How To Take Care of a Tomato Plant

How To Take Care of a Tomato Plant

Tomato Plants are a common fruit that many people grow in warmer climates. They are tall plants that sprout into tomatoes. However, did you know that you could grow some tomato plants inside of your home as well? Here are some tips about growing tomato plants inside your home, including how to make sure a tomato plant survives, the proper amounts of water and sunlight needed, and more.

 

How Do you Maintain Tomato Plants?

You can maintain tomatoes indoors, but they can only do so under the right conditions and with specific types of tomatoes. For example, more petite tomatoes, such as Grape and Plum, are best suited for indoor pots. You usually want indeterminate tomatoes, as they are the kind that grows on vines, and are ideal for a household than bush plants, aka determinate tomatoes.

 

Indeterminate plants are usually the kind you want to have at home, rather than determinate. For instance, Grape and Plum are two tomato varieties that can grow faster than most and indeterminate tomatoes (grow on vines). So, when looking for tomato seeds, an indeterminate tomato is better to choose from in this scenario.

 

How to Protect Your Tomato Plant?

Protecting your tomato plant from airborne and bacterial diseases is critical to having a happy and healthy plant, whether they are inside or not. Infections can cause your tomato plant to die if not treated right away or prevented. To try and help your plant survive, you can try and use a bacterial spray such as Serenade before your plant can get infected.

 

However, if it’s already infected, you can still use Serenade. It would help if you sprayed Serenade on your tomato plants once during the early morning or in the late evening a day. Having a consistent schedule spraying your tomato plants can help fix the problem since you won’t forget to do this.

 

Finally, air circulation is necessary to help keep the plant’s stems strong enough to hold the weight of the tomatoes as they grow. Air circulation (or even a fan on low if your plant is indoors) should be on the plant daily.

 

What if the Stems Star Falling Over the Base of the Plant?

If your tomatoes start getting heavy that the stem begins falling over, then staking is easy to keep the plant upright. Tie the plant’s main stem to the stake with a zip tie or some cotton yarn, and it should remain upright. Tomato cages can protect the plant from falling over, but this might be cumbersome depending on how much room you have on your window sill or wherever you are keeping your tomato plant.

 

What Does a Potted Tomato Plant Need to Survive?

Garden soil will not work for potted plants and is one of the many reasons that people end up killing the potted tomato plants they own. So, make sure that you use potting soil instead. Using potting soil mixed with a fertilizer such as miracle grow will help the tomato plants last longer.

 

Another way to keep your tomato plants alive is to constantly fertilize the plants more than once when you start growing them. However, continually using a large amount of mulch is hard to do in a potted plant. Some examples of good potting solutions are slow-release granular organic fertilizers and liquid and water-soluble fertilizers.

 

What is an Advantage of Growing an Indoor Tomato Plant?

One of the advantages of growing an indoor tomato plant is that you can avoid the problem of having aphids, hornworms, whiteflies, and other tomato pests that can ruin your plant if they were outside. Aphids thrive in warm temperatures, and having a tomato plant in the house should keep those tomato pests away, which is helpful.

 

How Much Sun Does a Tomato Plant Need?

Tomato plants grow in different stages, which means a different amount of sunlight is necessary at other times. For example, the germination stage will need 5-6 hours of moderate daylight. Not getting this amount of the sun might lead to the plant not surviving or growing the way it should.

 

During the fruiting phase, you want to give the tomatoes about 9-11 hours of sunlight. Finally, you will need very little sunlight for the ripening stage since ripe tomatoes come from the plants’ very own nutrients.

 

How Much Sun Does a Potted Tomato Plant Need?

Potted tomato plants need at least 8 to 10 hours of sunlight for them to grow correctly. It will help if you put your tomato plants on a windowsill with sunlight for most of the daylight hours to get the appropriate amount of sunlight. However, make sure you monitor how much direct sun the plant receives to ensure it doesn’t get burn marks or dry out.

 

How Much Water Does a Tomato Plant Need?

Make sure that you water tomatoes regularly. Otherwise, the tomatoes will not have enough calcium inside them, resulting in blossom-end rot. One tip is to get a Soil Moisture Meter to let you know when to water your plant.

 

Tomato seedlings will need less water than when it is producing ripe fruit later on. The more mature the plant is, the more water you will need.

 

Do not overwater your plants as that gets rid of the various nutrients that the soil holds. Overwatering can then lead to late blight, a disease from being in damp environments for too long. Late blight appears on plants as tiny grey spots on tomato leaves.

 

Remember not to water the tomato leaves or the stem as it can lead to many plant diseases. To avoid this problem, you should only water the soil directly.

 

Why Are My Tomato Plans Leaves Turning Yellow?

Tomato leaves that are yellow or that are turning yellow are a warning sign something is wrong. The warning sign could be by disease, by you doing something wrong, or something else. Check out this helpful guide on how to combat yellow leaves on a tomato plant.

 

Conclusion

There is nothing better than taking a bite out of a freshly grown tomato that you developed. For city dwellers, or those with no area to grow a garden in their yard, having a potted tomato plant growing in their house is a great option. It just takes soil, water, and sun, along with some of the tips you have read in this post.

 

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