Eliminating Blossom End Rot on Tomatoes

[Music] hey dirt farmer J here from dirtfarmer j.com I'm here today to talk to you about how to eliminate Blossom and rot on your Tomatoes you know last year I had a horrible crop of tomatoes wasn't the Tomato's fault it was my fault and I'm going to tell you exactly what I did through research and learning how to do things a little bit differently to eliminate blossom in rot and how to get more Tomatoes as you can see right here we have a great crop of tomatoes going here uh we we've got four different plants going here it's a little bit later in the season and they're doing well lots of fruitfulness you can see down in here we've got uh some that are going here and let me tell you a little bit about what I did last year versus what I did this year first of all you'll notice in these plants that the plants are nice and sizable but you there lots of uh air passing through them uh there's not huge amount of of foliage with a good balance between foliage and the amount of fruit that's on them now last year what I did is I was thinking oh this poor Plant it's out here it's suffering it needs to be able to eat so I gave it lots of fertilizer well you can guess what happens tomatoes are very efficient us of uh of nitrogen and what they'll do is if you put nitrogen on these they'll put out tons of foliage no fruit well that's great if you want to grow ornamental Tomatoes I don't you probably don't either you want some really good fruit so back off on the fertilizer once I did that these have only been fertilized once early in the season as you can see they're doing great all right second thing I did last year we live in the Mountain West of United States you can see it's in the middle of summer right now it's pretty warm out here right now Sun's hot and you begin to think these poor Tomatoes they need water so what I would do is water them every single day now I'd like you to see if you can guess how long it's been since I've watered these let's take a look at these plants again they look like they're water stress to you and if you look down at the Baseline there you can see down here there's a little bit of moisture that's only because we've planted in some other things some radishes and some other things are going to pop up here plus we have some basil plants here that you see sometimes used on dirt farmer mag Margarita Pizza uh so there's water that is done for these but the plants themselves I've not watered them what was your guess about how long it it's been since I've watered these one week that's right one week I've not watered these in a week now when I water them I water them deeply though remember when you first plant the tomato plant it's got a very small root mass and you'll probably have to come out and water it once every 2 or 3 days make sure it stays turgid that means perky and it's ready to go but as the plant matures and it gets bigger and that root ball under the soil that's been prepared here it gets bigger the plant is very efficient extracting water out of the soil so once a week I really soak the root ball slow soak actually work down the line soak it let it all run in and come back up and hit it again I'm probably putting two to three gallons of water on each of the plants and then I don't water them again for the rest of the week and the plant just sucks up what it needs as it needs it the other thing you'll notice at the bottom there's some mulch that's put down on the bottom this happens to be grass clippings and I'm getting ready to mulch these again I'm not going to bore you with that and put some more on there but mulch moderates the soil temperature it slows down how fast it evaporates off keeps it moisture at an even moisture level longer so I would am a heavy user of mulch throughout all the things I do for plants for uh any of the square foot gardening any of the shrubs that we put in in our beds all get mulch on an ongoing basis now how to eliminate blossom in rot I've actually just told you and that is slow down the watering Blossom and rot is not actually a fungal or bacterial disease it's a Calcium deficiency and how calcium deficiencies develop in tomatoes is when you heavily water the plant the plant's going to do something on go it's got to do something with that water so it puts it throughout the plant and Jacks it up and pumps it up right up to the leaves starving the fruit of the calcium it needs to fully develop and to do all the tissue building that it needs and once that happens then you get a collapse on the end of the tomato a canker that forms the blossom in rot if you water such as the way I've just described deeply but infrequently the tomato plant will do fine right through the scorching weather we've had several 100° plus days and all during that time I've watered them one week or a little bit more one day I stretched eight days and the plants did just fine no Wilt no die- off and as you can see let's look down here notice that every one of these Tomatoes is smooth beautiful round all being fruitful and no caners whatsoever I hope you found this to be helpful to you on eliminating blossom in Rod if you have any further questions comment on the comment section ask a question I'll glad to respond to it if you like the video please like it better yet subscribe to our Channel at dirtfarmer j.com until the next time this is dirtfarmer [Music] J [Music]