Ahsan Gardezi
Want to know how to grow tomatoes in your own backyard? Read our post below.
Tomatoes are one of the easiest crops to grow. When looking for tips about growing any vegetable in your own backyard, there is no shame in searching the web for some hack-a-do. Here’s a nice guide to replenish your small yard with little specs of crimson tomatoes!
Sometimes, it can prove quite troublesome to grow vegetables that are prone to problems – other than tomatoes. The slick trick for growing succulent tomatoes is to choose from the best varieties. You have to start plants off right, control problems before they begin to take shape, and then eventually play a little waiting game to reap the fruit. Did I say fruit?
Choose the Type Before You Learn How to Grow Tomatoes in Your Own Backyard
The first thing to consider is if you’ll use supports or not. This determines whether you want to grow determinate or indeterminate tomatoes. This is the deal: Determinate tomatoes usually stall after a growth spurt of 2-3 feet plant height. They immediately set fruit and the fruit ripens.
The indeterminate tomatoes require support. First, they grow. Then, they’ll set fruit. What’s most interesting is that these plants continue to grow more and later on, continue to reap tomatoes.
There are quite a number of varieties of tomatoes that you can choose to grow. There’s around 700 of them, but you have to consider a few things before landing on the right one. Which tomatoes you grow can vary by stimulant factors. Do you have enough room?
If you are limited on space or will be growing tomatoes in containers, the determinate type will be a better choice. If you have more room and can deal with sprawling tomato plants by confining them on a trellis, in a tomato cage, or with staking, the indeterminate variety may be a better choice for you.
With determinate varieties, the fruit ripens in a span of two to three weeks. The indeterminate varieties can set fruit and keep producing until frost sets in.
How to Grow Tomatoes in Your Own Backyard | What Tomato – Which Tomato
Normally, people with a little hint of farming abilities prefer to grow a paste tomato, a slicing tomato, and a cherry tomato.
Paste tomatoes are good for cooking, canning and drying. They have more meat-content with a lot less liquid. But they tend to take some time to evolve into the right kind of fruit. For example, Roma tomatoes – a paste tomato – mature in about 11 weeks.
Slicing tomatoes are those big tomatoes that can be sliced and eaten as a meal themselves or added to a burger. If you have a shorter growing season the slicing tomatoes might be a challenge to grow since they take about 90 days to mature.
Cherry Tomatoes are those little tomatoes that you can eat right off the plant. There are many varieties available in many different colors. These are a little quicker to mature, about 70 days.
I guess all options are good ones, but it’s up to the bearer’s resolve if he has what it takes to wait for a little while longer for the tomato to grow. Ever thought about what you’d do with surplus seeds?
The Heirloom – Hybrid Diorama
If you will be saving seeds from the tomatoes you grow you’ll want to purchase open-pollinated or heirloom seeds. Hybrid seeds can be grown and are good for disease resistance but if you collect the seeds, they won’t produce the same type of tomatoes the next year.
Quick Fix: Feed tomato plants with fertilizer designed for tomato plants or a mild plant food such as fish fertilizer. Neither of these fertilizers contains a lot of nitrogen, which stimulates leaf growth but not fruit development. Apply the fertilizer as the first fruit begins to develop and then again two weeks after picking the first tomato. This works typically fine for both open-pollinated and heirloom seeds. For a hybrid seed, add some water to the mix for bacterial-adaptability.
Location, Location – Does the Sun Shine Where You Live?
Tomatoes are sun loving plants. You’ll want to plant your tomatoes where they will get at least 6 hours of sun a day. If you are in an area with hot summers like in the south, you’ll want to plant your tomatoes where they will get a little afternoon shade. To ensure the tomato plants grow stocky, not spindly, keep the young plants only a couple of inches from fluorescent grow lights – if you’re experimenting with some greenhouse play-thing. Raise the lights (or lower the plants) as the seedlings grow.
When you’re ready to plant them outside, choose the sunniest part of your vegetable garden as their location.
You can plant tomatoes in late spring or early summer. This beauty can grow in the ground, raised beds, or in containers. If your precious yard doesn’t have enough room, use containers.
Note: I’m a strong advocate for anti-plastic alternatives and this article calls my inner spirit to some action. Instead of plastic containers, go for pottery-based containers or – if you can find it – a bamboo.
Container tomatoes can do just as well as other tomato plants and can be moved to the ideal place in the garden for sun. 5-gallon buckets are great containers for growing tomatoes.
Indeterminate varieties need a little more room so plant them about 3 feet apart. Determinate tomatoes can be planted closer together at about 2 feet apart.
How to Grow Tomatoes in Your Own Backyard – Or To Make Something Grow FASTER
First, decide on whether you want to trench your tomatoes in, or dig them in DEEP. Not crazy-deep, but deep enough so that the harvesting process isn’t too shabby. Honestly, both techniques work equally well.
With both techniques, add powdered milk – and a banana peel while you’re at it – to the hole or trench when planting the seeds. Later on, sprinkle a little more powdered milk around the plant.
Also, be sure to take off all leaves except for the top leaves and plant the stem in the ground up to the top leaves that are left. The tomato plant will be smaller to start – naturally – but planting the extra stem helps to produce more roots. With some miracle that is beyond my imagination, these roots find an abnormal source to generate growth to new protrusions towards the top.
Does anyone know what a compost does to tomatoes? **Google**
Make sure to add compost to your soil and loosen the dirt to about a foot-deep. After the transplantation period, water the ‘little farm’ generously. When the plants have been established, water about 2 inches per week. This muddy-clayey-watery situation helps tomatoes retain moisture.
Do you like ketchup? Remove the tiny suckers that form in the crotch joint of two branches – if you’re a tomato-person you’d know what a sucker is. These little suckers don’t help produce more tomatoes and, instead take away energy from the plants.
Another suggestion for you: Remove lower leaves. Removing lower leaves up to about a foot helps keep the plant healthy, and very less likely for it to develop any fungal problems. If you feel the plants need extra fertilizer, add it a couple of weeks before the first harvest.
Harvesting & Planning Ahead
Depending on which type of tomatoes you decided to grow, you may be harvesting a few tomatoes here and there, or a big bunch all at once. Your choice, no one minds it.
If you planted determinate varieties, your harvest will be close together over a few weeks. If you planted indeterminate varieties, you can have a few ready to harvest over the season until the first frost (if you have green tomatoes in there somewhere, you’ll know).
If you come to the end of the growing season and a frost is coming – which is highly unlikely in lower Pakistan, just saying – then be sure to harvest all your green tomatoes. For the green ones, you can bring them inside and ripen them indoors. It’s a natural fail-safe for people who worry too much.
Playing with Seeds
The easiest way to save tomato seeds is by placing the seeds on a paper towel and let them dry out. Then just peel them off! You can store your saved tomato seeds in paper envelopes – pre-East India Company vibes – with the date saved on the outside. Use a pen to mark a log or something, as long as you remember which one is from the green or red ones.
Fellow Ketchup Familia
Finding the right way to do things feels good. You not only learn what’s new, but also revise what’s history. Growing tomatoes is part of our lifestyle – whether we grow them in our backyard or get them from a grocery store – and one should never hesitate to respect what’s being given.
So, here was how to Grow Tomatoes in Your Own Backyard.
If this article was of any help to you, watch this space for updated content on similar topics!
