you know tomatoes are the crop of the season they're the crop of the year they're the crop that everyone loves to grow no matter what and i'm growing some juicy squishy delicious delectable boys here so we have some hacks for you in today's video nine tomato hacks that actually work plus a bonus one at the end so cultivate that like button for the juiciest toms on earth and let's get into the video let's get a hack on the plate for you guys don't fertilize your tomatoes in a very specific way i don't mean don't fertilize
at all but i mean be very strategic about how you fertilize these bad boys these tomatoes want to put out a lot of leaves especially early in their life why the leaves are the basically the engines for the plant they're going to help produce these juicy tamats right here and that's what you want them to do but if you keep too much nitrogen in your fertilizer too long into the plant's life especially when you start to see flowers and fruit develop it's really not what the plant needs at that point in time you want to
switch over to a more phosphorus and potassium heavy fertilizer i've got one that we love here it's called tomato tone from espoma organic it's a 346 so npk obviously that three is the lowest there it's not super high in nitrogen now you can have somewhat high nitrogen early on but if you over fert with nitrogen early what you're going to do is produce a ton of leaves and not a ton of tomatoes when it comes to saving tomato seeds this hack will actually ensure that your tomato seeds last for a long time and have less
disease so what are we doing here we are fermenting tomato seeds the reason why we're doing this instead of the classic paper towel method which works totally fine if you're growing a tomato and you just want to save a couple seeds to immediately plant next year you're more than welcome to just throw them on a little sheet of paper let them dry that way totally fine but if you want to save your tomato seeds for a long time like even up to 10 years you're going to want to ferment your seeds the way you do
that is that you're actually going to be pushing all of the juice and seed pulp into a jar now you need some of the tomato kind of juice and flesh to aid in the fermentation process that's why i'm just going and squeezing this whole tomato in and i am getting as many seeds as i can if you want you could just carefully remove the seeds and not eat the tomato but this is a over ripe tomato which is actually more ideal for this process now the advantage to having a fermented seed is that it fully
breaks down the outer little gel coating on a tomato seed which means that it'll be easier to plant next year it'll store longer because it'll be able to dry more properly but the other nice thing about fermenting your tomato seeds is that it actually can have an effect to remove some bacterial and fungal diseases that might otherwise transfer onto your seed for next year so what is the hack here the hack is fermenting your seeds they last a lot longer and they will be more disease free for gardeners who like me need to harvest unripe
rock hard green tomatoes at the end of the season whether it's due to early frost pests or late blight you can still ripen or soften and get color on these tomatoes by using a piece of fruit like an apple or banana and this is how the hack works these fruit are a great source of the plant hormone ethylene and in its gas form it diffuses out of the plant cells of this ripe fruit into neighboring plant tissue so if you put them side by side this is going to trigger ripening in these tomatoes and here
are two more tips to do this right when you go to lay your fruit in a single layer in your cardboard box you want to make sure that the blossom side is facing up because that side ripens first if you place that at the bottom it's going to get mushy fast and another reason why you have to pay attention to how fast it ripens is because once the ethylene triggers this ripening in all of the fruit in the box it's a one way no return everything's gonna ripen really quickly so keep an eye on it
every day to make sure you don't get overly ripe fruit in there next hack for you is to chill out on your tomato planting just chill a little bit because what happens when you plant all these tomatoes at the same time with roughly the same maturity date you get way too many tomatoes at once and actually what is a beautiful bounty and a delicious treat in the garden becomes your nightmare as the tomatoes rot and get all weird and messed up and you start being sad because you don't know what to do with all of
them you don't want that so two different ways to approach this number one is my personal favorite way it's sort of a little clever twist get tomatoes with different days to maturity so for example i have sun gold cherries cherries smaller tomato grows faster right 57 days to maturity on this one next up i've got hybrid beef steak pink alicious 70 days to maturity i just bought myself two more weeks for these ones to get mature right cherries coming first two weeks later i got these pinkalicious guys next up tasmanian chocolate this guy i believe
85 days to maturity that's another two weeks and that's 85 days plus so that's one way to do it you could plant all those at the exact same time and they would still ripen successively the other way to do it let's say you just love pinkalicious for some reason that's the only thing you want to grow well then stagger your plantings so go two weeks two weeks two weeks or maybe a month something like that and then you'll actually stagger out the ripening of a plant that has the same days to maturity so a couple
different ways to make sure you don't get sick of these juicy tamats at the start of the season and especially if your seedlings have gotten a bit tall and leggy you may have come across that hack that if you bury the plants deep it's going to be healthy and robust how does this work well it's because the plant stem has all of these adventitious roots ready to turn into roots so i'm not talking about those fine hairs which are trichomes but those bumps actually turn into roots and when you bury it deep so let's say
about a third to two-thirds deep so for this thing maybe around here you are going to have roots that spread and allow the plant to anchor itself into the soil not only that it's going to send out more roots to seek out more nutrients and water and that's how you get a healthier plant and a quick note for the cold climate growers who want to try this technique if you are digging a hole deeper that means you're accessing colder soil which is not ideal for these heat loving plants so you want to grab yourself a
soil thermometer and test it at the bottom of the hole and make sure that it's at least consistently 55 ideally 60 fahrenheit before you plant your plants deep another option if you can't go too deep because it's too cold you can try planting it horizontally which will give you very similar results our next hack is actually hacking off the top of your tomato plant so called topping or top pruning whatever you want to call it sounds like sakura it sounds like something you would never do to a tomato but there's a couple compelling reasons to
do it number one if you are in a climate where it's about four weeks until you get a frost but your tomatoes are still growing up and you have a lot of unripe tomatoes hanging on the vine so let's just pretend that's my situation here why do i care about it growing more vertically i really don't care it has enough leaves on the plant that i can come through and snip off all the growing tips force it to stop growing vertically and vegetatively and really force it to think that the season's coming to a close
sooner than it actually is and it's going to start ripening those fruit up a little bit faster so that would be one reason the other reason you might want to top off is let's say i didn't have much more to support my tomatoes with so they're at this point here they're on this florida weave style trellis with these t posts and i don't have anything else well i might as well prune off the top instead of letting it flip over so that's another reason to do it and then the third reason to top off is
just because if you feel like you have enough tomatoes and you just want to manicure and control the space what will happen if you top off and it's still early in the season is you'll have another sucker that's growing from down below that's going to grow up and sort of replace your main leader so a couple different reasons to snip off the tip of your tomatoes if you have limited access to full sun or if you have a shorter growing season then this tip is for you so with the larger fruiting varieties so let's picture
beef steak where they're really really big and they can get over a pound in size they require more sunlight in a day to produce fruit when compared to their smaller fruiting counterparts like the cherry varieties and also the current sized tomatoes for those large fruiting ones you want to give them at least 10 to 12 hours of sunlight per day in order to allow them to produce the fruit that you want now i don't personally grow those large ones for my medium sized ones i still give them the sunniest spot that i have and then
for the smaller ones i have them on the other side of the bed where they still get lots of sun but maybe a couple hours less per day and they do just fine and they still produce a lot of fruit i've got a dirty little hack for you if you love a particular tomato but you don't have enough time to start another seed of it and you still want more of it so let's take a look at this guy right here i have to say beautiful looking tomatoes these are dwarf indeterminate tomatoes we'll probably do
a video on that particular category it's a fascinating category however let's say it's august right now it actually is august and i want more of these and i still have some time but if i started from seed i would not have the time at all but what you can do is just clone off of this plant clone a sucker off so take a really healthy growing tip let's just say maybe this guy right here it's much like pruning a tomato sucker like i've showed you in multiple videos so here's what you can do with this
you can water root this by putting it in a little vase or a little jar transplanting that into the garden you can put it into a fine mix of soil much like a seed starting mix just make sure it's nice and moist don't even have to dip it in rooting hormone or if you really just want to get going with it you can just dig out a little area of your garden and plant it directly in firm that soil up and what you're basically doing here is you're starting a clone of this plant it's already
at this phase instead of starting it from seed so this probably saves you about two to four weeks of growth if you have enough time to get another ripening fruit out of this plant and you can multiply your harvest well it's a great little hackport if you are a space limited gardener and you want to grow as many tomato varieties as you can this hack is for you and that is pruning your tomatoes to a single or double liter now there are a lot of advantages to this as you could see this plant started off
as one and split into two main leaders whereas this plant started as one and then all the way at the top split into multiple other liters the advantage of this is that you could cram way more tomatoes into the same bed in this case you could get away with like 16 18 inch spacing rather than 24 to 36 if you were to grow it in the determinate tomato and say like a florida weave so what that means is that for the same bed i could fit four tomatoes in this row instead of just three it
also means that i will get a lot more tomatoes earlier the cool thing about this is that since you could also fit more tomatoes into your same space you could grow more varieties experience more flavors and actually find your favorite tomato so if you are limited on space really consider leading your tomatoes down to one to two liters what if i told you that there was a way to grow tomatoes without any water at all if you're familiar with viticulture or growing grapes dry farmed vineyards are kind of a thing now they're kind of popular
kind of pop in you see them on social media well you can actually dry farm to mods as well there's very specific use case that you can do this in it's basically just don't water it at all but how do you actually get away with that without killing off the plant well you're gonna need to be in a climate that has relatively heavy clay soil or somewhat clay soil and it's a climate that's somewhat temperate and a climate that gives a decent amount of late winter rain to hydrate that clay soil you want to get
a early producing tomato in the ground right when you can so early in the spring and then hill it up over time with more of that clay and the whole point of this is like why would you do this right why would i not water it when i can just water it and solve the problem well in viticulture the whole idea there is that you're forcing those grape roots to get down in the soil search for nutrients hunt for them the flavor is supposed to be intensified as the plant has struggled more think about it
if you're just sitting in a little chair and everyone brings you pizza to your face you're the guy from wall-e now it's kind of the same with plants if you give them everything they need 24 7 yeah they're going to grow well and they're going to look good and that's totally fine there's a totally different philosophy to growing things where you purposely stretch them out to produce certain flavonoids and certain flavors or textures that might be really advantageous so something to think about dry farming not sure i'm going to try it out until next season
but hopefully you got some hacks that actually work in this video and until next time good luck in the garden and keep on growing
