Tomato Plants from Seedshow to grow tomato plants from seeds

Living as I do in an upstairs apartment, all my gardening is in containers, some on the pavement downstairs and some on the first-story roof accessible via my back porch. Every year I’ve included tomatoes. The last four years, it’s been cherry tomatoes, grown especially for my grandson who turned five this year.

This was the year my grandson went shopping with me, and we picked out a six-pack of small tomato plants. I only wanted one, so daughter took the other five for her first attempt at her own garden. This was to be a lesson in growing for my daughter and her two little boys. It turned out to be a lesson for me as well.

Here’s what I learned. Whether you are planning to grow tomatoes from seed and to buy plants, read the labeling – all of it – before making your purchase. There are numerous varieties and sizes of tomatoes, of course; but, what I’d never had to deal with before was the fact that plants come in all sizes, too.

I transplanted my tomato into a bigger pot and settled back to watch it grown, knowing most tomato plants take a long time to produce their “fruit”. (Yes, although we treat tomatoes as vegetables, they are actually fruit.) The larger tomatoes can take up to 75 days to grow to full size. Cherry or grape tomatoes take less time. That’s why they are a good pick for children. Anyway, having raised tomatoes before, when the plant reached a height that satisfied me, I started pinching out the end growth on the stems. I also watched for leaves to appear in the V’s wherever smaller stems branched out from the main one. That, too, I had learned to pinch out.

My daughter and my grandson didn’t do any pinching, and one day I noticed their plants were getting quite tall, much taller than I’d ever seen. Well, to make a long story short, about the time their plants reached five feet in height, I went back and read the label. I had purchased vine tomatoes. I knew they were vine tomatoes; I just didn’t realize that meant they’d grow and grow, possibly reaching eight feet in length, or height. The good news is that all the plants (including mine which had to be moved to an even larger pot) have prolifically produced lovely, tasty cherry tomatoes.

You can do like I do every year and buy plants, moving them larger pots as they grow. However, if you want to start from scratch, meaning grow them from seed, consider where you live and pick a planting time accordingly. We’re located in upstate New York and in order to have

Tomato blight is perhaps one of the most disheartening tragedies that can befall the tomato gardener. While the blackened leaves and dying plants are dashing all hopes of success, there is hope. But it does require some extra work. Good gardening isn’t for the faint of heart.

The first step is attitude. Blight is a challenge. As with any challenge, one can give up and walk away, or face the crisis head-on. With any blight, time is important to save at least some of the crop since the blight can wipe out the tomato patch within days.

If time isn’t available, take the loss but get all the information about the various blights after the growing season. Talk to fellow gardeners; contact a local Master Gardener program and/or your local agricultural extension office. There is a wealth of information available to prevent or at least minimize a future infestation.

The best course of action, the least expensive and more healthy plan, is a natural and organic defense method. Compost tea ranks high on the list of measures to consider when blight attacks. To make compost tea, get a five gallon bucket and place about a gallon mature compost in it and fill it with water. It needs to be stirred frequently for three days or so and kept in a warm place. Strain the tea and spray on the leaves, after removing the most infected ones, and/or the ground.

While not a cure-all, the organisms present in the spray effectively control the blight and add important nutrients to the soil and provide additional benefits to the plant. It is necessary to use the tea every three or four days for proper control. There is a wealth of information on the Web regarding other options on how to use and make compost tea from simple kitchen scraps.

Another important step is to pay attention to your soil. Get a soil test done. The garden soil should be alive with organisms such as the beneficial earth worm. Add grass clippings and leaves and the all important compost. Never use pesticides which indiscriminately kill all living things. Crop rotation is also an important consideration in proper soil management. And consider winter crops as a cover crop. A number of plant species even in the cold northern regions will encourage a better crop the following growing season.

Companion planting, plants which “like” each other, also can help alleviate growing season problems. Native flowers in the vegetable garden, as well as herbs, also add to the general health of the garden plot. Biodiversity is essential.

Another smart move is to start with healthy plants and that usually means starting your own in real soil or finding an organic nursery. Heirloom plants, particularly if you save your own seeds from year to year, are a good choice.

Tomatoes need sun and good air circulation. Do not overcrowd them ; and it is best to stake or trellis the plants. It is best to mulch with lawn clippings and other organic materials. It helps with moisture content and weed problems.

A few extra organic steps and attention to garden details, along with information readily available from a wide variety of sources is essential to produce a good tomato crop. Everyone’s garden plot is different and has it’s own unique micro-environment, tailor fit your plan to meet your garden’s needs. At the end of the season, and throughout the cold winter months, enjoy the garden bounty and smile, you beat the blight and improved your health.

As one who has always associated chickpeas with Indian – or at the very least, Far Eastern – cooking, I can only ever associate them with dishes which have some form of similar influence. This is a simple yet flavoursome dish, including fenugreek, not one of the more widely recognised herbs. If you happen to be one of those fortunate people with access to the fresh variety, substitute the quantity in the recipe for 1 tsp of finely chopped leaves.

You will need:

2 tbsp of chickpeas

1 large tomato (deseeded and roughly chopped)

1 tsp of coriander, or cilantro in US (roughly chopped)

One quarter tsp of dried, powdered fenugreek

1 clove of garlic (crushed)

Splash of extra virgin olive oil

Salt/freshly ground black pepper

Simply combine all of your ingredients in a glass mixing bowl, cover and refrigerate for one hour. Your salad is the ready to serve.

One day when I was about seven years old, Me and my mother were gardening.

I remember this day was the first day I saw a ripe tomato on the vine. Through a haze of wonder I reached out and touched it. It was so perfect, so bright red and shiny. The leaves were bright green, and you could smell hay in the air. My hands were coated in dirt from digging up worms to feed to the chickens. How I stared at that tomato.

My mother turned to me, and she said “Kaila? Do you remember when I handed you that tiny seed and told you to put it in the ground?” So dumbfounded I couldn’t speak, I merely nodded. She went to her basket and pulled out a little brown packet, turned it over, tapped it twice and handed me a similar seed to the one I had planted months before.

“This Kaila, this is what you planted. Because you planted it, and because it had dirt and water and sunshine, it grew, and to thank you, it made that tomato.”

She plucked it off the vine and handed it to me along with the seed.

“All the magic in the world, can be found within a single seed.”

In wonder I stared at the tiny seed and the giant tomato in my hands.

Something so small made something so big, and I helped.

So my mom smiled. I cried.

I didn’t know why I was crying. I was happy.

But I cried, and she hugged me.

So we made bread, and then we made pasta, and she let me make the sauce.

That day I learned my mom was magic. Because she could make things grow.

Try a little something different in the garden this year with an upside down tomato plant or two. Amaze the neighborhood children and yourself too. If you grow organic this method cuts down on the number of pests who can gain access to your luscious red delights. Some say they have better yields but so far production is about the same for me. This is a delightful way to grow tomatoes if you have limited space or just a need for more tomatoes.

Make sure that the place you choose to hang them is stable enough to hold the tomatoes when fully watered. Plenty of sunlight is just as necessary for the upside down plantings as for right side up. The container needs to have a handle for easy hanging. Five gallon plastic buckets and twenty five pound rice bags work well. I had a neighbor who used three liter soda bottles but the plants soon became root bound and did not produce that well.

Grow upright until plant is about four to six inches tall.

Cut or drill a three inch hole in the bottom and top of the container, one hole for the plant to grow out of and one for watering.

Thread the plant through an unbleached coffee filter till it rests between the second and third sets of leaves.

Thread the tomato through the hole in the bottom of the container leaving the coffee filter inside to keep soil from falling through the hole.

Pour six cups of peat in first to settle around the roots.

Add four to six cups of compost.

Fill with soil

Hang with tomato pointing down.

Water thoroughly.

Secure the lid or tape the top closed.

Watch them grow.

Eat more tomatoes.

So far I’ve had the best luck with grape, cherry and roma tomatoes. I tried a midsized golden but the yield wasn’t near as good as in the ground. Try this method with small peppers and pickling cucumbers. Hang one off the mailbox with a help yourself sign for the happiest mailman on earth.

Fall Gardening: Late growing tomatoes

If the weatherman calls for a light frost, cover your tomato plants during the night and remove the cover during the day. The leaves might die off or turn brownish, but the tomatoes will continue to grow and ripen. If a killing frost is predicted then harvest your tomatoes.

Fall gardening will often leave you with both ripe and green tomatoes. Pick them all and divide into all green, partially ripened and almost ripe ones.

Green tomatoes should be picked and checked for soft spots or bug damages. The larger tomatoes can then be washed and dried. While they are drying, gather some small cardboard flats, newspaper and paper towels. You can cut cardboard boxes to create the flats.

When the tomatoes have dried, separate them into the same or nearly the same size, and then divide again by their green coloring. Cover the bottom of your cardboard flat with a single sheet of paper towels. Next start with one tomato, wrap a rolled newspaper around the sides, place your next tomato and wrap it with newspaper so the tomatoes do not physically touch each other. Take this flat and put it into a dark, cool basement. Cover the top with a single layer of newspaper. DO not stack any other flats on top of these. Do this with all your green undamaged larger size tomatoes. Keep the lighter green tomatoes together as they will ripen first.

Check your flats once a week by watching the color of the tomato turn from green to pink or yellow/pink and red. Remove the tomatoes from the flats when they start to turn pink and allow them to sit on a plate on your counter to finish ripening. Do not put them in the fridge.

You can freeze whole ripe tomatoes. Place them on a flat sheet and sharp freeze, and then put them into storage Baggies in your freezer. Be sure to put a date on the Baggie. When thawing, drop the frozen tomato into hot tap water. The skin will peel off easily. Then set the tomato into a bowl to finish thawing. These can be cooked and used in several food dishes that call for tomatoes.

Partially ripe tomatoes should be allowed to ripen by setting them on a paper towel surface. Do not put them in direct sunlight.

The ripe tomatoes that have flaws (cracks, slight bug damage) can be cut, cooked, strained and turned into juice that can be frozen for use in winter soups and chili dishes.

Green tomatoes with slight damage can be cut and canned, fried or used for salsa mixes. You cannot store these unless you are cutting and freezing the undamaged part of the green tomato.

• ISBN13: 9780761116967
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
Conventional wisdom says to garden from the bottom up, turning over the soil every spring until your back aches. Ironically, this does such a good job aerating that gardeners spend the rest of the season pulling weeds and replacing the suddenly energized (and easily used up) nutrients. Mother nature, on the other hand, gardens from the top down-layering undisturbed soil with leaves and other organic materials. In following this example and synthesizing the work of o… More >>

Weedless Gardening

• This Heirloom Tomato is so sweet it used to be called Sugar Lump.
• This is an indeterminate tomato so provide support when you transplant outside.
• When transplanting your tomatoes make sure to strip the bottom leaves and bury a third of the stem for a sturdy productive plant.
• Lycopersicon lycopersicum

Product Description
Almost nothing is more rewarding to the vegetable gardener than picking a sun warmed tomato and delivering it straight to your mouth…. More >>

Heirloom Gardener’s Delight Cherry Tomato Seeds 75 Seeds

A garden just doesn’t seem like a garden without at least a few tomatoes growing. A rich garden will also produce lots of great tasting tomatoes. One of the keys to tomato success in the garden, though, is in knowing when to plant them.

To simply say that this depends on the local climate doesn’t help a great deal, though it is very true. The problem is that climate is the average of the weather. This means that one year can be hotter and drier than normal, while the next may be colder and wetter than average.

To know the best time to plant them, then, it is easiest and best to understand the optimal growing conditions. You can then judge for yourself when the best time to grow them will be, according to your climate and the weather you are having in any given year. For people who have grown tomatoes for years, most of this will come as no surprise, but a few things might stand out as something not before considered.

Most important of all is that tomatoes are not a cool weather crop. Even a mild frost is enough to ‘zap’ an established tomato plant, killing a large number of the leaves and stems. Mild frosts, though, can be combated early in the growing cycle by covering the plant for the night. It isn’t necessary to have anything as elaborate as a greenhouse or cold frame; simply cutting the bottom out of a plastic gallon milk jug and placing this over the young plants can guard against quite a bit of frost damage.

Another consideration, though, is the general health and size of the plant when it is planted. If you plant directly from seed, the ground must be relatively warm and it needs to stay that way. If you plant the seedling plants, the continual warmth isn’t as firm a rule, and the larger the plant, the better its chances of it surviving and flourishing. Many people start the seeds inside, such as in peat pots, while others buy the seedling plants when they are already well established.

Cold and windy weather need to be guarded against in the early year, especially in areas prone to late winter storms.

There is a bit of a misunderstanding, though. Many people think that for the best crop, the tomatoes must go into the ground as early as possible. This isn’t always the case. Tomatoes grow according to three things; soil quality, amount of water, and amount of sunlight. It isn’t unusual to have one person planting tomatoes in April while a neighbor waits until June, yet for the two to have nearly identical crops.

Tomatoes require

I suppose to a drug addicted person they couldn’t care less is the grass is always greener. Why should they worry about color ? As long as it can be smoked and is a cool weed that seems to fine with them.

Did you ever think how confusing that expression is to a drug addict who is color blind? The grass is always greener would have to be altered to the grass is always brown or whatever color they see rather than green . I mean, like ,hey man. They could be just smoking tobacco instead of some harmless drug.

Did you ever consider the drug addict who grows his own grass? I mean the grass grown in pots , passed off as tomato plants and not a lawn. He wouldn’t want his grass to be greener. If his grass was greener than anyone’s elses then he wouldn’t be able to sell it. I mean, like , hey man. The grass could be so green it might even be tomato leaves.

Now consider the poor cows who have to eat grass rather than smoke it. They couldn’t care less if their grass is greener or not. I suspect they are color blind as well. As long as the grass tastes good that’s all that matters to them. Greener grass may be better than plain grass to them but I wouldn’t know . As a drug addict would say. To each his own.

The strange thing about American currency is that all their notes are “greenbacks.” A term applied presumably because of the green ink employed in the print on the reverse of their notes. Fascinating really when you consider that a large number of other countries’ currency employs several colors on the reverse of their notes. Again you wouldn’t worry if the green was any greener as long as you had plenty of the green stuff to buy your grass. I mean, like hey man. Grass is dear.

No matter if you aren’t a drug addict or a cow you may not even care yourself if the grass is always greener . Its best if you don’t smoke it in the first place or try to eat it. You may be lucky enough to be on the outside of a drug ward looking in . You may be driving along the highway looking at cows in a paddock where the grass is dying from drought.

You may even consider that sometimes the grass is not always greener on the other side.