There are many ways to grow tomatoes. Staking them or putting a wire cage around them or easier easy ways like letting them grow wild or stringing them up. I like all ways, but I have worked out a little twist on letting them grow wild.
If you plant tomatoes and let them grow wild, they will soon take up all the space in your garden and they will have formed so many laterals, you won’t know where the plant starts and ends.
The fruit will be lying on the ground and getting attacked by every pest known to man. What you thought would be the easy way has turned into the hard and non-productive way. You mutter to yourself as you pull that bloody tomato vine out. But you get a few shining moments as you rescue a few beautiful vine ripened tomatoes.
Remember That Twist
Instead of growing your tomatoes in the garden, grow them in a 200litre plastic drum.
Get some really good soil and add some worm castings, maybe some rock dust and some compost.
I learnt to grow tomatoes the easy way by accident. I had a 200 litre drum, on its side, as a worm farm. When I made my bigger worm farm, the drum was left sitting for a while and a volunteer tomato and passionfruit grew out of the worm castings. I didn’t take much notice and then some fruit formed so I kept and eye on it. The tomato produce quite a few fruit, had no disease and very few pest problems. I credited its good performance to the worm castings.
Because tomatoes are such hardy beasts, I didn’t shower it with much attention and only watered it if it wilted. Sometimes that would be a month to six weeks after a downpour of rain. If tomatoes were getting close to the ground, I raised them up by putting a block of wood under them.
Because the tomato had to grow up and out of the drum, I only had to support one tenacious lateral with tomatoes on it.
Getting Ready To Transplant Seedlings
These are Black Russian tomato seedlings. On the left are the remaining two from a punnet bought at Bunnings. Your can see they have been neglected in comparison to the two from the same punnet, planted in the wicking bed. In the punnet is a seedling I grew from seed. The seed was purchased from The Seed Collection. It was looked after a bit better than the others.
When I plant tomato seedlings, I plant them so that the leaves are right at soil level. This allows more roots to grow from the stem.
After planting I water them very well and won’t water again for at least 4 weeks, or if they are wilting in the morning before it has warmed up. They are hardy beasts and by not watering, they don’t grow all long and leggy. The idea is to make them want to produce fruit and you don’t want them to grow a lot between each level of fruit.
If a plant thinks that it might not survive, it produces fruit to ensure the species ongoing survival. Treat it too well and it doesn’t use it resources to maximise fruit production. Like us, when we get too comfortable, we don’t try to improve our situation.
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