of tomatoes in the cloth bags and followed your protocol for the fish head, fertilizers, etc. The plants all looked dry and so I watered them more often than I thought was good for tomatoes (like every 2-3 days) especially since it was not that hot (I live near beach). They produced a fair amount of tomatoes in spite of looking like they were dying most of the time. The chocolate cherries were great - juicy and tasty. The yellow cherries (coyote) were too tart, and the large orange beefsteak-looking one (not sure of name) was not very prolific and kind of mealy. Not a great year for me , but I definitely would like to plant the chocolate cherries again.
A: Tomatoes grown in pots need way more water and fertilizer than tomatoes grown in the ground. We end up watering them every day once the weather turns hot. Also, do not use a fish head in pots, only when planting in the ground. Plants in pots need a good dose of fertilizer once a week without fail. If you don’t do that, you’ll get spindly growth and scant production.
Q: Should I ever use a rototiller on the garden beds for vegetables? If so, what time of year should this be done and what should I add to the soil?
A: We don’t advocate using rototillers because they compact the soil too much and kill beneficial earthworms. We want you to amend your beds two or three weeks before planting with this recipe for every 50 square surface area: one bag G&B Harvest Supreme (compost), one quart G&B 4-6-3 dry fertilizer, one quart pure worm castings. Sprinkle all evenly on top of soil. Turn the soil over as deeply as you can using a spade fork, breaking up soil chunks as you go. Rake smooth and you’re ready to plant. Double up these recipe amounts if your soil is particularly poor.
Q: I find it challenging to understand and deal with various plant infections. Also how to address nutritional problems primarily mid to late season. Seminars on either or both seems to me would be be beneficial to your client base. Late Blight was a problem for me this year. I lost one plant early because I didn’t recognize/address it soon enough. I think other plants caught something that caused their leaves to dry up and die. It spread slowly throughout some plants as well as other plants picking up the infection.
A: Yes, you’re not the only one struggling with plant diseases. They’re so tricky that people go not only to college to study them, but then get advanced graduate degrees in plant diseases. Even then, these hyper-educated people are only able to diagnose diseases if they take a sample of the plant to a lab and culture it/study it under lab conditions. So don’t kick yourself. It’s hard. We just try our best to keep our tomatoes healthy from getting diseases. We do this by the three “Ss” listed above and also by sprinkling mycorrhizal fungi on the rootball when planting and spraying once a week with an elixir of worm casting tea and aspirin. This all helps the plant ward off diseases. We also don’t let microscopic pests such as thrips or tomato russet mites infest our plants. Late Blight is a pernicious diseases that can spread like wildfire in conditions that are moderate in temperature (between 60 and 80 degrees) with high moisture (such as rain, dew or fog). If your conditions get like this, you can spray prophylactically with Serenade or copper, both organic preventive fungicides.
Q: You had great directions on planting and starting out. I could have used advice on trimming, snail issues as the season progressed. I didn't know if the plants should be trimmed and they grew so well they knocked over the frames and all grew together.
A: Yes, well it’s hard to impart all the things necessary for great tomato care just on placards at our plant sale. But we do have “long form” instructions on our website under this page:
https://www.growbetterveggies.com/growbetterveggies/instructions-on-how-to-grow-better-tomatoes.html
Trimming or pruning them: we use very strong tomato cages that we make ourselves. You can’t buy a proper tomato cage unless it’s home made. Click here for our instructions on how to make them:
https://www.growbetterveggies.com/growbetterveggies/2011/05/small-conical-tomato-cages-dont-work-for-most-heirloom-tomato-plants-the-cages-typically-seen-at-most-nurseries-simply-don.html
After you’ve got a proper cage, push in the branches as they try to grow out of the cage. Do this regularly, every week or so. As the leaves bunch up inside the cage, reach inside the core of the cage and remove bunched up leaves and weak stems blocking light and airflow. This will help. Also consider taking one of the later Tomato Masters workshops. Once the plants get big in our garden, we demo pruning techniques. Those workshops are found here:
https://www.growbetterveggies.com/growbetterveggies/2017/06/class-tomato-ma.html
Q: Our tomato harvest was unusually minuscule this year (maybe 20 lbs from9 vines. Have others reported the same. We prob have upwards of 150- 200 lbs from past years.
A: 2018 wasn’t the best year for growing tomatoes. They are affected year to year, just like wine grapes. Some good years, some not so good years. Next year try to give them plenty of fertility in the planting hole and supplement with a weekly regimen of worm casting tea and aspirin spray. That will definitely up your yields.
Q: This was my first year in Sacramento and a learning experience. Next year is better water management (less cracking) and better spacing and support. What can I do to alleviate some of the heat issues? In September the tomatoes just stopped ripening due to the heat. Now to keep the rabbits and squirrels from eating my tomatoes…
A: Sacramento is challenging due to their extreme, relentless hot weather. I would only grow heat-resistant varieties. Blossoms drop rather than turn into fruit at temperatures above 90 degrees. Try to use a shade cloth on them too. Don’t let water get on the fruit. That leads to cracking. Irrigate only at the base of the plant. Use 7 foot tall tomato cages made out of concrete reinforcing wire. See our link above for how to make them.
Q: This year my Sexy Beast variety had an odd ripening. They were actually orange in color and didn't ripen like in years past. Almost a mealy texture. I had it on the sunniest corner of the box and ended up shading it with row cover which seemed to help a bit. I ended up using most of them for sauce/canning. Not sure if just an anomaly. Appreciate any input.
A: Sexy Beast should be a pink heart-shaped tomato. As is the case with oxhearts, they have wispy, scant, droopy foliage, so we try to put them in a location that gets morning sun and afternoon shade (since the afternoon sun is the hottest). Putting a shade cloth on them was a good call. Mealy texture could have come from watering them too much. But note that oxhearts have a creamy texture and scant seeds, so some folks would consider them “mealy” we imagine. Oxhearts do double duty as slicers and canners, so canning them was also a good call.
Q: Suggestions for spider mites would be eagerly accepted.
A: One of our six “Ss” is “searching” for bugs. Spider mites are so small that regular inspections with a 20x jeweler’s loupe is suggested for tomatoes. There are a lot of microscope bugs that can damage or kill your tomatoes. Spider mites are one of them. Also thrips, russet mites and aphids. Do Google searches for what they look like, get yourself a loupe (found on Amazon) and do regular inspections. Hit them prophylactically with weekly sprays of organic pesticides such as Neem, pyrethrin, or safer soaps. Keep them sprayed every week with worm casting tea and aspirin spray. This weekly elixir has been shown to increase fertility and yields, and decrease pest and disease issues.
