Well-known gardener Oktyabrina Ganichkina has been sharing her experience of growing vegetables for many years. In spring, gardeners are most often interested in picking seedlings and feeding them.
Basic tips for picking tomatoes:
- Ganichkina recommends pricking tomato seedlings twice. This will help avoid pulling the bushes and form a powerful root. This is relevant for growing tomatoes in the central zone, when planting in open ground is possible only in June.
- The first transplant is carried out at the stage of 1–2 true leaves into small pots with a volume of 200–300 ml.
- Before diving, the tomatoes are watered generously with water and Agricola complex seedling fertilizer.
- The water temperature for watering seedlings should be at room temperature. Too warm water causes heat-loving tomatoes to become very stretched.
- Ganichkina recommends using good quality purchased soil specifically for tomato seedlings or universal soil.
First pick
- Pour the earthen mixture into the pot and press a hole with a stick.
- Moisten the soil generously with the same water and fertilizer.
- Using a stick or fingers, carefully pry the bush from the box with seedlings and transfer it to the pot without disturbing the earthen coma.
- Using your fingers, dig the tomato down to the middle of the stem and gently press down the soil around the root.
- After 2 weeks, the plants need to be fed with Agricola for seedlings or other complex mineral fertilizer.
Second pick
The second dive is carried out after 3–4 weeks.
Two hours before transplanting, you need to cut off 2-3 lower leaves with scissors, leaving small stumps. With each picking of tomatoes, Ganichkina recommends deepening the bushes to form new lateral roots. To prevent the leaves from rotting in the soil, they are removed.
It is better to take pots with a volume of 2–2.5 liters. You can plant 1–2 bushes in each.
- A handful of soil mixture is poured onto the bottom.
- Plants are carefully removed from small pots, preserving the root system if possible, and placed in a new pot.
- Using your hand, gradually sprinkle and crush the tomato root until the pot is ⅔ full.
- There should be room in the pot for future addition of soil.
- The transplanted seedlings are watered with settled water at room temperature.
After 2 weeks, add soil mixture, leaving 2-3 cm from the top edge of the pot.Tomatoes are fed with Agricola with a small addition of an organic mixture (Humate or similar). It is useful to additionally carry out foliar feeding with the same composition. According to Ganichkina’s advice, it is better to start spraying each bush from the underside of the leaves.
Preparing for transplantation into open ground
Oktyabrina Ganichkina recommends starting preparations for transplantation by hardening off the seedlings. When the temperature outside rises above 14–15 ⁰C during the day, pots of tomatoes can be taken out onto the open balcony for a short time. For the first days, it is better to cover the plants with a thin covering material to avoid burns from direct sunlight.
A week before the planned planting in the ground, tomatoes need to be fed with complex mineral fertilizers. It is useful to treat tomatoes with the preparation “Bud”; this stimulates abundant flowering.
The day before transplanting into the ground, cut off the lower 1–2 leaves, freeing the stem for burial. The “wounds” must have time to weather before contacting the ground to prevent rotting. If there are two bushes in a pot, you can carefully separate them. Or plant them in pairs, but when tying the bushes to a support, form them slightly to the side of each other.
After planting, it is advisable to cover the tomatoes with plastic wrap for the first time until stable warm and dry weather is established.
