Gone Gardenin’ — Be the first on your block to have ripe, juicy tomatoes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/03/2018 (2838 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We will soon be able to plant tomato seeds — of all the plants gardeners start indoors the tomato ranks as the most popular. Tomato seeds are usually planted about six weeks before the last frost, meaning six weeks before you plant the seedlings into the garden.

Like most gardening rules, this one is perhaps also made to be broken — in some cases. Although I generally follow the six week rule, I tend to push the planting date up a bit if I want to have few tomato plants that will provide early tomatoes.

Greenhouses do this and when bedding plant season arrives the big tomato plants in large containers that were planted early are quickly snapped up by folks eager to harvest ripe tomatoes as early as possible. Although I don’t want plants quite that big, I do push the planting back a couple of weeks to let my “early tomatoes” get a head start.

Instead of trying to push all my tomatoes to ripen early, I concentrate my efforts on just a few plants to produce early ripe tomatoes. Usually I plant one plant of an early variety in the garden along with my other plants.

Most main crop tomatoes such as Fantastic, Beefsteak and Celebrity are rated over 70 days to ripe fruit. There are a few varieties, however that are rated below 50, one of them being Sub Arctic Maxi, and these tomatoes will produce ripe tomatoes a full two weeks before many other varieties.

Last year I seeded my early tomatoes the first week of April and the plants were just the right size when it came time to plant them outside. I put the seeding trays under the lights in my furnace room light garden where the temperature is quite warm.

The seedlings develop quickly in this environment once they emerge from the soil; they are not long getting their first set of true leaves. Since I only want a few early plants, I only have to deal with a half dozen seedlings.

I do not transplant my early tomatoes. I simply plant the seeds directly into square four inch pots that are quite deep. I plant two seeds in each pot and remove the weakest seedling from each pot.

I place the pots on south-facing sunroom windowsills. By early-May, depending on the weather, I put the plants outdoors inside a heated cold frame on the back patio — which has a southern exposure.

Being outside enables them to get lots of light so they do not get leggy. They are also perfectly hardened off when it comes time to plant them out.

For the past few years I have used a second approach to getting early tomatoes with good results. I continue to grow a couple of Sub Arctic Maxi, but I also use a variety called Tumbler, which is rated as a 48-day tomato.

Tumbler is a large cherry tomato, producing fruits about three centimetres in diameter — small enough to pop into your mouth as a snack but also large enough to cut into slices for use in a sandwich. I like to call it a multi-purpose tomato. All early varieties of tomatoes are determinate types, meaning they produce just so much vine and flowers and then they stop.

I mainly grow indeterminate varieties in the vegetable garden because I think they are more productive and I like the fact that they produce new fruit right up to the end of the season, thus ensuring a longer “tomato season.” Sub Arctic Maxi is a determinate variety.

When planting out time arrives, I plant my Tumbler tomato plants in a large terra cotta pot which is located on the back patio where it gets lots of sun and is sheltered from wind — a perfect spot for tomatoes. The container I use is a large one — about 60 cm in diameter — and I plant four Tumbler plants around the outside edge of the container and one in the centre.

I stake the plant in the center of the pot to encourage it into a more upright growth habit. As its name implies, Tumbler has a bit of a cascading growth habit and it does not harm the plants or impede their productivity to let them tumble over the edge of the container, but I like to have the center plant staked or all of the plant growth tends to topple over and be concentrated around the edge of the pot leaving the center of the container empty.

Perhaps a large variety such as Sub Arctic Maxi would perform in a large container just as well as Tumbler does. I have never tried them, nut I have successfully grown Tumbler in the ground.

Tomatoes grown in containers use a huge amount of water and when the plants are mature I find myself watering the pot almost every day during hot weather. I put a deep plastic saucer under the pot to give the plants an additional source of water.

I also use a 20-20-20 soluble fertilizer in the water later in the summer, after the slow release fertilizer added to the soilless mix when the plants are planted has been exhausted. Tomatoes are heavy feeders.

The big advantage of growing anything in a container is that containers are portable. If a cold night occurs or if there is a period of a couple of days of below 10 degree temperatures, I can move the container into the adjacent sunroom.

Tomatoes do not like to be chilled so I do not plant my main crop tomatoes into the vegetable garden until the night time temperatures are reliably above 10 degrees. Because of its sheltered location and the fact that I can move it indoors when I need to do so, I plant out my Tumbler tomatoes earlier than those that go into the vegetable patch.

Tumbler tomato plants develop very rapidly. They are sometimes in bloom when I plant them into the outdoor pot and soon after that they begin to develop fruits.

By the end of the first week in July we are eating fresh tomatoes from our Tumbler plants and the five plants in the container produce all the tomatoes we can use until the main crop tomatoes produce ripe fruit over a month later. Gradually the plants flag as their fruit is continually harvested, and by late August they are picked bare and the Tumbler plants are pulled up and the container is emptied.

The Tumbler tomatoes have served their purpose for another year — providing us with a steady supply of ripe tomatoes early in the season. If you want early tomatoes, you might like to try the variety Tumbler. I’ll bet you will like it.

Albert Parsons lives, writes, and gardens in Minnedosa.

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