Kitchen Gardener Rob Smith gives his tomatoes some TLC
And I have a handy trick you can use to grow some speedy tomatoes, too
With summer marching on at a fair rate of knots, it’s sometimes a struggle to keep up with all the jobs you have to get on with, especially if the weather takes a turn for the worse. My tomatoes seem to be growing hour by hour in the large greenhouse and there are some simple jobs to complete to get the most from your plants. An obvious, but sometimes overlooked, job is watering. Tomato plants perform best when the soil's constantly moist, otherwise they can suffer from blossom end rot. This is when the base of the fruit develops a black, soft, sunken area and the fruit becomes inedible. The problem is caused by lack of calcium uptake due to the plants not being able to
utilise the calcium in the soil because the soil is too dry.
By watering regularly, keeping the soil moist and feeding your plants, this should alleviate the problem going forwards. If you’ve seen any small fruits with blossom end rot, I find it best to remove them, allowing the plants to put energy into producing new fruit rather than swelling fruit you won’t use. While you’re inspecting tomatoes don’t forget to remove any sideshoots you may have missed from cordon varieties. There always seems to be one sideshoot that I miss or one that grows to around 20cm long without me noticing!
There’s a trick you can use these sideshoots for... speedy tomatoes! Some of you may have already taken sideshoot cuttings and be growing them on already, and you’ll notice they catch up very quickly with the parent plants. Yet if you have the space, you can grow just one truss very quickly. Take the sideshoot and put it in a bottle of water to root, then pot it up like a regular tomato cutting. As the plant grows cut the growing tip off the tomato when it has produced one or two trusses, this means you have a short plant that only needs a little support and will very quickly produce ripe fruit.
You don’t get as many fruit from these smaller plants, but you do normally get larger fruit which ripen quickly as all the plant’s energy is concentrating on producing those one or two trusses as the growing tip and all other sideshoots have been removed. This method works well for large tomatoes for sauce, when you want lots of fruit to all ripen together. Pay some attention to your mother plants by tying them in to their canes loosely
(otherwise the string can cut into the stem as it grows) or gently twisting the plants around the support wire if you don't use canes. Put small plant pots or tennis balls with a hole cut in them on top of each cane, so you don’t poke yourself in the eye!
It's your last chance to plant out sprouts. I’ve been growing mine in pots until a bed became clear for them. This way I won’t miss out on
a crop and the plants should shoot up quickly in the warm ground.