Projo Garden Blog

Budding tomato growers out there may be tempted to throw fertilizer at their young plants, hoping to get bigger plants and more fruits.

But adding too much high-nitrogen fertilizer to the vegetable garden will just get you brutish, healthy green tomato vines and not much else.

It helps to remember this: Fertilizer isn't food, no matter what it says on the bag. Plants make their own food during photosynthesis. Fertilizer adds some important supplements, to do specific things or correct specific imbalances.

But they don't need a weekly care package to keep from starving. Honest. They've been doing this since way before we got here, thank you.

So if you want to fertilize your tomato plants, use a fertilizer designed for tomatoes, or a general fertilizer with a lowish first number in the ratio -- like a 5-10-10. (The first number is nitrogen, the second is phosphorus, the third is potassium. Yes, I have to look that up every time.)

What you really don't want to do is throw a handful of lawn fertilizer on the bed as you're emptying out the spreader. Lawn fertilizer is designed to make lawns grown fast and green up quick. That's all lawns are supposed to do. Just lie there and be green.

Tomatoes, on the other hand, are supposed to grow strong vines and keep producing good number of tasty, well-developed fruits over a long growing season.

The general recommended advice is to prepare the bed or pot before planting with nice, rich composty material, adding a little fertilizer, then add a teaspoon or so (read the package) around each plant when the fruits are the size of a quarter.

Others recommend compost tea, or fish or seaweed emulsion.

Many people will pop a couple of plants in the ground, pick off some fruit, and be perfectly content with whatever they get. A few will go on to learn more and try to boost their yield. Do whatever makes you happy -- don't be intimidated.

Here is a factsheet from URI on growing tomatoes to get you started. There are plenty more on a wide variety of gardening topics on the URI site, as well as the number for the Master Gardener hot line.

Comments

Garden Wise Guy said:

Very nice post. I enjoy your writing style!

I like that you differentiate between typical all-in-one fertilizers and what tomatoes really need. Another hint, and pretty unique to tomato growing, is that if you're transplanting from a container to the ground, you can bury quite a bit of the plant's lower stem (I do it on the diagonal) and all of the buried stem develops roots, making for a "Rocky Balboa" pumped up root system.

BillyG (alias GardenWiseGuy - http://gardenwiseguy.blogspot.com)

Link | June 5, 2007 11:00 PM
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jack dusel said:

last year my tomatos and the garden in general were awful. the woodchuck helped. i dont know if my problem was
1. too much fertilizer, doubful
2. lawn clippings blow on to the garden and have scotts with weed killer
3. no rotation
this year i dug in manure and some compost. we will see. any ideas for me?

Link | June 6, 2007 8:20 AM
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