Fertilizing and Trimming Tomato Plants

So, we have an email here from Ann. ‘Two questions. Number one, my cucumber and tomato plants have a couple of leaves turning yellow. What should I do? Two, my tomato and green bean plants aren’t going. What can I do?’

Paired with a question here from Fred in North Canton, ‘my tomato plants are starting to get all yellow leaves, starting from the bottom up. Is that too much water? Are they getting too much water?’

That is usually a nitrogen sign of needing some fertilizer. So, I would recommend using a liquid fertilizer called GrowBig. It’s made by Fox Farms. It’s really good for vegetables, and it’s going to really help green up those leaves. But that’s most likely what’s happening.

It’s a liquid feed, so it’s going to be a quick release. You can do that even every other time you water. That’s going to help correct that. They’re very heavy feeders of nitrogen.

For the second question, the fertilizer will definitely help. A lot of that is just because of the weather and everything. Once we start getting some sun, that should change. I guess if you have vegetable gardens, I keep bringing up this old rain, but it probably wasn’t very helpful for that too, to a certain extent.

It helps with getting a good drink and everything. But at the same time, when it’s cooler like that, those temperatures that we’ve had and not having sunny, hot days, it does kind of slow the growth. But fertilizing will help. And yeah, if the sun comes out and warms up, it’ll really help.

The root system of these plants have grown pretty good. We don’t see that because it’s below the surface. But when it’s cool like this, you’re still developing root growth, even if the top of the plant’s not growing. But then once we get warm and sunny, really warm and sunny, then you have all these extra roots. You’ll see a significant amount of growth come in a short period of time when we have a cooler, wetter, cloudier spring like this.

You have to remember the first week of June we were seeing 50s as the high, and so we’re pretty much about two to three weeks behind where we’ve been in other years because of the cooler temperatures. It slows everything down. Now that the heat’s come on you’ll see everything kind of jump ahead and catch back up, but we may end up behind a little while.

We’re talking about veggie gardening here, and there’s a question about trimming tomatoes for a higher yield. 

It does depend on varieties of tomatoes, a lot of them do have those little offshoots off the main stem. There’s like a little node there that you would take off and that’s gonna help the plant get stronger at the base. The main stem gets stronger and taller.

But a lot of times with your cherry tomatoes and that kind of stuff, you can kind of trim off whatever’s going crazy, and it’s just going to keep on producing. So as far as the producing and stuff goes, most of the time fertilizing is gonna be your key.

Right now is a perfect time to be fertilizing, especially with a product like Grow Big. You want to be putting calcium into the soil right now because they’re gonna be starting to really grow and set their flowers, and they’re gonna be needing that calcium to set that fruit.

They are heavy feeders of calcium, and they suck that up in the soil very quickly, so it’s a good idea to put Cal Mag actually. It’s calcium and magnesium, those work with each other, but that is just a straight-up supplement that you would use alongside Grow Big.

If you haven’t staked your tomatoes I would do that now because they’re gonna start growing pretty quickly. I did notice at the garden center we’ve got the typical round tomato cages and the stakes, we also have a square one that can wrap around or take almost any shape you want. Each panel is 12 or 18 inches wide, but there’s four of them, so you could create a box around it.

A lot of times the regular tomato cages, the circular ones, It’s hard to get them on a plant that’s established already. This would be an incredible way to be able to add a cage to a tomato that’s already kind of too big.

They are a little costly, but they’re definitely something that is gonna last long and you can even use them long ways like a fence. They’re very versatile.

We all deal with it in the winter time. Where do you store that stuff? Well this thing folds flat, takes up literally almost no space in the garage or barn at all. Putting tomato cages away, I never know where to put them. Yeah, and these ones fold flat, just stack right up against the wall. They wouldn’t create any issues.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).