Growing Tomatoes In Pots | 13 Tomato Growing Tips For Containers

THAT OLD, DISCARDED ELECTRIC FAN that isn’t strong enough for the hot summers of global warming…hey, bring it on. It’s perfect for accomplishing one of the tricks to growing better tomato seedlings, which is (after all) the only thing you probably really care about on the run-up to another spring. To hell with winter.

THOUGH I WON’T START TOMATO SEEDS HERE UNTIL MID-APRIL, I know from looking at my WordPress dashboard—the administrative screen I use to create and run this blog—that many of you are already looking around for the tomato-growing how-to’s. To make the searching easier, a roundup of links to my best tomato-growing tips and tricks:Tips for growing a better tomato yourself from seed.

TORONTO-BASED Gayla Trail was a rooftop gardener for many years, so growing things in pots was her norm (proof is in the photo below). But many of the commercial varieties of container and hanging-basket tomatoes, she says, don’t taste too good—they’re bland, and often tough-skinned. Long ago she started on the hunt for ones that are better.Now Gayla has a real backyard (“like a bowling alley,” she says), but she still likes the dwarf types for other reasons: They’re small plants and reach maturity early (60-ish days, versus closer to 80 for a beefsteak type). That means she can extend her tomato-harvest backwards into June (again, even in Toronto!).Other features she favors of these smallest of the tomato-plant world:“Dwarf types tend to have ruffled leaves,” she says, technically called rugose, which are handsome-looking, and some plants are “tumbling types” that are especially suited to making

We’d love to hear what aliens of any description you are battling, whether weeds, insects, you name it—perhaps for subjects for future shows. Be sure to add a comment at the end of the story to let us know, and please say where you located. Any questions you have of any nature are also always welcome here as a comment or via the contact form, or on Facebook—not just ones related to invasive species, of course. You can also find Ken directly at his website.For answers to other questions, you can browse the archive of all our monthly segments.Read along as you listen to the podcast version of the August 14, 2017 edition of the show using the player below, and don’t forget: Keep the questions coming.august urgent garden question q&a with ken drusewhy do tomatoes crack?Q. So many questions have been coming in, because of course it’s that time of the garden season really no ma

Craig, a.k.a. the NC Tomato Man, a retired chemist and author of the great book “Epic Tomatoes.” He has been showing his Instagram and Facebook followers each variety and progress from seed to fruit on his social-media streams this year. It’s such fun and so informative, and I wanted to know more.I learned about his outstanding varieties, both large- and small-fruited, along with lots of tomato history, and also about why things go wrong: blossoms drop off without forming fruit, or no blossoms happen at all, or fruit is cracked or misshapen, and other issues.Read

Don’t worry: There won’t be a quiz at the end, where instead you can also share any tomato wisdoms of your own for our collective benefit.my 16 bits of tomato wisdom1. Start with a homegrown seedling (grow it like this) or a locally raised one—not a big-box-store seedling that may have been shipped in from warmer zones, where more tomato diseases are endemic and overwinter. (That logic isn’t tomato-specific; I buy local seedlings or g

We all love our pets and are always concerned about the stuff that goes in their mouth. One such worry of cat owners is that whether their beloved cats can have tomatoes or not?

Tomatoes are very easy to grow and planting them in your garden or indoors will ensure you will be getting fresh supplies all year round. Here are the most common Mistakes When Growing Tomatoes that most of us do!

How to care for succulents you’re growing indoors or outdoors? What’s the best soil? How to water succulents? Get answers to all these questions in this article.

Do you have a hankering for the taste of homegrown tomatoes, but lack the real estate for a garden plot?Well, there’s no need for despai

According to the National Gardening Association, tomatoes are the most commonly grown backyard vegetable, and for good reason.Not only is a fresh-picked, homegrown tomato extraordinarily tasty

‘Cherokee Purple’ is a delightfully scrumptious beefsteak in the tomato repertoire. A tomato with a story, this garden favorite can purportedly be traced back to Cherokee hands, carefully passed down through the generations.Sizeable in both vine and fruit, this indeterminate heirloom can yield tomat