Hello and welcome to the Farm! My name is Laura and today I wanted to show you how to transplant a tomato. Tomatoes you can transplant a little bit differently than the normal transplants. So here you see, this is our bed of tomatoes. These are sun gold tomatoes, they’re cherry tomatoes. And you can see on in some of them we put a tomato cage. The tomato cage allows you to provide more support to the plant. So see here, we planted the tomatoes in the very center and as it grows, it’ll grow up and you could put the leaves out while the center stock stays in the middle and that gives it support. We also planted some on the outside and we plan on being able to use the cage to help support the ones on the outside as well. And if you don’t have access to tomato cages, you can use sticks as well. You can buy bamboo sticks from nurseries and tie the tomato to the stick.
So here’s my tomato. I’m going to start by digging a hole. Now tomatoes are different because you can plant tomatoes a lot deeper than the soil that’s in the container.
STEP 1:
Pinch off the lower leaves.
STEP 2:
Hold the base of the plant & tip it upside down (squeeze your container).
STEP 3:
Place the plant inside of the hole. As you can see, some of the stock will be under the soil. The tomato plants develop root hairs all along the stock so wherever you have soil covering the stem, the tomato will end up developing little roots. These roots help support the plant and help feed it the nutrients it needs.
STEP 4:
Push the soil back & tap down.
There you go! Now the tomato will have more support. It will be able to provide more roots for the tomato to help feed it the proper nutrients and to make more tomatoes for us. I hope you learned something about how to transplant a tomato and to give your tomatoes a better start for the season.