Home Grown Tomatoes

This is the ultimate upside down tomato planter, which you don’t even need to buy, it tells you exactly how to make your own from a disused plastic bucket.

Couple of things I would note, don’t miss the use a metal handle tip and I would use a drill to take out the hole rather than using a Stanley knife as demonstrated, you could just loose a couple of fingers doing it that way. Other than that, this video says it all when it comes to making your own topsy turvy tomato planter.

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Tomatoes are relatively easy to grow but can be affected by many problems, most of which are generally related to being cultivated in the same soil year after year. Old re-used soil is the main source of tomato plants disease and can cause you to have a whole crop of rotten tomatoes in the blink of an eye.

There are different ways of dealing with this problem, no one wants horrible rotten tomatoes when they can have a nice juicy crop by taking a few sensible precautions. Clearly the easiest way to avoid diseased soil is to use fresh compost each year which you can achieve by either using a growbag or some other sort of container. Tomatoes will thrive in a standard 12″ plant pot as long as they are watered regularly and fed with a dilute liquid feed once or twice a week, particularly when the fruit starts to develop. Potassium supplements in the form of a high potassium tomato feed can aid the health and development of your plants and will be available from a garden center.

If you leave a space between the compost surface and the top of the pot, you can add more fresh compost as the plant develops and the compost shrinks.

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You can if you like extract the seeds from your own tomatoes, as demonstrated in the video link I have provided. Essentially once you have the seeds from tomatoes they are no different to any other garden seed and the process of propagation is much the same as for any other plant.

Beware of trying to grow from Hybrid tomatoes however, especially the F1 hybrids as they are notoriously difficult to grow from.

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