Tomato Notes. Part 1

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

The time is approaching when our tomato seedlings will go to their place under the sun to please us with beautiful, tasty and healthy fruits. Let's remember the simple rules that will help deliver it to the garden safe and sound

Watering seedlings before shipping

If you do not want to break off the leaves or the stem of the seedlings on the way, then you should not water them on the day of transportation. Do this the day before. Then the seedlings will not be fragile and will safely reach the dacha.

Only when you reach the garden bed, thoroughly water the seedlings until the soil clod is completely soaked.

What to do with potless seedlings that you purchased, for example, from the market, and tightly packed in paper or canvas, and the road is long, given the traffic jams? Wet the roots or keep them dry?

Experienced people are advised to leave the roots dry. In such a situation, only small roots will suffer, capable of quickly recovering their strength. Wet roots, given the duration of transportation in a warm car (after all, June is outside), can get heatstroke and support. In such a situation, large roots suffer, which require more time and effort to recover. That is, wet roots during long-term transportation will postpone the harvest time to a later date.

Container for transportation

We stock up on cardboard boxes, in which we put pots with seedlings tightly to each other. You can not put the pots vertically, but put them in a box in a horizontal position.

We also put potless seedlings horizontally in a box.

The use of plastic bags for transportation, in which the seedlings are hermetically sealed, leads to the formation of high humidity inside the bag. After all, leaves in a warm and closed space will begin to evaporate moisture, which can provoke seedling disease. Therefore, we leave plastic bags for other things.

Determinant and indeterminate varieties

Unfortunately, the science of plants originated outside the Russian expanses, and therefore we now have to break our language and strain our memory in order to understand all the intricacies of growing plants on our land plots, reading difficult to pronounce words.

In order for these words to be better fixed in the head, let's try to draw an analogy with more familiar options for their use. For those who often fly by air, the word "terminal" is familiar from the room, which is the final destination in a given place, before the plane takes off from the ground, taking you out of this city.

That is, "terminal" or"

terminant"Talk about"

limit"," Restriction ".

Prefix"

de Turns a word into an adjective, indicating that the stem

determinant tomato varieties has

limited growth … As soon as this variety acquires 3-10 inflorescences, its stem stops growing. In super-determinant specimens, this happens much earlier, after the appearance of 1-2 flower clusters.

The prefix"

in »Gives the word a negative meaning. It turns out that

indeterminate varieties

do not set limits for growth stems, and therefore, in film greenhouses, they grow up to 2 meters in height, delighting with large leaves and openwork of the bush, and in capital greenhouses, the stems grow 3 times longer. The vegetable grower has to arrange a special horizontal trellis for such stems in order to more conveniently place the giants.

Tomato stepsons

Tomato's stepchildren are called shoots that form in the axils of the leaves of the main stem. They are also called lateral shoots. On the stepchildren, as well as on the stem, flower brushes are formed, which increase the yield of tomatoes.

Now it will become clearer to the reader why we have been dealing with the terminology for so long and tediously. And we did this in order to understand when you can expect the appearance of flower brushes on the stepsons of different varieties of tomato.

Determinant varieties need to complete their full life cycle faster, so flower brushes appear on stepchildren after the first or second leaf.

Indeterminate varieties are in no hurry with the harvest, forming flower clusters after 4-5 leaves.

Under the first inflorescence of the stem, in the axil of the leaf, the strongest stepson is formed. On determinant varieties, a second stem is formed from it.