If you are planning to start out with vegetable gardening, you have made the right choice for choosing tomato gardening. Tomato gardening is one of the simplest form of vegetable gardening that a newbie gardener can get started with. In this article, I will show you 5 tomato gardening tips that you can use to grow red and juicy tomatoes over and over again.
Space Up When Planting
This is the basics of all gardening but many new gardeners still make the mistake of not giving enough space between tomato plants. Crowding them up will lead to intense competition for nutrients, sunlight and water. Such competition is not healthy as they are unable to get an adequate amount of the elements.
Soil Preheating for Early Harvest
This is one well kept secret that only a few tomato gardeners know. By preheating the soil, you can actually bring forward your harvest period way earlier than other tomato gardeners in town. How? Does that mean you should burn your soil prior to planting? NO! You can preheat the soil by placing it under the sun and cover it with a black plastic sheet to prevent heat from escaping.
Sunlight - Crucial for Tomato Plants Growth
Just like any other vegetables, tomato plants achieve optimum growth when exposed to at least 10 hours of sunlight everyday. If you want plant your tomatoes indoors, which is another popular way of planting tomatoes, you should get yourself a grow light that emits UV rays from nurseries or online gardening supplies stores, which normal fluorescent lights don't.
Watering Skills for Sweet Tomatoes
When your tomato plants are developing, be sure to provide adequate amount of water every single day. However, when inching closer to the harvest season, decrease the amount of water when you are watering. This will increase the density of sugar within the tomatoes, which will then give you sweeter tomatoes.
Apart from this, another reason of not watering too much during the harvest season is that the excessive watering will cause stress to the plants and tomatoes may drop to the ground before you pick them as a result of that.
Deep Burying Helps
Another tomato gardening tip that I would like to share here is that you should always bury your tomato plants deeper after getting them back from the nursery. This will allow the plants to develop stronger and better root system for better nutrients absorption. Roots can grow from the stems of tomato plants so you don't have to worry about them will die off just because you are planting them deeper than usual.