Now that tomato growing season is in full swing, there are a few things I need to do to maintain my 'maters. If you don't maintain the 'maters, they won't mature into fully ripe tomatoes and you won't have any tomato sauce to impress your mom with! My mom is a vegetarian Italian chef, so the only thing that really impresses her are good tomatoes (and blog entries about good tomatoes).
Take a look at my two giant tomato plants! You'll notice some small yellow flowers all over the place. When these flowers are pollinated, the petals will fall off and the flower bud will grow into a tomato. Ideally, every place you see a flower will become a fruit.
When my tomato plants became tall enough that they started to droop under their own weight, I added tomato cages. You can see a tomato cage on each plant in this photo: They are round cone wire supports that surround the plant to hold the weight of the tomatoes. The arms of the plant that stick out from the trunk to rest on the cage so they won't snap under the weight of tomatoes. Tomato cages come in lots of shapes and heights, but these ones were only $4 each from a small garden store in my neighborhood and they are doing a great job!
As the plant grows, I train the arms of the tomato plant to poke out of the cage in strategic places so each one rests on a wire support. I've also had to tie some of the longer arms to the cage to make sure they stay upright. If you're growing small cherry or grape tomatoes, you probably won't need to do this because those little guys aren't heavy. You can just use one tall stake to support the trunk of the plant and call it a day!Tomato Suckers
You gotta pluck your suckers! Suckers are small branches that grow in the armpits of other fully developed branches of your tomato plants. At first you might think, oh boy! My plant is growing larger and fuller every day! But don't let these suckers fool you. Once your plant has started forming small fruit, you shouldn't allow any new branches to grow. Small suckers that are just sprouting now will be using up nutrients and water that your developing tomatoes need. Since these little suckers have started growing so late in the year, they'll never become full branches with tomatoes before the frost comes, so there's no reason to keep them alive and let them use valuable nutrients.
Plucking off suckers is easy:
- Find a small sucker that is growing in the armpit of an adult branch.
- Snap off the sucker at it's base where it connects to the plant and pull it off.
- If there's any part of the sucker left on the plant, you can scrape the area with your fingernail to make sure it's all gone.
Volunteers are a cross between a weed and a real plant. Imagine this: I've been growing tomatoes in containers for about 5 years, and every year I reuse some of the soil from the year before. This soil probably has old tomato seeds buried in it from fallen fruit. When I reuse the soil, these seeds can sometimes pop up where I don't want them! They're not quite weeds because they're good, non-invasive plants. But if I didn't plan to have them in that container, they can be screwing up my plans for ratio of number of plants vs space and nutrients in the container.
You can remove volunteers as if they were weeds, but it's very sad to see good tomato plants go to waste when you put so much effort into cultivating the plants you are keeping. If they sprout early enough in the year, I often give them away as gifts to friends. You could even transplant them into another container and grow them into full plants. But whatever you do, you can't leave them where they are. You gotta get rid of your volunteer plants!
Keep up with cages, suckers and volunteers and your tomatoes will do just fine. I'll leave you with a photo of my largest Black Krim tomato that is already forming!
So how are your tomatoes doing?