And They're Underway ...

How weird was last week, right? After three days of rainy, windy, overcast weather, I felt like I was back in Michigan where I'm from (and where the sun never shines in the winter). I'd wanted to get my tomatoes into their containers last week, but considering the weather, I just moved them under an overhang and waited.

And then this weekend! Wow. Talk about perfect fall weather. This is the kind of weather that reminds me why I live in Florida in the first place. So I spent a thoroughly pleasant Saturday buying my soil ingredients and getting things ready to transplant. Over the next few days, I'll transplant everything into their containers and expect to start harvesting in January. Once again, I'm doing tomatoes (25 gal. containers and 15 gal. containers), broccoli (Earthbox), several kinds of peppers (Earthboxes), strawberries (vertical towers), mustard greens (vertical towers), lettuce greens (vertical towers), and herbs (small containers).

A few early season developments ...

Believe it or not, the first bugs have already appeared. I've discovered both white flies and tiny tomato hornworms on several plants already. I'm handpicking the tomato hornworms and using Neem oil everything else. This brings up a good point: spend a little time with your plants, every morning if you can, and watch very closely. Pest problems almost always begin on the underside of leaves, so make sure to flip up the leaves and look closely. Downy white filaments (webs), holes and tiny droppings that look like pepper grains are all signs of pests.

After much wondering, I've finally decided on my anti-fungal approach for the early season. First off (and most importantly), I'm going to be treating proactively, but I'm sticking with organic products:

• Neem oil. I've not used neem on tomatoes, but overall it's kind of wonderful stuff. It's an insecticide with anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties. It's very safe for humans, and I've already started treating the plants once a week with it.
• Copper fungicide. This is an organic fungicide. I'm using it as a weekly spray to prevent early season fungus from taking hold (hopefully).
• BT (bacillus thuriengiensis). This is the mother of all anti-caterpillar treatments. I use the powder and sprinkle it on the plants liberally maybe once a month or so.

Aside from neem, I've used these other two products, but I think the difference this year is I'm acting proactively: I'm going to hopefully prevent the kind of early season problems I had last year that took out several of my plants and reduced my yield.

Oh yeah ... and the soil mix. In the past, I've grown tomatoes successfully in all kinds of potting soils, even the ones that plant snobs turn their noses up. I've also mixed up my own potting mix with excellent results. This year, I'm doing a bit of a hybrid mix:

• Fafard 3B Professional Mix, which is basically just composted peat moss, perlite, pine bark fines, and dolomite lime
• Composted cow manure, for a slight organic food boost
• Perlite, to air out the mix after I add the cow manure (which is too heavy for good drainage, and good drainage is ESSENTIAL for good plant growth)
• Dolomite lime, just a few tablespoons to boost the calcium and counteract the manure's acidity
• Blood meal, for nitrogen
• Bone meal, for another boost of calcium

So you see, it's some of this and some of that. Some bagged potting soil and some additions of my own. We shall see.

In general, though, I'm really excited about this weather: there's nothing like walking outside on these mornings and spending some quality time with the plants before the day starts.

Reader's Questions, Part I

So to the questions! I might break this into two posts so it doesn't become a novella, but we'll see. And thanks to everyone who e-mailed me questions. I'm not posting names, etc., here (because technically, I didn't get everyone's permission to post these) but if you see a question you wrote, feel free to bask in my gratitude.

#1: Hi Jon In the photo below should I be concerned about anything and if so what is it and how do I treat?

Answer: This is a condition called catfacing. It's actually a malformation of the blossom caused by incomplete flower development. This, in turn, is typically caused by cold weather or cloudy weather that messes with the flowers as they first set fruit. Heirloom tomatoes are somewhat more susceptible to catfacing than some of the newer hybrids, which have been bred for uniformity of shape. For the most part, catfacing is a harmless, but strange-looking and even ugly condition. It does become a problem, however, when the skin splits and allows pinworms an entry point.

#2: I was reading some of your articles on your index but could not find if fertilizing should stop at a certain time prior to harvest or if I can continue to fertilize my tomato plants right up to and through completion of harvest.

Answer: Good question! Most people are growing indeterminate tomatoes (vines) that produce fruit over a period of time until the vine dies or the heat sets in and kills it. (Technically, tomatoes are perennials—a single well-managed vine can produce for nine months or more.) So yes, you can keep these plants going longer and producing longer by continuing to fertilize throughout the plant's entire life, even as you're harvesting fruit. You can also extend the harvest by removing brown and dead leaves and keeping the plant in good condition. Production will move from the bottom of the vine to the top of the vine. Of course, a major limiting factor for most people is space—who has room for a 12-foot vine?—so we top our plants. But we can still feed throughout to give them a boost. For indeterminate tomatoes, keep feeding up through harvest.

#3: A leaf-curling twofer ...

Is it a sign that my tomato plants are not getting enough water if the leaves are curling? AND

I have a mystery. Yesterday, I noticed the leaves on the upper half of my plant are starting to curl into burritos. I have changed nothing. I even brought the plant in when we had a very cold night a week ago. Can you diagnose for me?

Answer: Ah, leaf curl. It drives me crazy too, and I've spent untold hours trying to figure out what causes leaf curl and how to stop it. I ended up finding a lot of conflicting information and very few solid answers. In the end, though, leaf curl is a generally harmless condition and it won't affect your fruit set or harvest. As long as leaf curl is the only thing going wrong, no big deal. If it's accompanied by yellow leaves, brown spots, black spots, stunted or frizzy growth, or any other symptoms, that's a different ballgame and there's a problem.

#4: My local nursery sells their own mix of potting soil that sounds like what you get.

I don't have a list of the exact ingredient but from what I remember it contains

peat, fertilzer, dolomite, perlite. It comes in 2 cu/ft bags. Would this be good in my pots? Would you use only this or mix in something like Black Kow? How many bags are needed for a 25 gal. container?

Answer: At first glance, it sounds like a pretty standard potting mix and that's a good thing (with one caveat). The soil mix I typically use includes these same basic ingredients. But let me back up a few steps. A good potting soil mix has a few characteristics we care about: structure, water-holding capacity, nutrient-holding capacity, and an acceptable pH. Thus, a very basic mix might just contain peat (water and nutrient holding), perlite (structure, to allow drainage), and dolomite (a pH balancer). In higher end soils, you might also see pine bark fines (more structure). Anything after that is fertilizer or bonus ingredients, along with wetting agents to keep the soil moist in the bag. In general, I don't buy soil that has fertilizer already added to it—it's typically a balanced fertilizer and not geared for vegetable growth. Instead, I add my own fertilizer elements, like blood meal, bone meal and composted cow manure (Black Kow) to enrich the soil. I never recommend using soils with water retention crystals for tomatoes. So in answer, the question of adding organic fertilizer elements, like Black Kow, is a personal one. Personally, I do. BUT also remember, compost is heavy and reduces the soil's structure. So if you add stuff like compost to bagged soil, throw in 1 part perlite for every 2 parts of your compost addition. Keep the soil light, fluffy, airy, and able to drain quickly. You can always feed later in the season, but you can never correct for heavy, soggy soil.

Lastly, that's a good question about conversion rates, so here it is. There are 7.5 gallons in a cubic foot. So I use 25-gallon containers, which means it takes about 3 cubic feet of soil to fill them up and leave a little space at the rim. This can get pricey if you're buying custom mixes, so I tend to buy all my own bulk ingredients and usually spend about $100 in soil ingredients each season.

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Whew. OK, so that's it for today. More coming, and if you have any questions, send 'em over and I'll add it to the list.

Brandywines at Home

Woo hoo! We have tomatoes!

So I've finally finished planting the tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. It's been kind of a slow process ... with me running out every so often and doing another container. I still have to get to the strawberries, broccoli and lettuce. But that's okay, because there's lots of time.

These pictures show the basic large-container set-up for the Brandwine tomatoes. I'm using 25-gallon containers with two vines per container. The soil mix was:

• 2 parts peat moss
• 2 parts composted cow manure
• 1 part perlite
• dolomite lime (a few handfuls)
• bone meal (for calcium)
• blood meal (for nitrogen)

This is an organic-based growing mix that is enriched with slow-release nutrients and will provide plenty of calcium and magnesium. I'm watering every day in the morning. If possible, water your tomatoes in the morning, always at the soil level. Never water tomatoes from above and avoid water and dirt splashing up on the leaves. This will reduce the chance of bacterial diseases.

As for fertilizing, I didn't fertilize at all the first week, but yesterday I started with a program of weekly fertilization with Espoma TomatoTone organic tomato fertilizer. You can use pretty much any vegetable fertilizer you want—I like Espoma because it's organic and I've had good results with it. Here's a tip: whatever fertilizer you're using, use it at half- or quarter-strength every week instead of biweekly or monthly. Plants are just like us ... they prefer lots of small meals rather than gorging on one giant one.

I'm also supplementing once a week with a 1/4-teaspoon of magnesium to boost the plants a bit. Magnesium is widely available in garden centers.

Finally, I'm pinching off all the side shoots on the vining plants (indeterminate tomatoes). These little suckers emerge from the space between the leaf stem and the main vine stalk. If allowed to grow unchecked, they'll reduce the yield and increase leaf mass, which reduces airflow and increases risk of a fungal or bacterial disease. So yeah, keep the vines clean.

And that's pretty much it for the big container-grown plants. This is the great part: it takes a few days for the vines to acclimate to their new home, and then they start growing like crazy. I'm already seeing the first tiny flower buds hanging like little bells, but there are no open flowers yet.

Finally, I'd like to offer a shout-out to this weather. Last year, we had a two-week heat wave in October that nearly did the plants in. This year? Just perfection as far as I can see. This is truly tomato weather.

So you tell me ... how are your plants doing?

Growing in Coconut Grow Bags

One of the cool things about this blog has been hearing from readers, sometimes with questions and sometimes with tips and photos of their own gardens.

Among these readers was a gentleman calling himself Boca Bob, and he sent me pictures of his South Florida vegetable garden that kind of blew my mind (he runs a website at www.instagarden.com). He was getting amazing results with a system I was wholly unfamiliar with. Well, I'm nothing if not curious, so I did a bunch of research and set up another tomato grow elsewhere in my yard. Here's the story behind it ...

This set-up is essentially the same system used by professional tomato growers in greenhouses (so-called hothouse tomatoes). The growing medium is coconut coir, which comes in expandable 5-gallon bags from a company called Hydro-Gardens. See those black bags? Basically, you buy the bag, which comes with the coir brick included. You add water and presto! It expands into a 5-gallon pot.

Coconut coir is a bit different than peat or other growing media. It doesn't need to be adjusted for pH, but it's just about completely sterile. There are NO nutrients in coconut coir at all, so you have to add everything. In this case, I decided to abandon organic tomato growing completely and go synthetic. I'm curious if it will affect taste ...

Additionally, I didn't start these tomatoes from seed, but used Better Boy starts I got from my favorite garden center. Better Boy is a rough-and-tumble backyard tomato. It's a heavy bearing red tomato, resistant to all sorts of problems, and tasty. I've grown them before, so I'm familiar with how they should act.

At planting time, I amended the coir with gypsum, and I also threw in a bit of bone meal just to make sure. This will hopefully handle the calcium requirement. For magnesium, I'm using a 1/4 teaspoon of Epsom salts with every third or fourth watering. For nutrients, I'm using the Miracle-Gro general tomato fertilizer at 1/2 strength and feeding every two or three days (I'm watering every day). To train the vines, I drove large landscape stakes into the ground and I'm tying the vines to rope strung between the stakes. Couldn't be simpler.

Oh yes, I'm also experimenting with a weekly foliar micronutrient spray on one of the bags. I'll cover this in greater depth later, but in brief, a foliar spray is fertilizer or product that is applied directly onto the leaves. To use a foliar spray, you mix up the solution and use a garden sprayer to soak the plant down. You have to do this in the morning to avoid fungal problems. I'm using a product called Key-Plex, which is formulated with defensive proteins and micronutrients. According to the company, Key-Plex helps increase the plant's immunity to blight and other diseases while increasing yields. My test is obviously unscientific, but I'll post photos and results as they become apparent.

So far, this grow has gone surprisingly well. It took me a little time to get used to the coir. It doesn't compact like peat, so when you water it, the coir has a tendency to wash away from the plant's stem. You have to be more careful with watering (professionals use drip irrigation system). But the plants have bloomed heavily and are already covered with immature fruit. One of the plants is suffering from rolled leaves, but its fruit is unaffected. Otherwise, they're healthy, happy maters.

Up next: Topping Your Tomatoes

Tomatoes in Containers

It took me a while to warm up to the idea of growing tomatoes in containers, but once I did, I kind of fell in love with it. Containers have definite advantages ... the biggest one, of course, is that you completely control the soil environment, so there's no soil-borne pests or diseases. If you want to grow the exotic heirlooms and beefsteaks, containers make it easy.

That said, there are drawbacks to containers. They tip over, especially near the end of the season when your vines are heavy with fruit. But you know what they say about planning ahead ... set up your containers right the first time, and you'll only have to worry about this if a hurricane hits. In which case tomatoes will be least of your problems.

Also, containers will need to be watered more frequently (at least daily by the end of the season), and every so often, you'll have to flush the container to remove accumulated fertilizer salts.

Container Soil

In some ways, it's easier to deal with the dirt issue in containers because, one way or another, you have to provide it. First off, you can grow excellent tomatoes in a bagged soil mix. Just pick up a few big bags and you're good to go. Once again, avoid mixes with moisture retention crystals or you risk ruining your harvest.

Or you can blend your own soil mix. Here's mine:

• 2 parts sphagnum peat
• 2 parts compost
• 1-1.5 parts perlite
• dolomite lime (1/2-cup per 5 gallons)
• bone meal and blood meal

This mix provides macro- and micronutrients from the compost and the amendments of bone and blood meal. It is, however, deficient in potassium, so I will be using a general organic fertilizer throughout the season. As a rule, I try to keep my grow as organic as possible, so I like to build a strong soil with lots of good, organic nutrients.

If you aren't concerned with organic tomatoes, you could skip the compost and the bone and blood meals and add a high-quality controlled-release fertilizer like Osmocote, along with some micronutrient powder, and you'd have a very complete, fast-draining mix. Or you could skip any added fertilizer at all (but not the lime!) and just feed your tomatoes throughout the season. Some of this depends on your skill level with growing in containers and some on your preferences.

Later, I'll get into more depth on organic fertilizers versus synthetic fertilizers and feeding tomatoes in general.

Tips for Container Culture

When you're setting up your containers, here are a few ways to help ensure success:

1. Go big. Use at least 10 gallon containers, if not bigger. Your tomatoes will grow as large as the container allows, and you want big plants, right? Also, the bigger the container, the heavier it is, so it'll be less likely to tip over.
2. Make room for staking. I've seen a few ways to stake up container-grown tomatoes. You can build a cage around the container—which will displace the tomatoes' weight to outside the container—or you can install the cage in the container and anchor it to the ground. More on staking up tomatoes later, but for now, make sure you've got room for it.
3. Don't bother with drainage material in the bottom of the container. I've caught a lot of grief for this recommendation, but it's true. Container grown plants don't need drainage substrate in the bottom, and in fact, don't want it. In every soil medium—the ground, a potted plant—there is a level at which the soil's "wicking" ability to suck water upward (think about a paper towel dipped in water) balances the downward gravitational pull. This is called the perched water table. Below the perched water table, the soil is saturated with water, which can suffocate plant roots and encourage root rot. Above this level is usable soil. By adding a gravel substrate, instead of increasing drainage, you're actually moving the perched water table UP in the container, so the plant has even less room to grow. In other words, skip the rocks.
4. Get new soil. Don't grow tomatoes in last year's soil, or in soil that has previously grown peppers of any variety or eggplants. Two reasons: the soil becomes exhausted and there is increased chance of disease.

Up Next: Tomatoes and the EarthBox ...

Starting Tomato Seeds

When it comes to growing plants from seed, tomatoes are among the most rewarding. For one thing, I still find it hard to fathom that the tiny seedling of September will grow into the huge vine of January. Seeds in general are tiny miracles, but tomato seeds have at least one special attribute: they often germinate very quickly (sometimes as quickly as 4 days). This is good for impatient people like me.

I started my seeds on September 6, a little less than a week ago, in a custom-blended soilless seedling mix. You can certainly buy your own seedling media, but I make my own because it's cheaper. With the exception of the bat guano, you can find all of the ingredients listed below in almost any garden center. My seedling mix this year was comprised of:

• 2 parts sphagnum peat moss
• 1 part perlite
• dolomite lime
• bat guano

The lime raises the pH as well as supplies calcium and magnesium—both of which are important for tomatoes (much more on that later). The bat guano is an organic, low-strength fertilizer that supplies nutrients to the developing seedling, which strengthens the plant. Don't worry, though. You don't need guano to start seeds. In fact, you should be careful of any fertilizer in a seedling mix--too much fertilizer results in "hot" soil that can easily kill young seedlings.

Once my mix was complete, I filled a tray full of 2" Jiffy pots and sowed the tomato seeds about 1/4-inch deep. My first really successful year, I started out with cherry, plum, and Big Boy tomatoes. I'd highly recommend these varieties--they are heavy producers and generally forgiving. This year, however, I'm going a little exotic and planting four varieties that I ordered from the Tomato Growers Supply Company:

• Azoychka, a yellow, early season tomato with citrus notes
• Homestead 24, a red tomato bred especially for hot climates like South Florida
• Marvel Stripe, a large heirloom tomato with striped yellow and red fruit
• Giant Belgium, a ginormous red beefsteak tomato with fruit that weighs 2 lbs.

In all, I spent about $13 on seeds and probably a few bucks on soil and Jiffy pots. So far, I'm still well within budget ...

Up tomorrow: the first seedlings emerge.