Medwyn Williams on how to produce the best toms
Plant deeply each time you transplant them for strong, well-balanced plants
If you only have a cold greenhouse then there‘s still time to sow some tomato seed, as we explain on the left-hand page, be it for the show bench or just for eating. There are amazing varieties available now, with breeders constantly improving on shape, size and, thankfully, taste too! I remember a few years ago some tomatoes I used to grow for showing didn’t taste very nice, but were regular winners on the show bench. Nowadays you have nicer-tasting varieties that have the merits of a good medium-sized exhibition tomato, such as ‘Cappricia’, ‘Zenith’, ‘Dometica’, ‘Meccano’ and ‘Y Ddraig Goch’.
Some you’ll have sown much earlier if you have a heated house or a propagator, and the plants will be well advanced by now. One requirement with tomato plants is sufficient space for them to develop properly or they’ll get very leggy. When it’s time to plant them in their final position there’s no better plant than a wellbalanced one that hasn’t over extended and become top heavy and flopping about.
I’ve always looked at tomato plants as having four lots of roots, with the first naturally generated when the seed germinates and the first radicle develops into roots. The next three stages of development of the plant depends on how you transplant them.
The tomato plant has the capability of developing a mass root system from its own stem, which has fine hairs on it that are in effect adventitious roots. When these fine hairs come into contact with moist compost they very quickly develop into proper roots that will sustain the plant. When I plant out the germinated seedlings I plant them deeply until the seedling leaves are sitting nearly on top of the compost. The third set of roots develop when the plants are potted up into larger pots, again planting them as deep as you can. The final and fourth set develop in the same way – by planting them in their final position as deep as you can. This will give you a very powerful and strong root mass.