Grow More Tomatoes With These Two Tips
It was a time lost to binary code and the digital realm, a time when a kid could stand on a road alone without his parents being concerned. It was 1972, I was 7 years old and standing in front of a table selling vegetables on the corner of Hulsus Corner Road and Highway 9 in Howell Township, New Jersey. The very same Highway 9 referenced in the lyric “sprung from cages on Highway 9” in “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen. “The Boss” himself was raised 4 miles up the road in Freehold.
My unyielding passion for growing vegetables came from my Sicilian immigrant grandfather Calogero “Charlie” Bellina. I grew the veggies I was standing in front of with him. He was a fellow who grew up so poor that the idea of creating your own food from a seed and water had the magnitude of great wealth, a simple notion with life and death implications. Fast forward 51 years, I’m living in suburban Los Gatos, California, with that inspiration never having waned. I’ve converted all the available land at my residence into a farm that supplies our little restaurant Enoteca la Storia with fine heirloom tomatoes and fresh basil.
It seemed like all “Charlie” had to do was throw the seeds in the ground, water them and before I knew it, we had more veggies than we could eat. But it’s just not the case now. The Heirloom tomatoes I grow are incredibly susceptible to disease, particularly from fungus, and it does not matter how much organic sulfur, neem oil or baking soda you spray on them. If your plant doesn’t have a strong immune system, you’re going to have a short season.
Healthy Soil, More Tomatoes
What I learned after good council, a fatiguing amount of research and trial and error is that a plant’s health is all about the soil. Namely, the nitrogen-fixing bacteria–microorganisms capable of transforming atmospheric nitrogen into fixed nitrogen that is usable by plants–and mycorrhizae, a symbiotic fungus of which the mycelium absorbs nutrients and translocates them back to the host plant. Without these in your soil, your plant’s immune system will be weak and it won’t be able to fend off disease.
Filter Your Water
There are great sources of mycorrhizal inoculants and microbes available, but the biggest problem in keeping soil healthy within city limits is the water. City water is treated with chloramine, a chemical intended to kill pathogens that are harmful to humans but is also deadly to both mycorrhizae and beneficial microbes.
The single most effective strategy that I’ve engaged for healthier and more productive plants is filtering the water I give to them. It's very involved for a project like mine with 100 plants but if you have 12 or less you can find a simple filter that attaches to the end of your hose online, just search “in line hose filter for garden” and you’ll have a ton of choices. I almost doubled my crop from an average of 2K pounds to an average of 3.8K pounds by inoculating and filtering!
