START NOW FOR EARLY TOMATOES

Press, Volume C, Issue 29535, 9 June 1961, Page 8

START NOW FOR EARLY TOMATOES

The most expensive tomatoes to buy are the early crop. Fuel costs incurred in raising them to maturity are quite high. Nevertheless, if you think the expenditure is worth while, you can have the satisfaction of telling your local greengrocer you have fruit before he has’ Yoiir procedure varies with when you want to pick. It you are willing to spend a good deal of money in heating your glasshouse you can plant out now. buying plants which were raised about late March. The expense is generally too high, however, except for commercial growers. and most persons adopt the compromise of later planting—and, of course, of later picking, when fruit is not quite so dear. Seed sown now will produce plants fit to plant out in mid-August, and these will start cropping by the end of October or early November. Prices are still reasonably high then, although not so high as the earliest planting which will start to produce in late August or September. For satisfactory seed raising you need a glasshouse which can provide a temperature of about 55 degrees F. at night, and preferably one which has bottom heat as well. Seedlings germinate much more quickly when they have adequate heat. Seed should be sown in a sterilised soil mixture and John Innes mixture has been proved very suitable. An ounce of seed contains about 8000 seeds, and a rough guide to space is that each plant needs about 2J square feet, so the average home garden glasshouse only needs two or three dozen plants at the outside. There’s no •need to scatter the seeds thickly —in fact it’s better not to—and the best results are obtained when seedlings are pricked off into 3J or 4-inch pots as soon as they are fit to handle, and then grown to planting-out size in these. The results are far better than from plants raised in seed boxes to planting-out size. In trials which John Glazebrook and I have conducted at the College we find tl\at early yields from pot-raised planks are by far the best—often double those from other methods. This is an important feature when you think that the first truss or so of fruit is the best when it comes to actual market returns, too. The differences caused by treatment in the early days of life could bq thought to be insignificant, but nothing is further from the truth with the tomato.