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Starting a Tomato Garden
Tomatoes are one of the most delicious and rewarding plants you can grow -- and the number-one fruit or vegetable grown by home gardeners. To help support the tomato plants when they start growing, build tomato cages, which will help keep plants from breaking off or getting knocked over.
Tomatoes need lots of sun and warm weather to thrive.
The tomato is actually a fruit, not a vegetable, but it needs a lot of the same nutrients and conditions as the rest of the vegetables we grow. Tomatoes can
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run in many different colors, but red is the most poplar; sizes can vary from dime to softball. There are tomatoes for different purposes like slicing, canning, pasta and cherry varieties. Whatever type of tomatoes you choose to grow, you'll need rich, loose soil and plenty of heat and sunshine to be successful.
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One of the big gardening trends in the past few years has been to recapture part of our history by growing heirloom tomatoes. Gardeners who grow heirlooms swear by the flavor and texture; in fact, heirlooms were originally grown for their flavor. Over the past 20 years a lot of work has gone into breeding hybrids, or crosses of plants, to make them more disease or pest resistant. One of the challenges has been to make hybrids that really taste good.
Heirloom tomatoes are called open-pollinated because they're stable from one generation to the next. This means that you can save seeds from an heirloom because the offspring grown from seed will be exactly like the parent. They can be pollinated in the open garden without worrying about getting mutated plants in next year's crop. Seeds from a hybrid tomato are generally not used, because they may be very different from the "mother" plant, especially if they're grown in the open where they might cross-pollinate with other tomatoes.
A hybrid tomato is produced by crossing two or more distinctly different parent plants. Hybrids are created to mix or strengthen certain traits, like disease-resistance.
To grow tomatoes you need rich soil. Tomatoes are known as "heavy feeders"; that is, they like lots and lots of fertilizer and organic material. They grow fast and need food and energy to thrive: a plant that has to work hard to find food can't work hard on growing fruit. You can add compost and 10-10-10 fertilizer to give an additional nutrient boost to your soil.
Once the beds are ready, you need to build supports for the tomato plants. It's best to do this for all tomatoes, even if they're a bush type: you don't want plants breaking off or getting knocked over, causing you to lose all of your tomatoes in the middle of the season, especially if you're planting only a few plants. Build a metal cage for each tomato plant to keep it safe.
- To build wire tomato cages, you'll need heavy gloves, safety glasses, hammer, wire snips, 50' of wire mesh with 6"-square openings, 10 1/2" metal pipes, four elbows and two Ts. Each tomato cage will be about 60" around and 60" tall. Be sure to buy wire that's heavy-gauge; otherwise it may sag or bend with the weight of the tomato plants.
- The first step in making the wire cages is to cut off a length of wire mesh. Measure 10 whole squares and then cut about the middle of the eleventh square. This gives you a little wire handle at one end to use to close the cage. (Be sure you wear safety glasses and gloves when you work with wire mesh. You want to keep any metal shavings out of your eyes and protect your hands when you make cuts.) The wire has a tendency to spring up if it's been rolled, so if you don't have a helper, you need to secure the mesh in place before you cut.
- To turn the wire mesh into a tomato cage, you must bend the wire to make a circle, almost like a column. The easiest way to do this is to lay it out on the ground and roll it, trying to bend it as evenly as possible. The more even the curve, the stronger the cage will be.
- To close the cages, use a short piece of pipe as a handle to loop the wire over and through the square on the other side. The pipe gives you leverage to bend the heavy wire, and it protects your hand from any sharp points. Wrap the wire around until it's secure and won't slip. To make it easier to push the cages into the ground, cut the bottom horizontal pieces off, leaving the vertical pieces).
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