Healthy tomato plants need some TLC
If you live and garden on the east coast like I do, it seems like every time we hear about tomatoes it’s in reference to another case of late blight. While it’s certainly important to check plants on a daily basis for signs of late blight (check out this post on joene’s garden for links to new photos of late blight infected plants), it can be easy to forget that tomatoes need a lot of routine TLC in order to remain healthy and produce an abundant crop of fruit.
An important part of growing healthy tomatoes, no matter where you garden, is proper pruning. Tomato plants grow so rapidly that they benefit from routine pruning because a properly pruned plant is less susceptible to fungal and insect diseases. Rather than try to cover everything here, I’ll point you to an article I just read that covers all aspects of tomato pruning in detail. A comprehensive guide to proper tomato pruning can be found here on the Fine Gardening website. The article includes how-to pictures for pruning and also links to videos on tomato pruning.
After reading the article, I went out and did some selective pruning to my tomatoes. I’m only growing three vines – all received at the Fairfield County Plant Swap back in June – and all in one large container on my patio. I like having them growing front and center so that I can monitor them from my kitchen window several times a day and every time I go outside, there they are. I can easily monitor irrigation needs and also the earliest signs of any disease. And of course, I don’t have to worry about any critters getting to them in the container. With the constant struggle I seem to be waging this year with deer eating my perennials and shrubs, I am happy not to add another category of plants to the ‘needs to be protected’ list.
Where are you growing your veggies this year? I’d love to hear about any strategies you use to protect your edible crops. It’s great to have a garden that is welcoming to wildlife of all sorts, it would just be nice if that wildlfie could understand what’s strictly off limits!
This year I’ve kept my veggies confined to the vegetable garden which I had to surround with fencing to keep out the very cute but hungry baby rabbit. Anything outside the fenced area quickly became dessert. The down side to this is that I now have far too many beans and bolting lettuce… As for tomatoes, one has been disposed of already, one is wilting (cause unknown), one may have early signs of late blight (I’m closely monitoring it), and the fourth has no fruit. Not a very successful year for tomatoes.
It has definitely been a challenging growing season here in CT. While my tomatoes are doing fine, my cucumbers seems to have stopped growing. The plants are stunted but they all have some cucumbers on them. Very soon the weight of the cucumbers is going to overhelm the plant and then who knows what will happen. Gardening is certainly not for the faint of heart!