My Secret For Great Container Tomatoes.mp4

Hey everybody, Jeff, your Executive Gardener here in for another exciting episode. So I'm going to show you the results of tomatoes. It's May 24th, 2015 and I have my first red tomatoes from Container Tomatoes. So look in the link below this episode and take a look at my first episode, which I started probably the late winter and I started some tomatoes in some grow bags and from those grow bags I'll show you the result of those in a second. But this episode is again about what to do to grow effective tomatoes and get plenty of tomatoes in a garden container like this. So here's one right here. You can see this is a F1 patio tomato and as you can see, loaded with tomatoes so far. This is a cherry tomato, but you can see plenty of blossoms there, little tomatoes starting and so forth. But let me talk about my magic form. I talked about it before, it's not really any magic, it's just common sense when it comes to container gardening. So when you do container gardening, the soil, they may say it may provide nutrients to the plant for three months. Don't believe it, because what will happen is like Houston, if you get a lot of rain and your plants are outside, tomatoes are heavy feeders, so they will soak up all the nutrients in the plant and then there'll be nothing after the leaves come to push the fruit through and get nice thick fruit. So you got to keep the nutrients going, but again, I'm going to refresh in your memory what we do in Container Tomatoes. So start with a good topsoil. It could be Scott's, it could be any Home Depot brand, I don't care what it is. Start with a good one. That'll give you a good start with nutrients in the soil. But there's three main ingredients that you need to include in the tomato plant and we're going to go through those real quick. All of my bagged tomatoes, I'll show you the results. Talk is cheap, results matter. So I'll show you my results later in this video, but let me show you the key nutrients to any container tomato garden. Number one, Epsom salt. You can get this at any drugstore, four or five bucks. Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate. This helps plants in the photosynthesis process. Keep your leaves green, pulls the energy from the sun, goes into the plant to give you great tomatoes. What I would advise you do is when you start your plant, mix some Epsom salt into your soil and then probably every few weeks dissolve about a teaspoon in a gallon of water and feed your plant Epsom salt because the magnesium sulfate will leach out of the soil after a month or two, especially if you're getting heavy rains like in Houston. That's ingredient number one in the container garden right here. Real simple, real cheap. Number two is fish bone meal. This is phosphorus. So fish bone meal, okay? It's relatively cheap. I get mine at, I don't know where I got it, but look online at eBay, look up fish bone meal, you can get it relatively cheap. They get shipped, it's an organic ingredient, put a few tablespoons into your soil, mix it in, the phosphorus will help the plants put out the yellow flowers, which will lead to fruit. But again, this can be leached from the soil with heavy watering, heavy rain, and I would recommend that you continue to put this in every two or three weeks after the first month or two in your container garden so you have plenty of flowers, buds, that lead to fresh fruit, tomatoes. That's the second ingredient. Number three is calcium nitrate. Okay, I get this at a site, kelp4less.com. Very cheap. You go there, kelp4less.com. I'm not promoted, I'm not endorsing them at all, they just work well and they're affordable for me. We'll ship it to your home. Calcium nitrate, as most of you know, you can't really put too much calcium in a plant, but the key for calcium nitrate, the calcium, is that tomatoes get something called a blossom end rot. The bottom of the tomato is all brown. It's because of a deficiency in calcium, okay? And so put this in your soil, mix it in, a few tablespoons into your pot before you plant. Again, last night, about every four weeks, four or five weeks, I put a teaspoon in a container of water, I let it dissolve overnight, and then I pour it in after a month or two because again, the soil will release all the calcium and you may see a blossom end rot. So those three things are critical. Let me show you one last thing that I do use. Some people may like it, some may not, but that's okay. To each their own. I use Liquifeed by Miracle-Gro, okay? This stuff is miracle stuff. So what I do is once a week, I put in the recommended dosage, I think it's a teaspoon. The formula is 9, 4, 9, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, excuse me, NPK. So in putting this in, I put a tablespoon in, a gallon of water, and I put this into the plant after a month and a half or two months just to make sure they're getting nutrients. Because again, if your soil doesn't have nutrients within a bag or within a pot, your tomatoes will be less than superior. So let me show you what my tomatoes look like. The three ingredients I talked about, again, and giving a dose of this once a week really keeps them in great shape. Take a look when I get behind the camera, how many tomatoes are there, how many blossoms are there. Now I'm also going to show you something else. In the place where I'm growing these bagged or grow bag container tomatoes, I also have other tomatoes, but I use the same formula. I put my calcium nitrate, magnesium sulfate, and my fish bone meal in the hole before I plant the plant so it has plenty of that in the dirt. Because some of our dirt, it may be deficient in some of those types of things, and just to make sure, I put those three organic materials. The results will speak for themselves. Let me show you my first red tomatoes, what my container garden looks like when I use the three key ingredients I went through, and when I use this once a week. Let me get behind the camera and show you the results. So here we are. Let's take a look at my first tomato. This one, again, look at the video down below. This is the same tomato plant you saw in the video many months ago. Now it's starting to produce its first red fruit. So it's in a grow bag. It's about a gallon. It's a small grow bag. About a gallon grow bag. Put some topsoil. I put the three key ingredients, and I put Miracle-Gro, Nutri-Gro, in here every so often. So May 24th, many of you are just starting your seedlings. Well, I have my first red tomatoes here in Houston, Texas. Let's take a look. A little bit of a close-up. So here we go. There it is. So look at this. Beautiful. And the great thing about this, and I don't know if it was meant this way or not, but there's no cracks in the tomatoes. They're perfectly shapen. And I actually have another one under here, another red one over there you can see. So I've got three red tomatoes in this plant, and it's my first red tomatoes. Now what I'll show you is that it is pretty proliferate with tomatoes. So because of the phosphorus, I have some netted up there, but they're pretty much all over the place, and pretty good size. Look at those tomatoes, guys. No cracks, pretty decent size. I think this is meant to produce six ounce fruits, and it's doing that. But you'll see that it's kind of, you've got some baby tomatoes starting here now, but some of it's slowed down a little bit. That's because the energy of the plant is going toward the tomatoes that are on it right now, and that's obviously a tremendous amount of energy. But first red ones are here, and my nutrients that I've done so far seem to work out really well. So no blossom end rot, none of that type of stuff. So we'll take a look at another one. This also is in a gallon grow bag, and there's a grow bag, okay. I do have a watering system hooked up to this, but I believe there's also a red one. There you go. Look at that. There's a red tomato, my first red one on this plant, but again, beautifully shaped. No cracks, no anything, and a good amount of tomatoes for a small pot. So I put some in nets here, just in case rats or mice show up, and a lot on the other side as well. So everything looks really good. There's some down here. Sorry for the movement, but there's some down there as well that you can take a look at. So lots of tomatoes. Those are the two that are in pots, and then as we move along here, I have other tomato plants. Again, I use the same formula. I put the same three ingredients in the hole, and again, you see lots of tomatoes on all of those. So overall, I think it's a success. I would encourage you to follow that formula. You'll get plenty of tomatoes. I mean, look how small that grow bag is, guys. Not big at all. Anybody could grow that in their porch, but as I said earlier, this bag, I mean, how long do you really think the nutrients are going to last in here? You've got to keep that Miracle-Gro Nutra-Feed going in here, and if you do, I mean, the plant stays healthy, as you see. These are results, okay? Not opinions, it's just results. Use them as you wish, but there's even some smaller tomatoes that are starting to bloom here. Again, you'll see one there, since the tomatoes have grown. While I'm at it, let me show you a few other things. So I have a few other tomato plants that are kind of cool. I make a recommendation. This is actually my all-time favorite tomato in the world. It's called Black Sea Man, S-E-A-M-A-N, so that's a black tomato, and absolutely delicious. We have over here what's called a boxcar willy, and you'll see in there that we have several tomatoes that are coming in there. I've netted some up there. Same formula, lots of fruit. And then there we have a beef, a beefsteak tomato. Lots of fruit everywhere, just loaded with fruit. I've never had this much success before, but it's the first year that I've used kind of my own formula in figuring out what to use with the three key ingredients. So that's it. Here's another one of my tomatoes that, this actually started in a container, and I moved it to the ground. Lots of fruit, as you can see here. So that's my episode, guys. Use it for what you want. Hopefully you'll find some use out of this episode. But it's worked well for me, and I hope it works well for you. I hope you enjoyed this quick episode about container tomatoes, what to do to keep them healthy, flourishing, and to produce beautiful fruit. That's it for me, guys. Please subscribe to this channel if you have not already. Love to have you as part of my community. Leave comments, ask me questions, I'll try to get back to them as soon as possible. And if you have a friend interested in gardening, let me know, have them subscribe to the Executive Gardener channel. For now, that's it. Thanks. Bye.