Today we are working on the tomatoes in the greenhouse and wanted to share with you our top 5 tips for growing vertical tomatoes. While these tomatoes are grown in our heat sink greenhouse, the same tips will apply to your tomatoes grown vertically in your soil. We are going to share our top 5 favorite tips to help you succeed at growing your tomatoes vertically.
The 5 tips fort growing tomatoes vertically we are going to discuss are
1 - Nutrition - watch for signs of calcium deficiencies and make an application of calcium (Preplant) half way through your growing season. Blossom end rot on tomatoes is an indicator your plants are lacking calcium. We know tomato plants are heavy calcium feeders. Give them additional calcium half way through the growing season and you can avoid any blossom end rot.
2 - top the tomato plant 8 weeks before the end of your growing season. Allowing the plant to expend energy to produce new flowers and fruit that will never mature is wasteful. Top the plant and force it to put its energy into bringing the existing fruit to maturity.
3 - Pest control - daily you should be looking for signs of hornworms. Look for their frass, as well as missing leaves they have eaten away. Spray BT as soon as you see sign, and then spray weekly there after. If you kill them the day they hatch they won't get big enough to do any real damage. BT is organic and won't harm you or pollinators.
4 - Prune weekly - keep your plants under control so you grow tomatoes, not leaves. Force the plants to put its energy in growing taller, produce more blooms and to ripen the fruit it has already set. Limit unnecessary growth by pruning suckers. Pruning leaves to reduce competition between plants is also a good practice.
5 - Leave one sucker on the stem closest to the growing tip. In the event of accidentally breaking the terminal bud while training it up the twine, having a sucker allows that plant to continue growing. If you break the growing tip off after pruning all the suckers the plant is done growing. That sucker can also be used to propagate n new plant to extend your garden size, or replace a damaged plant.
Link to the BT - https://amzn.to/31J994c
Link to our favorite pruners for tomatoes - https://amzn.to/2z4TsYQ