Must-know basic tips for growing tomatoes

Don't crowd
If you are starting tomatoes from seed, be sure to give the seedlings room to branch out. Close conditions inhibit their growth, so transplant them as soon as they get their first true leaves and move them into 4" pots about 2 weeks after that.
Light
Tomato seedlings will need either strong, direct sunlight or 14-18 hours under grow lights. Place the young plants only a couple of inches from florescent grow lights. Plant your tomatoes outside in the sunniest part of your vegetable plot.
Fan
It seems tomato plants need to move and sway in the breeze, to develop strong stems. Provide a breeze by turning a fan on them for 5-10 minutes twice a day.
Heat
Tomatoes love heat. Cover the planting area with black or red plastic a couple of weeks before you intend to plant. Those extra degrees of warmth will translate into earlier tomatoes.
Bury
Bury tomato plants deeper than they come in the pot, all the way up to a few top leaves. Tomatoes are able to develop roots all along their stems. You can either dig a deeper hole or simply dig a shallow tunnel and lay the plant sideways. It will straighten up and grow toward the sun. Be careful not to drive your pole or cage into the stem.
Mulch
Mulch after the ground has had a chance to warm up. Mulching does conserve water and prevents the soil and soil born diseases from splashing up on the plants, but if you put it down too early it will also shade and therefore cool the soil. Try using plastic mulch for heat lovers like tomatoes and peppers.
Remove
Once the tomato plants are about 3' tall, remove the leaves from the bottom 1' of stem. These are usually the first leaves to develop fungus problems. They get the least amount of sun and soil born pathogens can be unintentionally splashed up onto them. Spraying weekly with compost tea also seems to be effective at warding off fungus diseases.
Pinch and Prune
Pinch and remove suckers that develop in the crotch joint of two branches. They won’t bear fruit and will take energy away from the rest of the plant. But go easy on pruning the rest of the plant. You can thin leaves to allow the sun to reach the ripening fruit, but it’s the leaves that are photosynthesizing and creating the sugars that give flavor to your tomatoes.
Water
Water deeply and regularly while the plants are developing. Irregular watering, (missing a week and trying to make up for it), leads to blossom end rot and cracking. Once the fruit begins to ripen, lessening the water will coax the plant into concentrating its sugars. Don’t withhold water so much that the plants wilt and become stressed or they will drop their blossoms and possibly their fruit.
Tomatoes
Determinate type tomatoes tend to set and ripen their fruit all at one time, making a large quantity available when you’re ready to make sauce. You can get indeterminate type tomatoes to set fruit earlier by pinching off the tips of the main stems in early summer.

How To Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes.
Do you want to get inside Secrets To Doubling, Even Trebling Tomato Yield. How To Grow Fabulous Tomatoes?
Just got myself a copy of How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes. Certainly a "must have" for anyone wanting to grow healthy tomato plants. Written by a plant nutrition and disease specialist who is an expert advisor to professional growers and horticulturists, it's jam packed with all sorts of great info, including 260 colour photos. It contains a wealth of information on soil preparation, growing in pots and greenhouses, staking, irrigation, nutrition, disease control and pest control. It also has a section on organic growing and growing by the moon phases. It comes with a CD which contains a huge database of 1300 varieties, plus 4 extra bonus files. Highly recommended!- available as an ebook for instant download or in glossy hard cover format, delivered by airmail. Here's the link How to grow juicy tomatoes

My blogspot: I love gardening