Tips for Successfully Growing Tomato & Pepper Plants

Those of you who love fresh, home-grown tomatoes and peppers are now anxiously planting your new seedlings and are hopeful for a bountiful summer crop. With the rainfall so far, we may just have a good year for summer produce. But to ensure this will happen, you want to make sure you do your part and follow some simple rules of good tomato and pepper growing.

Plant them in a place that gets plenty of sunlight, no less than 6 hours a day, but the more, the better. This will be important to plant growth and will determine flowering, fruiting and how tasty the fruit will be. Next, remove the “suckers”, (small branches that emerge from the joint created at the leaf stem and the main trunk on tomatoes). This will help create more accessible locations for future fruits and prevent the sprawl created by lower suckers taking energy from the upper branches. Make sure you soil, whether in-ground or in a container, has been supplemented with calcium. Calcium is critical to fruit development. The lack of calcium shows itself in Blossom-end Rot, a black rotten patch that forms at the blossom end (bottom) of the tomato or pepper fruit. Good sources of calcium are garden lime or limestone, and a product called Tomato Maker. If you still get Blossom-end Rot on your fruit, it can be quickly corrected by spraying the leaves with a fast-absorbing calcium spray that we sell as Rot-Stop. Early summer is the time to be on the lookout for Blight, a fungus that starts on the lowest branches, turning them yellow at first and then they die. The blight quickly moves upward, doing the same thing to other branches until it reaches the top. Start spraying a garden fungicide that if effective on blight, such as Chlorothinil (formerly known as Daconil), or an organic fungicide, such as Serenade® or Garden Sulfur. Remember, it is important to start before the signs of the disease appear, as prevention works far better than trying to cure it when it has already started. Lastly, water you tomato and pepper plants deeply and thoroughly, allowing the soil to dry out between watering.  Keeping the soil moist with too frequent waterings will give you shallow roots and excess green growth, at the expense of fruiting. Check your plants at least every other day, if not daily. This way, you will be able to detect problems at an early stage when they are most able to be resolved.

Here’s hoping that your salsa bowl remains full and delicious throughout the summer.

More Articles:

•Controlling Caterpillars

•The right way to mulch

•Moon Gardens

•Grubs are active under your lawn