Gardening Hacks : On Planting Tomatoes and Other Nightshade Plants

Do you live in a place where it is always wet and mostly cold?

Have you ever wanted to grow your own tomatoes and just don't know what to do?

Have you ever grown tomatoes but in the end your tomato plant did not grow well or its leaves started turning brown and the leaves of the other plants around it turned brown, too?

snack tomatoes

I know how frustrating that feels. On my first years here, I wanted to grow my own tomatoes and had a hard time. I knew the basics of growing tomatoes like:

1. Plant the tomato seeds right after you scrape them off the fruit.
2. Plant in a loam soil and water a lot.
3. The best planting time is February so you could maximize benefiting from the fruits. Later than that means later harvest and the weather condition by then won't be ideal anymore.
4. Use compost and water your baby tomato plants a lot.
5. Water only the soil not the whole plant.
6. Make sure to place your pots or plants where it is sunny.

If you know the game Plants Vs. Zombies - plants there need plenty of sun to grow right? That's the very same thing you need to make sure your tomato plants have.

These were my tomato plants back then, yes, I just grew them on containers.

I did all these basics but most of the time, either my tomato plants just grew too much leaves but not much fruits or they start growing mildew and soon died.

"What was I doing wrong?" I thought.

For years, either we had too late a harvest or too many wasted tomatoes that didn't manage to ripen anymore just because mildew had already gotten into them.

This year, I joined a public garden and there I learned how to plant tomatoes properly.

I didn't know that tomatoes should not be planted in the open air. Not just tomatoes but every nightshade vegetables like ..

Jalapenos

Paprika

Potatoes , eggplants and many more...

If you do and you live in a place like The Netherlands where it's always cold, humid and raining the tomato plants would just not do very well. The worst part is it could spread a fungus called phytophthora. Tomatoes and other night shade plants can easily catch phytophthora and spread a contagion to any plant around them. It's a fungus that causes root rot . The symptoms are wilting tops and browning of leaves then formation of mildew. It happens when tomatoes get exposed to too much humidity. The fungus come from the soil and spreads fast due to the wetness in the environment.
I put sand on top of the soil where I planted tomatoes to keep it dry. The sand drains the water and stays dry on top so this year, there wasn't any mildew on my nightshade plants at all.

This year, since both my green houses were full, I've improvised another one just to salvage my tomato plants right after I heard that it should actually not be planted in open air. I built this using the old greenhouse foundation, a roll of transparent trash bags and staples. It just cost me - 3 euro. . I just stapled the transparent trash bags and formed it with the old greenhouse's pillars and left a slit for ventilation.

This is what it looks like.

It is also important that the leaves of any nightshade plants don't touch or overlap each other like what happened to these tomatoes I've planted before.

Suckers or stems that grew between the main branch and a leaf stem should be plucked off. They would use too much energy from your plant and prevent it from fruiting a lot. You could plant them in another pot and just water a lot. Let them soak in water for some days and they will eventually grow roots and pot once they started rooting.

That's it and you're good to go.

I'm growing snack tomatoes,

Roma tomatoes,

cherry tomatoes

jalapenos, and paprika in there.

It's as warm as that of a sauna on sunny days in there. The heat speeds up the ripening of the tomatoes.

These were our first harvests and still counting.

Now isn't the best time to plant tomatoes. It's time to harvest them, instead. Now is the best time to collect seeds of different kinds of tomatoes. Dry them and in February soak them in lukewarm water for a day, throw whatever floats and stuff whatever stays at the bottom in a pot. Good luck!

If you happen to know any other tips that could be helpful in growing nightshades, please feel free to write that down on the comment. SHARING IS CARING!

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