What do you do to prepare your tomato bed?

[travis]

I grow in raised beds and containers.

For the raised beds, basically in late winter I pour on the homemade mix of composted forest products, manure, a small amount of sand and some clean clay loam if I can get it. This is tilled into the existing mix, adding about 3 pounds 10-10-10 or similar per 100 square feet of bed surface, mulched heavily with straw and planted with a handful of bone meal in the planting hole, plants watered in with fish emulsion and epsom salts, sometimes using a soluable flower fertilizer instead.

Pots are filled with same mix but using time release fertilizer rather than the typically 10-10-10 granulated. Straw stuff atop the pots because the clay soil in the mix usually has some weed seeds that come free with that stuff.

In between crops and in late fall I might add any available lawn waste like grass clippings and chipped leaves directly to the beds as filler. Be careful with lawn waste that it does not contain typical herbicides you may have used.

Really that's about it for me.

Oh, I noticed you said something about fish heads in the planting hole. I'd never put fish heads or any other kind of garbage in my garden during a growing season because all that's going to do is attract savangers like raccoons to dig up your transplants.

[huxter09]

Here in Australia ,we have a huge problem with an invasive exotic introduced fish ,the European Carp .It has wiped out huge areas of native fish stocks by eating the young and muddying the water making it difficult for the natives to breed .

And the solution is to catch them and use them in the garden as they are too muddy to eat. I use them straight out of the river ,dug into garden beds but for others there is a fantastic product called "Charlie Carp" ,a plant food solution made out of emulsified fish ! Stinks to high heaven but does wonders for my toms .Maybe there is something like that in the Northern Hemisphere ?

[Worth1]

In answer to the original question, “What do you do to prepare your tomato bed”?
I fluff the pillows and pull back the covers, for freeze protection I will put on an extra blanket as it is going to get into the teens tonight.

Good Night,
Worth

[disneynut1977]

In answer to the original question, “What do you do to prepare your tomato bed”?
I fluff the pillows and pull back the covers, for freeze protection I will put on an extra blanket as it is going to get into the teens tonight.

I think Worth, 1 of my most favorite things about reading on T'Ville is your comments.

I still chuckle a bit with the Okra thing.





Melissa1977

[b54red]

As someone who has been gardening for over 30 years and fishing for much longer, I no longer add fish waste to my garden beds except during the winter to allow them time to break down before planting time. I tried using them in the holes where tomatoes were being planted for years and compared the results. The tomatoes planted over the fish were usually smaller and less productive. I thought this might have been a fluke so I tested it out over several years with the same poor results. I don't know whether it was the rotting in the ground or whether it was taking needed nitrogen out or what, but the results were noticeably poorer for tomatoes with the fish.
I still use fish emulsion fertilizer with good results and always add egg shells to my beds along with compost, cottonseed meal, alfalfa pellets, basic slag, and water saving crystals.

[b54red]

Originally Posted by mensplace

Re the soil food web and deep soil preparation. All that I have studied stresses that any deep disturbance of the soil such as tilling and double digging destroys much of the life that exists and it may take a few years afterwards to restore that equilibrium. This is leading me to think that building raised beds, especially in heavy clay soils may well be preferable. I have seen double digging that resulted in perfect little ponds of clay when the rains come since those beds, like a swimming pool, are still surrounded by heavy clay walls causing the double dug or tilled portions to readily fill with water. What then, is the best approach to not kill the worms, soil web balance, existing life forms and still best utilize the various soil amendments to best advantage? OR, is this really a concern so that even in clay...heavy clay, one should dig down? The plus of digging has supposedly been the loosening and aeration of the soil. Making a beautiful bed of clay particles with all of the soil almost like a powder can also have exactly the wrong end result when the rains come and it all converts to something like concrete. Even if you add a LOT of humus and other amendments, is the damage to the food web really an issue.? How long would it take the many life forms to recover? Seems a foot thick or deepr layer atop the soil may well be preferable?

My garden is located on a clay knob with less than 2 inches of topsoil. After fighting the hardpan for a few years I built raised beds and it took years to get the clay level down to the point where things don't pack bad after a rain. If I was starting over again on the same spot I would not have tilled down into the clay; but instead would have added more composted manure and composted leaves etc. I also try not to till too often because it will cut down on the worm population much more than turning with a fork or spade. When I have a large amount of manure or other organic mater I will till because it mixes it so well. The rest of the time I turn with a spade or fork to mix in my cottonseed meal or alfalfa pellets. My worm population is now so high that when I pull up an old plant I usually have a handful of wigglers falling off the roots. The only place in my beds with really low worm concentrations is in the areas where there is still too much clay or in a couple of spots that are too sandy. Turning the beds with a fork doesn't seem to dampen the population of worms at all. If anything they seem to come back with a vengeance because of the food I am adding when turning the soil.

[whistler]

A guy at work (he's a Master Gardener) told me about something called the Great Missouri Tomato Hole. I can't find anything about it on the web, but this is what he described:

Dig a 3' long by 3' wide by 4' deep hole. Place a watering pipe in each of the 4 corners. Fill the bottom 18" with either tightly packed corn cobs or tightly packed straw. Fill the next 18" with tightly packed manure. Then fill to the top with 60% top soil and 40% manure. Plant your tomatoes.

Water through the pipes to start the decomposition of the bottom layer. The resulting bottom heat is supposed to really get the tomatoes growing like crazy.

I plan to test this method this year... I'll let you know how it goes, especially compared to the 16 raised beds I just finished building and filling with a mixture of mushroom compost, peat and vermiculite (mixing soil in a truck bed - talk about a terrific shoulder and arm workout!!).

[huxter09]

My tomatoes this season are planted with a fish head in each hole ,a handful of worm castings ,some old sheep manure as well as banana skins (for pottasium ) and egg shells ( for calcium) dug in a trench next to the toms .The ground was well prepared with home made compost and old manures during the winter .So far in a cool summer , I have had very few ripe tomatoes but the flavour ,vigour and health of the plants is terrific .I usually expect a good crop by Xmas day then toms through to about end of March .

[Tom C zone 4/5]

When I had a sandy bed I did double dig to put high carbon stuff oh like brush into the bottom of trenches. I did it in hopes of creating a large enough sponge, that might retain water. By default I wound up making raised beds.

On clay I start out with a border and build up on top of hard dense soil.

Either way liberal amounts of leaves and or manure yearly both spring and fall. Only in really cold sites like northeast kingdom in VT did I have to pull composting leaves back in the spring so that soil warmed.

[huxter09]

Report from an Australia suffering extensive major flooding in which 30 people died ,never-ending near-tropical rainfall then a Cat 5 Cyclone that had winds of 345kms per hour ,which destroyed several towns in Queensland .It has been so humid my garden is getting wilt and sooty mould .But my toms are still producing ,smaller types being much better than larger fruit.And I have a local scourge ,the fruit fly ,a small wasp-like fly that lays eggs into fruit in humid seasons ,which turn into maggots that consume and pollute the fruit .So far found in my toms,peaches ,apricots and nectarines --very disappointing so far this year .So much for Oprah coming downunder and turning us into the number one US tourist destination .. Storms ,hurricanes ,floods then bushfires in the West --its all happened since she left !!! -it all makes one look at climate change with a new apprehension .

[attml]

Please bear in mind that I am still the FNG and most of the folks here on the board have forgotten more than I know. When I planted my garden last year I dug about an 18 hole, filled it with miracle grow soil, miracle grow tomato fertalizer, some organic garden lime and a little saltwater fish tank crushed coral for calcium. This was the first real year that I didn't just bury my plants in the native soil and I had a really good year.

I have considered putting fish in the hole (like the indians showed the early settlers) before adding soil and or adding manure but I guess it is a psychological thing with me- that those things would affect the taste of the tomatoes? I plan on adding some leaves in the hole this year when I plant out and possibly a few other organic things that I can get my hands on. Sometimes we have large quanities of seaweed wash up on our beach, but for now that is about it.

Mark

[Hilde]

I don't till, I just add a layer of compost on the top. I can get compost very cheap from a municipal compost facility.

[husker nana]

attml --I have considered putting fish in the hole (like the indians showed the early settlers) before adding soil and or adding manure

I read that you could add a chopped up banana peel and crushed eggshell right into your tomato hole when planting. Said that the banana peel will break down fast.

These are things that I put in my compost bin. I think I'm going to go ahead and add them right into the tomato hole on some to see what happens.

[b54red]

I would love to not have to till my raised beds but it is becoming more and more of a necessity due to the invasion of tree roots into the beds. The worst are the small wire like roots from a nearby pecan tree. If I skip tilling, the nearest bed becomes a near solid mass of small tree roots and nothing grows good because the tree just sucks the nutrients out faster than I can add them.

[Dewayne mater]

Mensplace. I'm interested in learning more about the not disturbing the microbes, worms, etc. theory. My natural soil is 100% heavy clay, some call it caliche. In beds I've amended I dug down a foot or more and find no worms whatsoever, but perhaps there is microbic abundant life? Then, when I amended with an expanded shale product, lots of compost and some mulch, withing a season, the earth is teeming with worms, it is much fluffier and I think that means more oxygen is getting into the soil. My WAG about that was that the existing soil was so dense and lacking in nutrients that it was relatively devoid of life, but by amending the soil, the combination of clay and compost, etc. really revived the soil. If that isn't what happened, I'm wondering what accounts for more life in the amended soils?

I should point out that the amended beds also drained much better and the tomatoes grew much larger and were much more prolific. So, my take was that improving the soil was a very good thing in my case.

Dewayne Mater.