Planting Tomatoes
Field tomato harvests are not possible very often in my gardening area. It’s disheartening to spend all summer tending plants for a crop that will never reach fruition. Hence the push to get the greenhouse going. A vine ripened tomato surely must be one of the top garden treats in most people’s minds. Eating a garden fresh tomato has been on my mind as I watch the temperatures as we patiently await some warmer weather.
You can see the difference the greenhouse makes temperature-wise. We finally broke 60°F two days ago.
Too warm for puppies, they would rather hang out in the shade hunting moles.
I was more interested in the soil temperature though, each day the sun shines just a little, the soil begins to warm and acts like a heat sink. I wanted the soil to be at least 70°F before planting my tomatoes. Finally!
Bellstar OP determinate.
Before transplanting water well.
To prepare for planting, I dig my holes, fill with compost and add lime. Tomatoes are heavy feeders and this helps get them off to a good start.
Mix the lime in with the compost. Tomatoes are susceptible to blossom end rot from not enough calcium, but just providing the lime is not enough, you have to water well and deeply too, so the plant can actually uptake the calcium.
Planting is self-explanatory.
I water deeply after planting and then install a soaker hose for once a week deep watering throughout the summer.
Everyone is enjoying the warm spring day.
This post is part of Food Renegade’s Fight Back Friday feature. Check out the other great posts here.
Food Renegade
Simple, Green, Frugal Co-op
Adding the lime like that to the planting holes doesn’t burn the roots? I always skipped that part thinking it would. No wonder why my fruit always gets blossom rot.
Debbie, it could if you didn’t mix it in. You can also put it in the bottom covered with soil and hope that they roots eventually find it when they need it. But deep watering would take care of that.
great pics! love the pups and the dandies!
our tom plants are still sitting in pots in our greenhouse. we’re still waiting for the soil outside to warm up.
i was wondering why you are wearing gloves to plant the toms?
Bunkie, cuz I’m a weenie? My hands already look like a grease monkey’s so anything to protect them a little!
I live in the Kentucky bottoms where we’re fortunate enough to grow tomatoes in the field (white potatoes don’t produce very well, though). I’ve always buried about 1/2-2/3 of our plant when transplanting. Is there a different strategy for cooler climates?
Deborah, our growing season is so short (for warm season crops) that I don’t bury the tomatoes below the planting line. I can either grow more roots or get fruit faster, because it is still not that easy to that ripe fruit.
Jealous of your field tomatoes, but glad I can grow Irish potatoes
I am curious about the calcium. I was told to save egg shells and grind them up to put under the squash to prevent the rot. Is lime better, or does it matter?
I have over 3 gallons of crushed shells saved!
Paula, eggshells are fine if you have them, especially that many
I give mine back to my hens so I never have any. Our soil is low pH so lime is a must have for the garden. I think lime is recommended because it can be readily bought as opposed to egg shells. 3 gallons is a lot!! 
We have lots of hens, and we eat lots of eggs! Been saving all winter.
We are on our third year amending our soil. Very deficient in Alaska. Adding goats to the mix gave us lots more to work with this year.
Paula, animals sure do make the difference!
As soon as I saw your title I hurried right over. And, as expected, learned something new about growing tomatoes. We add epsom salts under the plants, but I haven’t tried lime, I will though this year. Thanks
TC, same here, I am always amazed at the differences in your area and ours – we have to be careful with magnesium. Maybe that’s why you have so much bird diversity
I use eggshells as Paula does. You seem to use a lot of lime, Nita. I’ve been trying to use exclusively what I can produce so I have been spreading wood ash (lightly) on garden areas & pastures. Any ideas on the difference relative to minerals & pH?
Kristin, I can’t answer your question about the difference in wood ash and lime, I do spread all my wood ash on the gardens and orchard, but I never have enough even though wood is our only heat source. Which I suspect is the difference between burning Douglas Fir instead of hardwoods – almost no ash. I’m going to venture a guess that your ash is more potent not being a softwood. I don’t put any lime on the pastures, although they could use it if I could afford it. The instructions on the garden lime bag specified 50# per 1000 sq ft for Pacific Northwest gardens and lawns, so I loosely followed that, almost. I bought 2 bags for the greenhouse and I have about 1/2 bag left.
I haven’t had much luck growing exceptional vegetables without some additional lime in our naturally acidic soils. Eliot Coleman has a good section on amendments in The New Organic Grower that is helpful for low organic matter soils – which is what my greenhouse space is. I am basically starting over in soil I used pretty hard in the past. I had to make the choice to leave it as is with a good sod cover so the ground could withstand all the traffic it was going to get during the building process.
I have a question for you all using egg shells, what do you use to supply calcium to your hens? The old timers around here always fed the ground shells back to their girls and bought lime if they had any spare money.
I’ve got & read the New Organic Grower. Keep in mind, Elliot Coleman had only a few ducks when he wrote a lot of those books. It is my understanding that, with the addition of organic matter and the growing of plants (pasture plants, that is) that soils will naturally correct itself for pH over time.
Thanks to you, we have only recently cooped up our hens. They spent the winter on deep bedding and are now in kid-moveable chicken tractors on grass. When they were free ranging, they had all the plant & bug matter they needed for calcium. We started to feed oyster shells to them once we cooped them up. The hens get most of their shells back but I save some for the garden.
I have also read that ag lime contains small levels of toxic materials as our government deems it “safe” and the big corporations need a place to get rid of waste. Johann (KAFC) mentioned this a few years ago on the forum. My husband witnessed first hand that this is done with fly ash from coal power plants…..it is placed in concrete. We always ask for “no fly ash” when building with the stuff. At least oyster shells are “whole”.
And I won’t even mention fluoride….
Kristin, well, I think Eliot still believes his own advice because in his latest book, The Winter Harvest Handbook, when he mentions limestone and other amendments he refers the reader back to the The New Organic Grower. And I know he changes his mind on some things, for instance now he realizes livestock are part of a more sustainable approach to intense vegetable gardening. Maybe the 3 or 4 bags of lime I buy a year are a deal breaker philosophy-wise. I have friends who do pastured poultry who will not use oytster shell or shell flour (thought to maybe contain mercury) which we used in our chicken feed, they instead use Aragonite shipped in from the East coast. Which battle to pick? Use a west coast by product with less shipping or a east coast product that has to be mined and shipped as opposed to a by-product type semi-local product? Anymore I think almost everything has something in it, on it, or someone can find something wrong with it. And the choices we make now are governed by economics or at least mine are. This lime is what is available within what I consider a short trip – otherwise I either have to spend a day going into Portland and hoping that what is available there will be worth the trip. I kind of had this conundrum buying milk replacer for Jane. Buy another cow (not easy, about like buying a used car IMO), ship in cost prohibitive better milk replacer, or buy the expensive “local” milk replacer and hope for the best. Anyway, I am getting off topic here, this discussion is good for people who have worries about their limestone source if it is something they want to use. A possibility in my area would be the limestone grit for chickens that Concentrates is marketing. I don’t think it could replace grit in the chickens diet, it would be a good add on in place of oyster shell, and would work good for the plants as well in place of limestone. But here again, it is local to me not others, and it is mined.
Good discussion!
I use gloves also!
Linda
http://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com
Linda, gosh I would be lost without my chore gloves.
I never heard of using lime in the soil for blossom end rot……is it a specific kind of lime??
Linda, it’s just lawn and garden lime. Usually it’s erratic and uneven watering that causes the calcium deficiency since the plant can’t uptake the calcium that is there. Adding some lime is just insurance.
What a great crop you are going to get. I’ve been growing my tomatoes in pots since I have so little soil to work with. But this year there will be none. I won’t be at the cabin enough to do the necessary watering. Maybe I’ll get some at the farmer’s market to take their place. But nothing tastes like home grown right off the vine.
Margy, I agree. It’s been two years since we had enough tomatoes to do anything with – I can’t wait!
Reading this makes me glad I live in a place where I can just put tomatoes into the ground and later harvest pounds and pounds of tomatoes.
Question for you- someone told me that feeding the eggshells back the the chickens makes them more likely to eat eggs. Any truth to that? My dad always used oyster shell- although not actually oyster- he got clam shell fragments from the button factory by the river. To bad most buttons now are plastic and not made from clam shells.
Judy, oh how I wish I could grow tomatoes outside, well, they can grow outside but they rarely get ripe, I think we had 3 ripe tomatoes last year! One thing I discovered about growing them in a hoophouse here is that there is no blight because there is no rain. That’s nice to not have to worry about. It’s pretty common for CSA’s to use unheated hoophouses here (Western Oregon) for a consistent crop of tomatoes and peppers.
I’ve never had a problem with egg eaters or at least not since we got rid of our large flock, and then it was only occasionally, it’s more of a low protein feed problem. Of course any chicken will eat an egg that breaks, and they can learn to break eggs if the shells are weak. We supplemented our large flock with oyster shells, since most of the eggs were leaving the farm. I’ve heard that too, though, and it reminds of when someone thinks a dog eating raw meat will go out and help himself to a steak from a cow
That hasn’t occurred to my dogs yet!
Love all the pictures, but especially the last two of the dogs in dandelions.
Well, nobody has asked yet. So what is the purplish red ochre colored mystery material in the header shot that sort of resembles a dogs tongue. I’ve seen it before, but can’t place it. It reminds me of comfrey or wooly mullin.
akaaww, it’s actually concrete
But the plant was Burdock, Arctium lappa.
Perhaps, I confused you. It isn’t in the header shot, it is in the first pic of this post…………….behind the thermometer……………….with a knife and an electric fence insulator………………..and a pencil and……………… a garden trowel on top of it. Can’t get much clearer than that.
Yes, at first it did confuse me because the header picture is a cow. But I realized you meant the concrete leaf casting the first photo on the post. So answer is the same. Usually you see bigger leaves like rhubarb but the burdock looked kinda cool, it turned out pretty good I thought. Except the broken off tip
Anything I turn up weeding gets thrown in there, plus other stuff with no real home.
Thanks.
Now I’m ready to plant tomatoes! I gave you a shout out on my blog today.
http://frycowgirl.blogspot.com/2011/05/rotational-grazing.html
One year I heard that eggshell was good for tomatoes so I saved the shells, dug the holes, planted the tomatoes and woke up the next morning to find EVERY plant dug up laying dead beside an emply hole. Now I know that skunks also like to be fed eggshell…
I found I could solve the blossom-end rot problem a few years ago with Tums (they contain calcium) – just like you might take for indigestion! One Tums in the planting hole is all it took. As I water, the Tums is dissolved and absorbed by the tomato roots. Easy, quick, and effective.
i am going to try the lime this year. my first tomatoes last year had ber but not the later ones so it was likely a watering problem but just to be sure…
i have pelletized lime. is that ok or does it have to be powdered?
thanks.
Bunny, pelletized is fine, and much easier to handle