Leggs here! I have always heard that tomatoes are one of the easier plants to grow. I mean from my initial experience of growing a tomato plant in high school, it seemed like a pretty straight forward plant. Then again my high school tomato plant was bought at the local Home Depot and already had fruits. This time around I decided to start from seed; Mortgage Lifter Tomato and Vintage Wine Tomato were the chosen ones. The plants started inside until they got around 4 inches in height and had their second set of leaves. Once they hardened outside for a week during the day, I transferred them to 7 gallon fabric planters. It felt great to finally plant something in the soil I worked so hard on mixing together a month ago. Over time the tomato plants grew… and grew… AND GREW. They survived a fungus attack which was a win and seemed to not affect their growth. I made the mistake of not doing any research on pruning and just let the plants be.
The plant pictured above is the only one I have in a pot solo. The other four (two Mortgage Lifters and two Vintage Wine) I have growing with herbs/plants that compliment each other (i.e., basil for example). My initial instinct was to wrap that bitch up in twine. So I did.
I feel in the long term, this is not going to help. Having the plant wrapped up like this will probably increase its chances on disease/fungus. I reached out on twitter for some advice and learned the difference between “determinate” and “indeterminate” tomato plants from our friend Andy who hosts the Deep Share Podcast. This is definitely something I should have researched prior to purchasing the seeds, but hey I am learning! Haha.
“Determinate” tomatoes:
“Indeterminate” tomatoes:
- Smaller plant with controlled growth
- Fruit ripens early and produces a lot at once
- Requires little staking/caging
- Best for containers
Source: https://www.thespruce.com/determinate-and-indeterminate-tomatoes-2540020
- Large plants with sprawling growth
- Continues to fruit early to late season, up until frost
- Requires strong support
- Planting in the ground preferred, may work in large containers
Knowing what I know now and the limited backyard space we have, “determinate” tomato seeds should have been the proper choice. But I will make do with what I started and try to mitigate the best I can with my indeterminate tomatoes. I found a helpful video by the Phoenix Aurelius Research Academy that showed me how to properly trim, tuck, and train tomato plants to optimize production. I thought I would embed the video so others may benefit. Today I will go out back and look for the “unproductive” vines on my plants to trim in order to properly tame the tomato beast.
I will continue to provide more garden updates through our website, especially as I start to plan the fall/winter crops. Feel free to comment with any other advice or questions you may have! Or you can always shoot us an email at frcpodcast@protonmail.com. Thank you for reading and MUCH LOVE to you! – 🦵 🦵