July 21 Column: Tomato Care

For this week’s garden column, I wrote about tomato care. I felt it was important to discuss what we gardeners need to be doing for our tomato plants this time of year, so they grow their very best. You can read it in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review: Proper staking, consistent watering key to best tomatoes.

How are your plants doing so far? I have a couple of cherry tomatoes that are almost ripe, but that’s about it at this point. Of course, I am dreaming of harvesting as many as possible very soon! (I’ll bet you are, too)

This year, I’m growing ‘Gilbertie’ paste tomatoes, ‘Chef’s Choice Orange’ beefsteak-type tomatoes (if you like eating tomato sandwiches during the summer, THIS is the tomato for you!), ‘Skyway’ slicing tomatoes, and a ‘Goodhearted’ cherry tomato plant from Proven Winners that I’m trialing in my garden.

This is the first year in a long time that I haven’t grown ‘Sungold’ cherry tomatoes, which are absolutely the BEST cherry tomatoes on this planet. But I just ran out of room in my garden, since decided to try a couple of new tomato cultivars. That’s the ‘Gilbertie’ and ‘Skyway’ I mentioned above. Our friend, Steve Cole, recommended them to me and it’s always nice to try new things, right?

In my column, I mentioned blossom-end rot. I thought you might like to see photos of what this nasty problem looks like. (it’s not pretty, is it?) The primary cause of blossom-end rot is stress to the plants due to irregular/infrequent watering. As I mentioned in my column, research has shown that it doesn’t really help to add calcium or eggshells to the soil of the bed. Just keep the plants well-watered and they should do great.

For this week’s “Everyone Can Grow a Garden” video, the topic is summertime garden tasks. There are so many different things we need to be doing this time of year so I thought you might enjoy tagging along and, perhaps, learning something new. I hope you will enjoy it as I really had fun putting it together, as you’ll probably be able to tell!

Here it is: