- 20 minutes ago
Want healthier tomato plants and a bigger harvest? These three tomato-growing secrets are the kind of practical tips professional gardeners often use, but rarely explain to home growers. The focus is on simple, useful methods that can help your tomatoes grow stronger and produce more fruit through the season.
Whether you garden in containers, raised beds, or a backyard plot, this gardening guide is built for everyday growers who want better results without complicated steps. It’s a helpful watch for anyone looking for tomato growing tips, vegetable garden advice, and easy ways to avoid common tomato problems.
If you enjoy home gardening videos, container gardening, raised bed gardening, and practical grow-your-own food advice, this tomato growing tutorial fits right in. It’s especially useful for gardeners searching for simple tomato care ideas, seasonal growing help, and harvest-focused garden tips.
Created for viewers looking for tomato growing secrets, gardening tips, grow tomatoes at home, vegetable gardening, and beginner-friendly home garden advice. A useful choice for anyone interested in practical tomato plant care, bigger harvests, and easy growing methods for containers, raised beds, or backyard gardens.
Whether you garden in containers, raised beds, or a backyard plot, this gardening guide is built for everyday growers who want better results without complicated steps. It’s a helpful watch for anyone looking for tomato growing tips, vegetable garden advice, and easy ways to avoid common tomato problems.
If you enjoy home gardening videos, container gardening, raised bed gardening, and practical grow-your-own food advice, this tomato growing tutorial fits right in. It’s especially useful for gardeners searching for simple tomato care ideas, seasonal growing help, and harvest-focused garden tips.
Created for viewers looking for tomato growing secrets, gardening tips, grow tomatoes at home, vegetable gardening, and beginner-friendly home garden advice. A useful choice for anyone interested in practical tomato plant care, bigger harvests, and easy growing methods for containers, raised beds, or backyard gardens.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Your tomato plant is loaded with fruit, the finest crop you have ever grown, and you are thrilled.
00:06And then, right at the peak, it just quits.
00:10Stops setting new fruit, stops growing, sits there ripening the load it has, and giving you nothing more for weeks.
00:19Near every home gardener has watched it happen and never known why.
00:23But the old growers knew, and they knew three simple things you do to a tomato through the season to
00:31keep it producing steady, right up to the frost, instead of loading up once and shutting down.
00:38Today, I am going to give you those three, quick, one after another, and I promise at least one of
00:44them will be new to you, and it may double how long your plants keep feeding you.
00:49I am Elias, and these are the through-the-season secrets, the things you do to a growing, fruiting tomato
00:57to keep it strong and bearing, which is a different matter from how you start it off.
01:03Folk are sold these as the tricks of the big commercial growers, but the truth is, they are old kitchen
01:10-garden wisdom, plain as day, once you know them.
01:13So let me hand them to you.
01:15Quick word before I go further.
01:17The old methods my family uses, there is more of it than fits in any one video.
01:24I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
01:29The book is the long version.
01:31If you want it, it is there.
01:33I will not mention it again.
01:36My father grew tomatoes that bore clear to the first hard frost when the neighbors had given up by August,
01:42and as a boy, I thought he had some secret.
01:45He did, but it was no secret at all, only that he tended his plants all season long, going down
01:53the rows of an evening with his snips, taking a little here, thinning a little there, reading each plant.
02:00A tomato is not a thing you plant and leave, Elias, he would say.
02:05It is a thing you keep in balance.
02:08I did not know what he meant then.
02:10I do now, and it is the whole of what I am about to show you.
02:14Now, to understand all three, you must first understand the one thing that runs under them, and here it is,
02:22the thing most folk never grasp about a tomato.
02:25A tomato plant lives in two minds at once, and it is forever tipping between them.
02:32One mind is the growing mind, making leaves and stem and root, building itself bigger.
02:39The other is the fruiting mind, making flowers and setting and ripening tomatoes.
02:45And here is the whole secret, that the plant has only so much strength, and it spends it on one
02:52mind or the other, and you want it kept in balance between the two.
02:57Let it go all to the growing mind, and you get a great leafy monster with hardly a tomato on
03:04it.
03:04But let it tip all the way over to the fruiting mind, loading up every tomato it can, and pouring
03:11everything into ripening them, and it stops growing.
03:14And once it has ripened that load, it has nothing left, and it quits.
03:20That shutting down you have seen is a plant that tipped all the way to fruiting and spent itself.
03:27So all three of these tricks are really one thing, keeping the plant balanced between growing and fruiting, so it
03:34never tips over and quits, but keeps steady at both all season.
03:39Hold that in your mind, and the three will make sense.
03:43The first trick is to take off the lower branches, a few each week, as the plant climbs.
03:49Now, folk gasp at this.
03:51Sure, you are wounding the plant, stripping off good leafy branches.
03:56But hear me.
03:57A tomato does not need every leaf it grows.
04:00Down at the bottom, below where the fruit is coming, those old lower branches are past their usefulness, shading nothing
04:08you need, and just draining strength that should go to the fruit up top.
04:12So once your plant is well up and fruiting, you take off about three of the lowest branches each week,
04:19working up from the ground as it grows taller, keeping the bottom of the stem bare and clean.
04:25And this does three good things at once.
04:29It keeps the plant from tipping into that leafy overgrowth, holding the balance.
04:34It opens up the crowded, damp base to the air and sun, which is the great preventer of the blights
04:40and mildews that start down low and creep up.
04:43And it makes your ripe tomatoes easy to see and pick.
04:47Now, here is the honest measure of it, that a tomato needs only about three good leafy branches above each
04:55cluster of fruit to feed that fruit, no more.
04:58So you can safely keep the plant to a dozen or so good branches up top and strip the rest
05:05below without ever starving it.
05:07Take three from the bottom each week, keep the base bare and airy, and you hold the balance and beat
05:15the disease both.
05:17And this goes hand in hand with another old bit of tending, the pinching of the suckers, those little shoots
05:24that spring up in the crooks where a branch meets the main stem.
05:28Left alone, they grow into whole extra stems and turn your plant into a crowded jungle that tips hard into
05:36leafy growth and shades its own fruit.
05:39So, many growers pinch most of them out while small, keeping the plant to one or two main stems, which
05:47keeps it open and airy and balanced toward fruiting.
05:52Between taking the lower branches and pinching the suckers, you keep a tomato from ever running away into a leafy
05:59tangle.
06:00The second trick surprises folk even more, and it is to pull off some of your tomatoes, thinning each cluster.
06:09When a cluster sets five or six little tomatoes, you pinch it back to just three or four.
06:15And I know, I know, it goes against every feeling in you to pull off good young fruit.
06:22But here is why it works, and it is that balance again.
06:27A plant carrying every last tomato it sets tips hard into the fruiting mind, straining to ripen that whole heavy
06:35load, and once it does, spent, it quits, that very shutting down we spoke of.
06:42But thin each cluster back to three or four, and the load is light enough that the plant keeps a
06:50little strength for growing, too, stays balanced, and so keeps setting new clusters and new fruit long after the loaded
06:59plant would have quit.
07:00So you trade a few little fruits now, for weeks more of steady bearing, and end with far more tomatoes
07:08overall, and bigger, better ones besides, for the three left on a cluster grow fatter than six crowded ones would.
07:18Now here is the honest and important caveat, so heed it.
07:23This thinning is for folk with a long, warm growing season, where the extra weeks of bearing pay off.
07:31If you are up in the short season north, where you only get a few weeks of ripe tomatoes anyway,
07:37do not thin, leave them all.
07:40For you want every tomato you can get in your short window, and the plant will not outlast the season
07:47regardless.
07:49So thin if your season is long, leave them if it is short.
07:54Fit it to your own summer.
07:56And a plain word on which to pull when you thin.
08:00Take off the smallest, the runtiest, and above all, the laggards, the ones far behind the rest of their cluster.
08:09For you want the fruits left on a cluster to be of a size and to ripen together, not a
08:16few big ones and a few tiny stragglers dragging the plant's strength.
08:21Snip the little late ones and the misshapen ones, and keep the three or four best.
08:27And use a small pair of scissors or snips for it, rather than tearing, so you do not damage the
08:34cluster.
08:35Thinned so, each cluster gives you a handful of fine, even tomatoes, all ripening together, easy to pick.
08:45The third trick is about the soil being a touch sour.
08:49And here I am going to give you the true old way, for the fancy version of this one is
08:55both needless and, done wrong, dangerous.
09:00Here is the genuine truth under it, that a tomato likes its soil a little on the sour side, a
09:07little acid, not sweet and limey.
09:10And if your soil or your water is very sweet, very alkaline, as much well water and some soils are,
09:18then even a well-fed tomato cannot properly take up the food that is right there in the soil,
09:25for the sweetness locks it away from the roots, so the plant half starves in the midst of plenty.
09:33That is real, and worth knowing, and to put a plain number on it for those who like one,
09:39a tomato is happiest in soil just mildly sour, around six to six and a half on the scale the
09:46gardeners use,
09:47where seven is the middle, and higher than that is the sweet, alkaline side that gives the trouble.
09:53You need not fuss over the exact number, only know that mildly sour is the aim, and very sweet is
10:00the enemy.
10:02Now the commercial hydroponic growers correct this with strong acids,
10:07and I have even heard folk told to use battery acid from the auto parts store,
10:12and I will tell you plain, do not.
10:15That is dangerous stuff to handle.
10:17It burns and fumes, and it has no place in a home garden, nor in these hands.
10:23There is no need for it, for the old folk sweetened or soured their soil with plain, safe things,
10:30and here they are.
10:32First and best, good compost and well-rotted manure worked in,
10:37for rich organic matter naturally trends the soil gently toward the sour side the tomato likes,
10:44and buffers it steady, so a well-composted bed is halfway there on its own.
10:51Second, a mulch of pine needles or oak leaves, which are naturally acid,
10:56and gently sour the soil beneath as they break down.
11:01Third, if your soil is truly very sweet and alkaline and wants more,
11:06the old garden amendment is a bit of plain garden sulfur, the yellow powder,
11:12worked into the soil ahead of the season,
11:14which slowly and safely sours it over weeks,
11:18and that is the honest, safe way to lower it, not any battery acid.
11:23And fourth, if it is your water that is hard and alkaline,
11:28catch and use rainwater instead,
11:30which is naturally soft and slightly acid, and just what the tomato wants.
11:36So sour your soil the old safe way with compost and pine mulch
11:41and a little garden sulfur and rainwater, and never with anything that burns.
11:47Now let me give you one honest word tying it together,
11:51on how to even know if you need that third one,
11:54for you should not go souring a soil that is already right.
11:59The plain old sign is in what grows and how,
12:03but truest is to test your soil,
12:06and you can buy a cheap little soil test,
12:08or, simplest, just watch your plants.
12:11For a tomato in too sweet soil often shows a yellowing and poor growth
12:17despite your feeding, the sign of that locked out food.
12:21If your tomatoes have always grown and borne well for you,
12:25your soil is likely fine and sour enough already,
12:29and you need not touch it.
12:31Only reach for the souring if your soil is known to be very limey and alkaline,
12:37or your plants show that starved look.
12:40Do not fix what is not broken.
12:44Now let me say a small plain word,
12:46not a who-profits sermon,
12:48for a tomato is no one's scheme.
12:51But notice these were sold to you
12:54as the secret tricks of the big commercial growers,
12:57the things the pros know and you do not.
13:00And yet every one of them turned out to be plain old kitchen garden scents,
13:05keeping a plant balanced,
13:07thinning for a longer harvest,
13:09and sweetening or souring the soil
13:11the way the old folk always did,
13:14with compost and mulch.
13:16The pros did not invent this.
13:19They only kept doing what the old gardeners always knew,
13:23after most folk forgot it.
13:25There is a whole notion that the good growing secrets
13:29belong to the big operations
13:31and are beyond the home gardener,
13:33and it is not so,
13:35for the old ways were these ways,
13:38free and simple and in your own hands.
13:41So do not think you need a greenhouse
13:43and barrels of acid
13:44to grow a tomato that bears all season.
13:47You need only the old balance-keeping
13:50the grandparents knew.
13:53So there are the three old through-the-season tomato tricks
13:57to keep them bearing to the frost.
13:59Take three lower branches off each week
14:02to hold the balance,
14:04open the base to air,
14:06and beat the disease.
14:08Thin each cluster to three or four fruit
14:11so the plant keeps producing
14:13instead of loading up and quitting
14:15if your season is long.
14:17And keep your soil pleasantly sour
14:20the old safe way
14:21with compost and pine mulch
14:24and a little garden sulfur and rainwater,
14:27never anything that burns,
14:29but only if your soil truly needs it.
14:32Do these and understand
14:33the one balance beneath them all,
14:36and your tomatoes will keep flowering
14:38and setting and ripening
14:39long after your neighbors
14:41have shut down and quit.
14:43Now I want to hear from you.
14:45Tell me down below
14:46whether your tomatoes
14:48have ever loaded up
14:49and then just stopped on you,
14:51for now you know why.
14:52And which of these three
14:54you mean to try.
14:55And tell me your county
14:57and how long
14:58your growing season runs,
15:00for that decides
15:01whether you should thin your clusters
15:02or leave every last tomato on.
15:06I read every one.
15:08Next time,
15:09I want to show you
15:10the biggest tomato mistakes
15:11I see folk make,
15:12the plain errors
15:14that quietly wreck a crop
15:15before it starts,
15:17the ones so common
15:18and so easily fixed
15:20that naming them
15:22may save your whole harvest.
15:24The old gardeners
15:25kept their tomatoes
15:26bearing all season,
15:28not by any secret
15:29of the big operations,
15:30but by understanding
15:32the plant deep,
15:33its two minds
15:35of growing and fruiting,
15:37and holding it gently
15:38in balance between them
15:40with a bit of pruning
15:41and thinning
15:42and good sour
15:43compost-fed soil.
15:45There is a quiet wisdom
15:47in that,
15:48in keeping a living thing
15:50in balance
15:51rather than driving it hard
15:52till it spends itself
15:54and quits.
15:55The people who built
15:56this country
15:57with their hands
15:58knew that,
15:59and we are only
16:00just starting to remember it.
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