How to grow tomatoes

    What should be done so that the tomatoes do not hurt, grow strong and healthy? It's so eager to grow tasty, healthy tomatoes in your garden, and not to buy on the market!

    The answer to this question can be formulated as follows: to grow tomatoes correctly means to strictly observe the agrotechnology, which will create favorable conditions for the development of strong, productive plants and unfavorable conditions for pests and pathogens. But in order to comply with agricultural practices - it must be known.

    Carefully Pick the Seeds

    To grow good yields of tomatoes, you need to start with the selection of resistant varieties. Vegetable growers in recent times increasingly prefer domestic varieties, which are created taking into account our soil-climatic and phytosanitary conditions. For example, scientists of the All-Russian Research Institute of Irrigated Vegetable and Melon-Growing (Astrakhan) recommend the following varieties:

• Ranovic
• Chizhik
• Record holder
• Forward
• Royal
• Gigantella
• Cleopatra
• New prince
• Orange avury
• Astrakhan 5/25

    These varieties are distinguished (to varying degrees, of course) by resistance to vertex rot, cracking, dry growing conditions, and viral and fungal diseases. Many gardeners prefer foreign varieties - this is not entirely correct. Scientists emphasize that the varieties of foreign selection are inferior to domestic and taste, and resistance to many diseases, and yield.

    Can grow tomatoes from their seeds

    To those who grow tomatoes from their own seeds, scientists recommend:

    First, harvest them only from ripe fruits collected from healthy plants.

    Secondly, it is imperative to ferment the seeds in the pulp for 2-3 days.

    For sowing, it is better to use not fresh, but 2-3-year-old seeds, which during storage are released from pathogens. Presowing treatment in solutions of biological preparations also helps to reduce seed contamination: phytosporin-M. alirin-B, hamair. These drugs are used for processing plants during the growing season.

    Informative video on how to prepare and sow tomato seeds:

    Properly grow tomato seedlings

    Early sowing does not guarantee success

    Tomato health depends to a great extent on the conditions of the seedling period. Often, gardeners try to sow seeds on seedlings as early as possible, arguing something like this: we sow earlier - we will get a harvest earlier. Plants in such hasty gardeners do not grow, but toil. Most often, tomato seedlings are not grown properly! The roots of seedlings in February get cold on the cold window sills, the leaves suffer from a stream of dry air coming from the radiators.

     Add to these costs of early sowing, a deficit of light, excessive irrigation, nitrogen supplements, which, as supporters of early sowing believe, should stimulate the growth of seedlings, and we get a full set of conditions negatively affecting the development of seedlings.

    By the time of landing in open ground, summer residents have thin long plants with stretched internodes. Such a seedling, when planted in a garden bed (especially without first quenching in the open air), takes a long and hard time to take root. Part of it dies, being burned by the sun, worn by the wind.

    The race in time, which the seedlings should have given early sowing, is nullified by a period of difficult and long adaptation to new conditions. Not having time to survive the stress of transplantation, young tomatoes are often forced to suffer again: sharp drops in night and daytime temperatures, and the sharply rising heat weakens tomatoes even more. Immature immunity fails, and plants cannot withstand infection (viral, mycoplasma, bacterial), become ill and even die.

    In short, after chasing the early harvest of tomatoes, summer residents often lose the entire crop.

    The seedlings of later sowing (mid-March - early April) develop under the conditions of a growing daylight hours. It becomes possible to air the room more often without risk to the health of the plants, and even take the seedlings to fresh air.

As a result, the stocky healthy seedlings are planted on the bed, which tolerates the transplant painlessly and almost immediately begins to grow in a new place.

    She needs just a little help, for example, to spray with zircon or HB-101 so that she can withstand diseases. Of course, such plants can get sick, but, as a rule, when agrotechnics are observed, the disease does not become widespread. Removing the affected bushes, gardeners stop the spread of infection. Such a sanitary culling has little effect on the total yield.

    It is even more appropriate to grow tomato seedlings not on window sills, but in temporary film shelters, warm beds. Dried tomato seeds can be sown as soon as the soil allows. Tomatoes will sprout when favorable conditions for germination are created. Germinated seeds are sown only after the soil in the greenhouse warms up. Weeded weeds are weeded before sowing.

    If there are a lot of seeds (they stocked up from their garden), it is possible to conduct a combined sowing with dry and germinated seeds. In warm weather, with a small interval in time, they and others will ascend. A cold snap can ruin germinated seeds, but dry, albeit with a delay, will sprout. More viable tomatoes grow, sown immediately in the garden. But this method requires a large number of seeds.

    Watch an interesting video about how you can start growing tomatoes in March, sowing seeds immediately in the ground:

    How to grow a good crop of tomatoes

When a tomato is tomato is not happy.

    It is right to grow tomatoes, it is first of all to observe crop rotation. It is difficult to do in the country, even harder in the greenhouse, but without this in any way. Tomatoes can be grown after many vegetable crops, but it is absolutely not recommended to place them after the related crops of the family of the nightshade: pepper, eggplant, potato.

    It is undesirable to grow tomatoes after cucumbers, due to the development of viral diseases, which can be common in tomatoes and cucumbers. All the more harmful to the health of tomatoes is the permanent cultivation in one place. Crop rotation is very important, without this agrotechnical reception, you can forget about good yields of tomatoes.

    Failure of crop rotation contributes to the accumulation of pests (eg cotton bolls), pathogens. Even if annually replenish the site with organic, mineral fertilizers, tomatoes will steadily reduce yield.

    According to the rules, tomatoes (and other nightshade) return to their original place after five years. In small suburban areas such a gap is difficult to sustain, but it can be reduced by introducing siderats into the crop rotation.

    Tomatoes, planted where the solanaceous grew last year, can develop quite normally, but during the period of mass ripening of the fruits, the leaves begin to dry quickly. Plants do not realize their potential yield.

    How to feed tomatoes

    Balanced nutrition is no less important for the health of tomatoes. Plants that get everything they need, become immune to diseases, pests.

    Potassium is of particular importance for tomatoes. By contributing to the thickening of the cell walls, this trace element thereby prevents their infection.

Top dressing of tomatoes.

    The low resistance of tomatoes to diseases in the dacha plots can often be explained by the enthusiasm for nitrogen supplements. After the urea is introduced, the bushes are transformed, noticeably growing up, which is good for summer residents. And for the external positive effect, they can not consider the negative effects of nitrogen on plants.

    Strengthening the growth of cells, nitrogen contributes to the thinning of their walls, and thereby reduces the resistance of plants to diseases, adverse weather conditions.

    Some of the disease resistance to tomato give trace elements: manganese, zinc, copper, boron.

    Taking into account all this, the attitude to dressing should be reconsidered: abandon the indiscriminate use of urea, giving preference to complex fertilizers with microelements, potassium sulfate, and wood ash.

    Tomatoes that are planted (or sown) without delay are less affected by diseases and pests. Tomatoes in open ground are usually planted in May or early June, focusing on the air temperature, soil, weather forecast for the upcoming week. About two weeks earlier planted tomatoes under temporary shelter. By the time of mass reproduction of pests, widespread infection, the plants have time to grow, to grow stronger and will be able to give a generous, good crop of tomatoes.

    Do not forget to water the tomatoes

    It reduces the resistance of tomatoes to diseases, pests, and the delayed irrigation. When water is scarce, the leaves of the plants become attached, nutrients begin to decay vigorously, becoming an easy food for pests. That is why aphids, mites, thrips love to settle on weakened plants.

    Timely watering saves plants from such stresses. Their multiplicity depends on the weather, soil structure. On light soils, they are watered more often, but with lower norms than on heavy ones. Loosening, mulching between the rows helps to save moisture in the soil.

    Watering tomatoes is better on the furrows or using a drip irrigation system, rather than sprinkling. The latter method contributes to infection and the intensive development of diseases.

    Create favorable conditions for tomatoes

    Not the last role in the protection of tomato plants belongs to the environment of the site. Summer residents give little value to this, relying more on processing with pesticides. It would seem that there is nothing simpler than sowing nectar-bearing plants on a plot that attract entomophages — predator insects that destroy pests of the garden and vegetable garden, but few of the summer residents use this.

    Dill, basil, coriander, phacelia, savory, hyssop, lemon balm - this is not a complete list of plants that feed on entomophages. Being sown next to tomatoes, these plants will help to make the microclimate of even a single vegetable garden more favorable, and you will not need to resort to chemical remedies.

    If you still can not do without spraying, experts advise to seek the help of biological preparations.

    To reduce the number of pests (cotton moth, trip-sows, ticks, aphids, etc.), it is better to treat tomatoes several times with lepidocide, bitoxybacillin, fitoderma than once with a chemical insecticide. The main thing is not to wait for the mass reproduction of pests. And the fewer pests in the garden, the greater the chance that tomato bushes will not be infected with viruses, fruits will not be damaged by scoops, and you will grow a good harvest of tasty tomatoes.

    And here is a video about how tomatoes grow in the right garden: