Do You Want More Tomatoes Per Plant This Year?
Well follow these tips to more tomatoes and enjoy the bounty. Fact, tomato plants are self-pollinators. That means that they can pollinate their own flowers and deliver more fruit. Fact, tomato plants like to grow foliage over fruit. You’ll notice early in the season that the plant starts to develop what is called “sucker growth”. This sucker growth will do just what the name implies, it allows the plant to grow foliage and not fruit.
So How Do I Tame My Tomato Plants?
To tame the tomato is to understand what it wants to do and then use those traits to your advantage. So let’s start growing more tomatoes.
Staking Tomatoes
Tomato plants will grow 12 feet or more in a single season. Those wimpy tomato cages that are 3 feet high won’t do anything to keep your tomatoes off the ground after 6 feet of growth. I use what I call a tomato fence. This uses 6 foot or taller steel T posts on the ends and a concrete reinforcing wire panel 3.5 feet by 7 feet suspended between the two posts. The video above is very much like my own tomato fence.
Steel T Posts for Fence – Amazon.com
The tomato fence
I use wire to tie the panel to the posts with the bottom of the panel 10 to 12” up from the ground. That puts the top of the panel 4.5 feet from the ground. My garden uses boxes that are 15″ high so my plants have an additional 15″ before touching the ground. So the plants can grow 10 to 12′ before coming back and touching the ground.
If you’re planting straight into the ground you may need to purchase an additional panel and cut it to extend the height. The best or optimal height would be you standing flat footed and extending your arm up. That is the perfect height for you. Any higher than that would require a ladder or stool. Not a good practice in dirt that can be wet and soft. The posts are not directly buried in the ground. A 1″ by 12″ long piece of PVC pipe with a cap(one hole for drainage) on the bottom is buried in the ground the post ends go into the pipe. The fit is not tight on purpose, more on this later. The spacing of the wire mesh produces roughly 6″ squares through which the tomato plant is woven as it grows.
Growing The Right Tomatoes
I want my planted tomato plants to be prolific producers. So I start with Juliet tomato plants. They are wonderful producers. The tomatoes are always plentiful and while they are small they will make up for their smaller size in sheer volume of tomatoes. Juliet’s are small Roma type tomatoes commonly called grape tomatoes if you can describe 1.5-2.0″ tomatoes as small or grape. They can be used for cooking or eating fresh in a sandwich or salad. A dual-purpose tomato if you want to give it a name.
How To Plant Tomatoes
Growing Tomatoes
Tomatoes are self-pollinators. What that means is that they will set fruit without the use of bees or insects. The early morning hours are the best hours for self-pollination. Once the tomatoes are laced in the wire panel you can go out early each morning and give the tomato fence a small shake to aid the pollination process. If that seems like to much work you can attach whirligigs or large pinwheels to the top of the wire panel. Any small breeze or wind will cause the whirligigs or pinwheels to spin and that will introduce a vibration or small movement into the wire panel inducing self-pollination of the tomato plants. Remember that the stakes are not tight in the ground but loosely fit in PVC pipe. That loose fit allows the tomato fence to more easily move and add more movement for self-pollination.
Sucker Growth Into Tomato Growth
Tomatoes like to produce foliage more than fruit. This growth if left unchecked will produce a tomato plant with beautiful foliage but very little tomatoes. So what can you do to check the sucker growth and turn it into more tomatoes? Simple, if you know how tomatoes grow. You can turn that into an advantage.
Tomato plants will produce between 1 to 3 main stems. Tomato flowers will grow from and produce fruit along the main stems. As the plants get older you will notice that at any junction where the leave stems grow out of the main stems a small set of leaves will start to grow. This is the start of sucker growth. The video at the left has good examples of sucker growth.
Pinching for more tomatoes
The person in the video and I disagree on how the suckers should be handled, I will explain. I encourage you to allow these suckers to grow. But only for a short amount of time. Let them grow until you see a new set of flowers emerge. Allow the growth to grow past the flowers and then pinch off the top of the sucker with your fingers, one inch above the flowers. The sucker will no longer grow. The flowers on the sucker will produce one bunch of fruit and not foliage. Each sucker you treat this way will produce more tomatoes and not foliage. Remember pinching is going to get your tomato plants kicked into high gear. You’ll need to pinch all summer. I hope you enjoy large bowls of tomatoes all summer long.
Related Article: Go Green Build Raised Garden Beds On The Cheap
(By Vikiçizer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)
(By Vikiçizer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)
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