Tomatoes

[epaul]

Thanks, Bill.

[epaul]

Eyeball test.

Terry's tomatoes clearly don't need any added Nitrogen, the color is good and they are growing like crazy. Don's tomatoes do need a shot of N. Color is pale and yellowish (especially the new growth, the true tell of N deficiency).

When a tomato plant doesn't need N. Don't add any. From a home gardener's perspective, the goal is to get a good crop of tomatoes as soon as possible (not to produce the maximum amount of tomatoes at an end of season harvest date down the road, as a commercial grower might wish).

Nitrogen stimulates foliage growth, but once the plant is up and growing well, to anthropomorphize, you want your tomato plant to set its attention to producing and ripening fruit as soon as possible, not growing all the luxuriant foliage it possibly can for a late season kick ass record crop (a crop that might not even be half-completed come mid-September when short days and cool nights reduce the fruits taste and sweetness and frost threatens to put and end to the entire show).

(a tomato ripened during the short days and cool nights of late September might only have half the sugars and altenoids* as a tomato ripened during the long days and peak warmth of August.)

If you have good foliage but aren't getting the fruit set you think you should, it can be useful to give the plant a shot of liquid fertilizer that in high in phosphorous (and low in nitrogen, which you don't need). What nitrogen is to green growth, phosphate is to fruit set and fruit production (which is why commercial commercial tomato and cut flower growers will use fertilizer blends that are low in N (nitrogen) and high in P (phosphorous).

Very, very generally:

Nitrogen (N) is for good foliage production.
Phosphorous (P) is for flower production and fruit set.
Potassium (K) is for general plant health and stable cell production.

N,P,K, the big three of fertilizer.



* don't bother looking this word up as I just made it up to stand for that group of complex chemicals that give a tomato that tomato flavor

[jdd2]

epaul--you're a tomato whiz, so can you help with this corn...?

[jdd2]

(and by the way, that N and P stuff is the basics for when you want to tell your plants to produces good buds)

[epaul]

Jul 31, 2024 6:48:39 GMT -5 jdd2 said:

epaul--you're a tomato whiz, so can you help with this corn...?

That corn is beyond help. But, if you want to eat it, you still can as the growth you see is basically just another mushroom (the fruiting/reproductive portion of a fungus... fungus flower?).

Farmers call that disease "smut". Corn smut if it is on corn, barley smut if on barley, wheat smut if... you get the idea. It is a fungus that infects the flowering portions of a grass (which corn, wheat, barley etc. all are).

I wouldn't eat barley smut, nasty stuff that it is. But, Euell Gibbons types will chow down on corn mushrooms. Apparently it is quite nutritious. (I keep telling you folks, corn is amazing!)

[TKennedy]

Q: Why did Mary Mushroom stop dating Tommy Tomato?

A: She found out he wasn’t a fun guy

[Tamarack]

Thanks ePaul. The veggie plants have been dosed with Miracle Gro, which the woman in charge of ornamental plants always has available.

A follow-up question - the humus I worked in has lots of wood chips. Are these beneficial as they decay or would it be better to screen them out? (I usually screen the soils every spring, to screen roots, pebbles, and clay balls out and screen humus and manure in)

[epaul]

The wood chips will compete with the plants for the available nitrogen and can create a short term nitrogen deficiency, depending on size, amount, and placement of the wood chips. It is called, alternately, nitrogen lock up/nitrogen tie up.

Bacteria in soil will begin to break down/decompose the wood chips. This bacteria multiples like crazy as it feasts on the wood. And this bacteria needs nitrogen to live, so it consumes nitrogen as it consumes the wood; locks this consumed nitrogen up/ties it up. Once the wood is broken down/decomposed, the bacteria that had been chowing down on it die off and the nitrogen they had consumed/tied up is released.

Short term pain, long term gain. But, depending on a host of variables, the short term pain could be affecting your tomato crop this year.


Variables. Lots and lots of them.

Proximity is one. If the wood chips are on the surface, applied as a mulch, the nitrogen they tie up will also be near the surface. Plant roots located deeper in the soil profile may have plenty of N. But if the wood chips are mixed up throughout the soil profile, they can tie up N through out the soil profile.

Amount and size of wood. A few little chips won't affect much of anything. Lots of big chunks will tie up a lot of the available N.

Bottom line. You don't want a lot of wood in your raised bed's soil.. But, if you do have wood chips in your soil mix, no problem, just add extra N to compensate for the wood-eating bacteria's appetite. Long term, the wood will break down and add useful organic material to your bed. But until it gets there, it can be a nitrogen hog, so toss in extra N.

[Cornflake]

epaul, would the same analysis apply to any organic compost? Most of our beds are covered by about three inches of partially composted grass clippings. The compost holds in moisture, cools the soil and suppresses weeds. All good things. But I hadn't considered the possibility that they tie up nitrogen.

[epaul]

If the grass clippings are dry and are applied thinly, an inch or two at the time, they make a fine mulch. Don't worry about N consumption. Any that occurs will be at the surface and you are just feeding the N cycle that leads to good things. (unlike all those logs and tree stumps buried in Tamarack's bed)

But, dumping a deep pile of wet grass clippings fresh from your mower's grass bag is a bad mulch. Bad, bad, bad. The pile of wet grass will mat up and form a sour seal limiting the amount of oxygen and moisture that can reach the soil. Plus, it can cause genital warts. Or so Todd told me. So, don't do it.

(don't add grass clipping if you had just sprayed your lawn with a broadleaf herbicide for dandelions or some such. Wait four to six weeks.)

The bottom line is: If something is working, it is working. If it isn't, do something else.

[Cornflake]

Thanks. We never use freshly cut grass.

[Village Idiot]

Jul 31, 2024 6:48:39 GMT -5 jdd2 said:

epaul--you're a tomato whiz, so can you help with this corn...?

We might call it corn smut, but in Mexico it's a delicacy.

[TKennedy]

I used coco bean shells this year, how are they for mulch? The nursery recommended them.

[epaul]

They are wonderful. Does what a mulch should do. And they allow for great water and gas exchange and not a friendly habitat for mice and voles. (gaps and pore space is big plus for mulch... the lack of which is reason why a mat of wet grass is poor mulch... no pore space for air and gas exchange. Some are perhaps now wondering, so why can plastic sheeting can work so well in the garden? That's a good question.

[epaul]

Poly sheeting and other types of landscape fabric block weeds and preserve soil moisture, which is what you want it to do. While plastic "mulch" won't add anything good and useful to your soil like organic mulch, it is an inert material and does no harm (unlike that wet mat of moldy grass clipping turning into sour, smelly, disease harboring sludge).

And, if soil-borne leaf diseases become a problem in your garden, plastic won't harbor the bacteria that produces them (organic mulches can harbor everything there is to harbor... those cocoa beans are pretty good in that regard, however.) But, it can takes a lot of plastic to keep your plants safe from fungal diseases, mobile wretches they are.)

Poly row coverings work really well and are mainstay for most veggie farms.


If you are using a landscape fabric that uses a weave that promises to allow water to through, don't expect it to allow very much water to pass through in a gardening useful fashion... darn stuff sheds water like a duck. And the expensive stuff works no better than the cheap. It's fine for long term use under pavers, but if you want the water to your plants, stick your hose under the stuff or cut your own holes in it.

[Village Idiot]

My tomatoes, actually my entire garden, which isn’t huge, is all in raised beds. The rabbits and other critters around here will devour an entire garden full of seedlings in an hour, so I’ve got to keep them off the ground. My garden require lots of watering, but not having a drought is really helping the peas and beans.