5 Tomato Planting Mistakes To Avoid – Grow Great Tomatoes This Year: For those who want to grow their own food, tomatoes are a great choice because they taste great and are easy to grow. But tomato gardeners can still have a lot of problems that they could avoid if they were ready and knew what they were doing.
5 Tomato Planting Mistakes To Avoid – Grow Great Tomatoes This Year
Some of these tomato gardening mistakes can be very bad, like planting too early or not giving the plants enough water. But with Jobe’s Organics’ tomato gardening tips and fertilizers like our tomato granular, you can make your garden grow food instead of just sitting there.
1. Planting Tomatoes Too Early
Toys are often grown in the summer, and tomato seedlings love it when it’s hot and hate it when it’s cold. It’s not warm enough for tomato plants if the soil doesn’t get to at least 60 degrees during the day.
You should wait until young plants are about 6 to 8 inches tall before moving them. So, don’t put tomatoes in the garden as soon as spring comes around. If you plant plants too soon, the blossoms may fall off before the fruit even forms.
This is called blossom drop. If it gets too cool at night, tomatoes may also lose their shape, bulge, or get scars at the blossom end. Still, crops that don’t look right can still be eaten. For example, some of the most popular tomato varieties aren’t perfectly round or red.
2. Planting Tomatoes in the Wrong Location
It’s important to keep tomato soil cool and moist, even though tomatoes do well in heat. If not, plants and dirt that are too dry can get diseases. You should also avoid planting tomatoes in places where peppers or potatoes have grown in the last two years.
Pick an area on your plot that is mostly open, gets eight hours of sunlight a day, and has soil that drains well on your plants. You might want to mulch tomato plants to keep water in and stop it from evaporating.
Putting down 2 to 4 inches of mulch around the plant will help keep weeds down, stop the spread of disease, and let water get deep into the roots. After that, pull the layer back about 2 inches from the stem to make a small well around the plant’s base.
3. Planting Tomatoes Too Close Together
You want as many tomatoes as possible, but don’t put too many plants in one spot! When plants are too close to each other, they block airflow and cast too much shade on each other. Make sure to read the seed packets or look them up online to find out the best way to space your tomatoes.
In general, leave 4 feet between rows of determinate tomato plants and space them out 18 inches to 2 feet apart. Leave 5 to 6 feet between rows of indeterminate tomatoes and space them out 2 to 3 feet apart.
How do you figure out which kind of tomato will help you grow the most? Find out more about the difference between tomatoes that are determinate and those that are indeterminate.
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4. Planting the Wrong Type of Tomatoes
Making the choice between determinate and indeterminate tomato types is an important step that depends on what you want to get from your crop. It’s easy to take care of determinate tomato plants in a normal home garden.
This kind will ripen all at once and grow to be about 3 feet tall, which is great for gardeners who don’t have a lot of room but still want to can or freeze some of their food. Indeterminate tomatoes, on the other hand, can grow anywhere from 6 to 20 feet tall for a very long time.
These are great for people who want to keep getting tomatoes for salads and other home-cooked meals. An indeterminate plant can keep growing and making fruit all summer and into the fall, until the first hard frost.
Remember that these are just the two main types of tomato plants. There are dozens more flavors and varieties to choose from.
5. Watering Tomatoes at the Wrong Time of Day
Don’t water your tomatoes late in the afternoon. Instead, water them in the morning or at dusk, when the sun and temperature are lower. While the sun is high and the temperature is high, early in the morning is best, but evenings are also fine as long as you don’t water the plants then. If not, the soil won’t be able to soak up water before it evaporates.
