Grow your own! (Tomatoes)

Member Name: herbie__53

Product:	Tomatoes
Date:	23/04/09 (86 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fresher taste, yummy straight off the vine. Easy to grow!

Disadvantages: None!

One summers day last year I suddenly had an urge - an urge to grow some vegetables. So I took a trip to our local garden centre and explained to the sales assistant that I'd had this urge, and that I didn't have the foggiest what I wanted to grow or how I should go about doing so!

She suggested tomatoes as a good starting point - very beginner friendly. So I bought my packet of seeds (about £1.50 for an insane amount of seeds!), Gardener's Delight if anyone is interested, a bag of seed compost and a windowsill propagator.

Tomato seeds are small and fiddly, but not as small as some! I was told to fill the cells of the propagator with compost, and plant double the number of seeds than the amount of plants that I wanted. This would be so that I could pick the strongest one out of every two seeds to grow on. Not knowing how many tomatoes I would get off a plant, I went for a round 30. (I later found out that this was WAY too many plants!!)

I watered the seeds as instructed, and sure enough within a few days the little seedlings began to poke through the soil. Excited that I had even got something to germinate, I took care of them well, moving them into patches of sun and keeping them watered.

When the plants are a few inches high and big enough to handle, they need to be potted on into slightly bigger pots (to give them space to grow) which I did carefully, holding the plant by the stalk.

Again when they were around 6 inches high and really starting to produce lots of leaves, they can go into their final pots. I grew some plants in growbags and some in pots, and found the deep pots to be better because you will need to stake the plants to provide support and the growbags do not provide enough depth to support either the plant or the stake, and the plants kept falling over.

As they are growing, be sure to pinch out any "side shoots" that appear between the join of the main stalk and branches. This will ensure you get a single stalked plant - I missed one on one of my plants last year and ended up with a double-stalked plant which was really awkward to get to stand up!

Gradually accustom the plants to outdoors weather by putting them outside in the sunshine during the day but bringing them in at night when the temperature drops. When the weather really warms up (mid-may time) you can leave them out there permanently.

They will do fine on just water until you see the plant start making the "trusses" which will go on to grow the tomatoes. Then you can start using tomato food (which is also good for other veg) as per the instructions on the bottle. Make sure you keep them well watered, do not let them dry out.

Soon you will see the tomatoes start to grow, and they will be green. Dont panic - they will go red! Some I had took ages to go red, but they will! Usually one will turn, and then this one will turn the one next to it and the one next to that... and so on.

Once they are red you can pick them and use them in salads, sandwiches, pasta, anything you like! They taste so much better home grown and straight off the vine.

I learned from experience that 30 plants was way too much and had to give most of them away - I whittled it down to six plants in the end and even that was still too much. This year I have four - two large tomato and two cherry tomato.

I recommend growing tomatoes to anyone - if I can do then anyone can! You learn fast from experience, this year I already have way more veg growing knowledge than last year, and am growing a lot more than tomatoes now! Its addictive!!

Summary: Give it a try, its suprisingly addictive