This week’s column is specifically for our forlorn Lifestyles
Editor Colleen Valles and her problem tomatoes.
If you’ve been following Colleen’s Adventures in Gardening, it
seems she’s having trouble growing the most popular home-grown
vegetable of them all. Her five newly transplanted tomatoes in the
ground are turning brown and papery.
This week’s column is specifically for our forlorn Lifestyles Editor Colleen Valles and her problem tomatoes.
If you’ve been following Colleen’s Adventures in Gardening, it seems she’s having trouble growing the most popular home-grown vegetable of them all. Her five newly transplanted tomatoes in the ground are turning brown and papery.
Colleen’s tomato problems aren’t that unusual. Suffice to say, tomatoes aren’t quite as easy to grow as, say, zucchini squash. I mean, I once resorted to sticking my excess zucchini in the mailbox and putting the flag up! I still have the nasty note the mail carrier left me, saying that it was a federal offense to attempt to use the U.S. Postal Service to get rid of excess zucchini. He recommended that I do what he does – specifically, place zucchini in grocery bags, plop the bag on a neighbor’s porch, ring the doorbell and run.
If the leaves of your tomato plants are turning brown and papery like Colleen’s, I suspect one of two reasons. One could be fertilizer burn; two could be transplant shock. In all likelihood, it’s a combination of both.
If Colleen mixed organic compost or dry fertilizer into the ground before planting, it’s quite possible a little too much was used. Meanwhile, transplant shock occurs when roots are disturbed and damaged during transplant, especially if the plants were rootbound in their pots.
The good news, though, is that plants will normally adjust to both overfertilizing and transplant shock.
While the affected leaves may or may not fall off, young plants usually will quickly replace lost leaves. However – and this is the worst news — if the excess case of fertilizing is really excessive, plants may die.
Luckily, Colleen mentioned that the tomatoes she planted in containers are doing well. Container-planted tomatoes almost always do well because we usually plant them in straight packaged potting soil.
Anything will grow fine in $10 worth of packaged soil! Colleen also mentioned she bought some tomato cages for her plants. This was a great move because tomato plants will bear more and have better-looking fruit if tomatoes are climbing off the ground. If unsupported, the increasing weight of filling fruit and multiple side branches forces the plant to lie on the ground. By season’s end, tomato plants could be an unsightly, impenetrable, disease-wracked tangle.
I do have another concern for Colleen. I’m worried that she fell into one of the beginning gardener’s biggest mistakes. Specifically, I’m fearful that she got too ambitious and planted too much at one time. I’ve never planted more than three tomato plants, much less Colleen’s eight.
And if those are squash coming up as volunteers and she has seven squash plants going, Colleen’s going to be doing a lot of “ringing the neighbor’s doorbell and running” after leaving bags of squash on doorsteps.
If you haven’t planted yet, consider staggering your planting by not planting all at once. That’s the advantage with living where we do. We have an extended summer vegetable garden. It’s not unusual to still be harvesting veggies in October, so stagger your plantings.
