Perfect Tomatoes: How to Plant and Maintain Tomatoes

Welcome back guys, it's the Titewad and today I'm planting a tomato plant. This is a husky cherry red plant but you plant all tomato plants in the same way. And today we're going to talk about how because most people do it wrong. If you ever take the time to read the tag on your plants they always have helpful information including planting instructions. So on this tomato plant tag you can see that it requires six plus hours of full sun. So tomatoes like a lot of sunlight. They need to be planted 36 inches or three feet apart from plant to plant. And then the planting depth says bury two-thirds of the plant. And that's where most people do it incorrectly. So a lot of people tend to plant the plant at the soil line which is right here but actually you're supposed to plant it all the way up to the top up here. Two-thirds of the plant should be below the soil line. So planting it all the way up to the top. So what I like to do is take my scissors and cut off all of the stems on the bottom. Leaving just the part that's going to be exposed at the top. And then remove it from the pot. So we're planting it all the way up to here. So whenever removing from the pot don't simply pull on the stem. You can use it to gain a little leverage but really you want to push from the bottom or squeeze the bottom until it starts releasing. And you can see that this one has a decent root structure. It's not root bound which is important to know. You shouldn't see roots wrapped all the way around the base down here. This is a well cared for and ready to plant plant. So now the next step is to dig a hole in your garden. And I already had somewhat of a hole here because I planted some a little earlier this year but my garden was still too wet and they didn't make it. But I'm going to drop the plant down in here and make sure that it's deep enough to get it to this top ridge. And I can see it is now deep enough. Notice most of the plant is in the hole. So now I'm going to fill in around the tomato plant. If you've had issues in the past with diseases on your tomato plants you could add a soil amendment like gypsum salt or epsom salt into the bottom of the hole before planting. And now would be a good time to add some fertilizer to the plant. I like time release stuff like Osmocote. If you're going organic you can go with a Milorganite or some there's a great product called Mater Magic which is specifically for tomatoes that you mix into the top a couple of inches of soil. I'm just going to go with a time release fertilizer this year and it's already mixed in with the top layers of the soil because I had a plant planted here before. Once it's in there I have some straw here. I like to keep straw around my plants. It keeps not only weeds from coming up around them but it also keeps rain from hitting the soil and the soil splashing up on the fruit or the leaves which creates a good environment for diseases. So the more soil and stuff we can keep off the leaves and the fruit the better production we're going to have in the long run. So that is the proper way to plant a tomato plant. I need to give it a good watering even though the soil is somewhat damp from a quick shower. I want to make sure it's got a nice deep watering. The last step is to get a cage around this tomato plant. You can find them at most hardware stores locally. We're going to check back in on these same plants throughout the season this year and show you how to maintain them and what to do when they start bearing fruit so that you can have a successful season. In just one week that plant has grown this much and I want to show you something I do to maintain plants. This little piece right here is called a sucker and I try to come out about once a week and remove all the suckers from the plant because if you don't we're going to have another stalk growing up and your plant will look nice and big and pretty but it won't be able to sustain itself. So coming through and just picking the suckers off of the plants will help them maintain one center stalk and a bunch of branches that it can sustain. Here's another plant with a little more substantial sucker growing here. So I'm going to pick this one off and down here is another one and you can see how it's attached itself and they grow right in the armpit of the other branches and they put force that branch to lay down farther and then they grow up straight. So this plant is an example of one where I did not pinch a sucker. There's a sucker right here that has now become a large branch. Since it's already developed that much I'm going to go ahead and maintain it and we'll keep track of this plant throughout the season so that you can see how it affects the growth pattern. But I'm going to go ahead and pull off some of the newer suckers that have formed higher up. Here are the tomato plants again after about three and a half weeks of growth. Today I'm going to be adding some stakes. You can see how this plant is starting to lean over even though it's in the cage. So I'm adding these long metal stakes to it and I'm going to tie them up so that they stand up straight. So I added the stake. It's about an inch away from the stalk of the from the main stem of the tomato plant and now I have some elastic cord that I'm going to tie the stem of the tomato plant to the stake with. Any type of elastic cord will work but this is what I use. It's biodegradable so eventually it will dissolve and just go into the ground if I don't cut it off and throw it away later. But it's nice and flexible so it grows with the plant but it still holds it up straight. These have been in the ground about four weeks now and you can see we finally have some flowers setting some blooms and on the one next to it you can see we have a few more and it's nice and healthy looking and growing strong. The base is nice and thick and at this point we're just keeping it watered. This is our tomato plant with I think two weeks since the last update. We've had a ton of rain finally. We went about 20 days with no rain and these guys have shot up several inches in the last couple of days. We have some blooms that have set here and actually some tomatoes forming here and some bigger ones already down in here. So in the next two or three weeks we should have some tomatoes ready to eat. I kept the same process alive for most of the season and these are my tomato plants now after about a month since the last video. These down here got a little bit too much water during a two-day period when we had about six inches of rain and started to wilt but they've come back strong and they're looking beautiful and producing some nice tomatoes now. We've already harvested a little over 20 tomatoes from the garden and probably 50 or 60 jalapenos, mammoth jalapenos, and a few of the poblanos. Some of our plants did not make it. This one here has struggled the whole growing season. I pulled this one up because some kind of bugs or animals got to this one and we have a couple of great looking bell pepper plants with some good bell peppers. This one's ready to be picked now but with a little TLC you can definitely have a garden that is part shade and part sun as this one is. They do not have to be complete full sun to have a bountiful harvest. Always plant more plants than you anticipate needing to account for loss. If you have any questions about gardening leave them in the comment section below and I'll reply as soon as possible and I hope you guys have a great day.