Growing Tomatoes – How to Stop an Earwig Party on Your Tomato Plants
By Diane Palmer

Tomato Plants suffer from pests, just like any other plant in your garden. But personally, I found Earwigs to be the biggest pain.

They love to eat the leaves of a tomato plant, and if there are enough of them, this can kill the plant. If you are just battling a few, then, picking them off by hand may work.

But most earwigs, tend to form a crowd, and head into your tomato garden between 2 and 4 am for their buffet snack. Some are brazen enough to eat during the daylight as well, but the night is their perfect setting for some midnight snacking.

Here is what worked for me. If you are a beer drinker, then this is good for you and the tomato garden!. Earwigs love yeast, and guess what is in the beer?. Yeast!

You can do this a few ways, you can pour some beer in a tinfoil pie plate and leave it in the garden overnight. The earwigs are attracted to the yeast and fall in. This will get rid of quite a few.

But if you have a windy area, like me, then this might not work so well. You will wake up to pie plates everywhere and beer spray! Find a container you can bury, or better yet, buy beer in cans, drink about 1/2 of the beer, then bury the beer can, leaving about 1 inch of the top of the can sticking out of the ground.

The earwigs will crawl into the can. Make sure you have finished your watering of your tomato plants, then place the can. Every couple of days, replace the can with a new batch of beer.

So, now you get to enjoy the tomato garden even more, as you will now need to drink a 1/2 beer, or have a party if there are a few rows of tomato plants that need to be protected. You will be happy and so will your tomatoes!

click here for tips on growing the best tomatoes on the street. Article and website by Diane Palmer

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Diane_Palmer
http://EzineArticles.com/?Growing-Tomatoes—How-to-Stop-an-Earwig-Party-on-Your-Tomato-Plants&id=2525908

fresh juicy tomatoes straight from the garden to the dining table

When you are just starting out with your own vegetable gardening, a wise choice is to include tomatoes in your choice of plants because they are one of the best plants for a beginner to try his or her hand with. Strictly speaking of course tomatoes are not vegetables they are actually a fruit, but most people categorize them as a vegetable and they are a classic ingredient for a lovely summer salad. There really isn’t anything nicer than having your own home grown tomatoes sitting freshly picked on your plate.

Tip Number 1 – correct spacing

Always leave enough space between your tomato plants when you plant them, a common mistake of a newbie gardener is to place the plants too close together. The plants then end up fighting for everything, nutrients from the soil, sunlight and water. Far better to leave enough space and let them prosper in adequate space even if that means having a few less plants.

Tip Number 2 – warm soil

Warm soil, anyone who has grown tomatoes in a hanging planter will probably have noticed slightly better yields from the plants than when they are planted in a normal garden, providing attention is paid to all the other aspects of growing tomatoes of course, and the reason for this is that the soil is warmed slightly by the sun in a way that normal ground in a standard garden isn’t. What you can do however is to create that same affect by placing black plastic sheeting over the ground and using the thermal heating effect that results to warm the soil.

Tip Number  3 – plenty of sunshine

Tomato plants need a minimum of 6 hours full sunlight a day and some people would recommend up to 10 hours of sunshine. Whichever camp you fall in, it is clear that a good location needs to be selected where the plants can get the required amount of sun.

Tip Number 4 – prepare the soil

You need to prepare the soil for where you are going to plant your tomatoes with a nitrogen rich fertilizer, compost and mulch. The mulch will help with water retention and the compost fertilizer mix will provide the much needed nutrients that are particularly required when the fruit starts to appear.

Tip Number 5 -proper watering of tomatoes

Watering, not too much and not too little. You should aim for a happy balance where the plants neither dry out or are absolutely drenched in water, a moist root ball is a happy root ball and this will allow the nutrients to be absorbed that are required to produce the tomato’s fruit.

Always remember that you are not growing tomatoes for the supermarkets, if they turn out a little less than perfect now and then, don’t beat yourself up over it, they will probably still taste great and there are other alternatives for the ones that don’t get served fresh, for example making tomato chutney is a brilliant way to preserve some of your tomatoes for outside of the normal growing season.