 Hello, I'm Megan Humphrey. I'm the Executive Director of Hands, and we are a nonprofit in Burlington, Vermont. Our mission is to get food to adults who are 50 years and over throughout Chittenden County. Hands in the dirt, gardening workshops, just like this one with expert Charlie Nardosie, a meal and gift bag on Christmas Day, our holiday dinner, and nutrition education workshops called Hands in the Kitchen, and Support Buddies, which is a program in partnership with Heineberg Senior Center that we developed in response to COVID, but we're going to continue. So we're just trying to get food out in lots of different ways. And I wanna do a very special thanks to AARP Vermont, and Hannaford, and Red Wagon Plants. All of them are really huge supporters of ours, and we really appreciate that. So thank you so much for joining us today, Charlie, and we're looking forward to this. I am Charlie Nardosie, and this is All About Tomatoes. I figure it's Memorial Day coming up very soon. End of May, early June is a great time to plant tomatoes. I should just do a little talk about tomatoes, and I'm sure everyone is probably growing some, and it'll be great to kind of do a little refresher, and maybe you'll learn a few new things too. So let me just jump right into it, share my screen, and we can get going. So All About Tomatoes, tomatoes are, of course, the most popular garden vegetable that's out there. And lots of people love to grow fresh tomatoes. There's such a diversity of types of tomatoes to grow. You can use them, eating them raw. You can cook with them, you can can them. There's so many different things to do with them. So what I'm gonna do here in about a half hour, so I just kind of run through what we should be thinking about with our tomatoes right now, at this time of year. So I'm not gonna talk about seed-starting per se, but I'll kind of pick it up. I assume you've got a tomato plant one way or another. Either you bought one, or you've got one that you started indoors. So what do you do with these seedlings? Well, one of the first things you wanna do with the seedlings, of course, is make sure they're healthy, make sure they're growing really strongly. This is kind of the time of year to plant. So end of May, early June is a perfect time to plant tomato seedlings. Tomatoes, of course, like warm temperatures. So we have had kind of bizarre roller coaster temperatures so far this year, starting the end of March, when it was 70 degrees for a number of days to cool temperatures and snow in April, to warmer temperatures in May, and then cool again, it's going up and down, up and down. But what we're looking for is kind of a consistent warmth. And that's really what we're looking at this time of year, the end of May, early June, when the tomatoes can really thrive and they really can start growing and continue to grow without any interruption. Now, the first thing you have to do, though, is make sure you put them in the ground at the right time in the right way. And that means hardening them off. So this process, for those who are not familiar with it, is you're slowly acclimating those tomato seedlings to the outdoor conditions. So say you've been growing them as seedlings under lights and now they're in a window, they look really nice. Instead of just putting them out on a nice sunny day, which of course is not the best time to transplant, the best time to transplant is cloudy, cool days so that transplants can really get acclimated before the sun comes out. So before you do that, though, you wanna transition them outdoors. So what that means is that put them out for maybe an hour or two, the first day, and then bring them back in. When I say put them out too, not necessarily in the sun, they could be just outside in a morning sun area or a little filtered light, maybe get a little light breeze, but certainly not if there's a lot of heavy wind blowing, do you wanna have them totally exposed? Then the second day you do the same thing and you just extend the period of time that they're outside. So that after about five days, you really can leave them out there and leave them out overnight. At that point, they're pretty much hardened off ready to put in the garden. So by doing that, you're gonna have less transplant shocks so that when the tomatoes get into the soil, they're gonna just kind of take off for you. Now, where are you gonna be planting them? Well, full sun, of course, if you haven't known that or figured that out before, tomatoes like at least eight hours of full sun. The more sun you get, the more growth you get, the more growth you get, the better tomatoes you get, the more growth and sun you have, also the better flavor you're gonna get on your tomatoes because that's all due to the photosynthesis that's happening. So you really wanna find a spot that gets a good six to eight hours of full sun a day. That's really the best place. Can you grow things on a deck or patio that has four hours? Sure, you can try to grow tomatoes there. I would suggest more of the container type tomatoes that I'll talk about in a minute, but those tomatoes are gonna be fewer and probably not as flavorful. So look for full sun. That's really a key thing where you're gonna be planting them. The other thing is if you have a garden versus just maybe a couple raised beds, if you have at least three raised beds or three areas in your garden, you wanna do a crop rotation with tomatoes. In fact, with all of your vegetables. So what does that mean? It means that the first year, as you can see up there, A, B and C are on the top. Year one, in bed A you have tomatoes, bed B you have collards, bed C you have peas. Then the second year, you rotate things around. So where the tomatoes were the first year, second year there's peas. The third year there's collards. We're just using three examples. You can mix anything in there if you wanted. The whole idea is not to plant the same family of plants in that bed for year after year. If you can get away with a four year rotation like this one, that's great. If you have just a couple raised beds and you really don't have the space to rotate, maybe you can just move them to the other side of the bed or at least put down some compost. If you keep putting down the same plants, same family of plants, so tomatoes, for example, will be peppers and eggplant and potatoes, petunias, all in the tomato family. What happens is diseases build up in that soil so that when you plant your plants this year, there'll be diseases ready to attack your plants. If you break that disease cycle by putting in plants from other families, it could be from the legume families like peas. It could be from the cucurbit families and melons and squashes. The brassica families like broccoli and kale. All of these different families have different diseases that will attack them and you'll break that cycle so no one group of diseases builds up in the soil. So that's why we wanna do crop rotation whenever we can. Now, I always recommend doing raised beds with tomatoes and with all vegetables, really, pretty much all vegetables do well in a raised bed. You can build your own very simply just by taking the soil in the pathways, areas of your garden and mounting it up until these, what I call temporary raised beds or freestanding raised beds. And they'll stand up, well, maybe about eight to 12 inches tall and then you can plant right on top of them. The nice thing about this is that you can make your beds curving and you can make them big and wide and narrow or whatever shape fits your garden. The downside is by the end of the season, you'll see those beds will be flat. So you're gonna have to recreate them every spring. That's why I tend to push people more towards doing permanent raised beds. These could be made out of woods like cedars, hemlock and spruce are nice woods that are fairly rock resistant, last good eight to 10 years under normal conditions. You build them up at least again a foot tall if you can and you bring in topsoil and compost. So you have a real fertile soil so things will grow really well. You can grow your tomatoes in these as well. It may make them a little taller, but that's okay. You're gonna have a really healthy crop. With tomatoes, you might even wanna make the beds a little bit deeper because as you know, tomato roots go pretty deep. So you wanna make sure you have enough soil there for those tomatoes to grow well. In either case though, whether you're doing a freestanding raised bed or a structured raised bed, a permanent one, you wanna add compost and compost is like the food that's feeding the microbes that helps keep the air and water flowing through those beds and those microbes and those creatures that are in the soil are releasing nutrients so your plants can grow well. So in my no dig system, which is based on my book, The Complete Guide to No Dig Gardening, what I talk about is just adding compost layers on top, not turning it under, but put a couple of inch thick layer on top every spring or every time you're going to actually put a new crop, a new vegetable in the garden if you're doing succession planting, for example. And that's gonna build up that soil layer and build up the organic matter so that your plants will grow really strong and you won't have to rely on other kinds of fertilizer. So when the plant, as I mentioned, end of May, early June is the time to do that. You can start them a little bit earlier and put them out earlier if you're willing to protect them like with wallow waters or any kind of crop protection, flow, row covers, things like that. How do you plant them? Tomatoes have a unique characteristic. So tomatoes will root all along their stem. So if you have leggy seedlings like this person has here, what you can do is bury them a little bit deeper. So you have the root ball that normally you put around the same level, the top of the root ball at the same level of the soil line. But with tomatoes, you can bury it deeper either straight down or you can even bend the stem horizontally, bury it with soil and have it pop up a couple inches away. What that will do is that it'll take a leggy plant and make it into a stocky plant. It also allows those roots to form all along the stem which will help that plant grow much stronger. And it might set it back for a week or so, but you'll see your plants will catch up really quickly. That's another nice thing about tomatoes. They grow fast. You can plant them in mulch and the plastic mulch in particular. This is a shot from Pennsylvania State University's College of Plasticology. Sounds like something I don't wanna really do too much. Personally, I used to plant in red mulches. You see the red one over there? That is the one that's recommended for tomatoes. I used to do that year after year, pretty religiously using mulch. The idea with plastic mulch, of course, is that it heats up the soil fast. It prevents weed growth and your plants will grow quicker. And there is research that shows that that red mulch will produce more tomatoes. I've kind of gotten away from that. In our garden, we've tried to do less use of plastics in there and I found by doing raised beds, having really fertile compost in soil and not mulching with organic materials until the soil is really warmed up, our plants do fine. I'm not a farmer. I'm really just looking for home production. So if I would get a few less tomatoes because I'm not using the plastic, that's okay with me. I'd rather not have the environmental hazard of the plastic there having to throw it away and just a look of it too. But if you are really trying to produce a lot of fruit, that is a way to do it is using plastic mulches. But another way to plant is to do what I call inter-planting. And this is something we did last year. This is a shot of one of our beds from last year with tomatoes in it. Those cages are where the tomatoes are. There's four of them in there, it's a little hard to see. But the thing I really want to point out with this image is that look at all the material that's around it. In a no-dig gardening system, we always want to have something growing on that soil or have mulch on that soil. You don't ever want to leave the soil bare. So what I did with my tomatoes, as I first, of course, spaced them two or three feet apart like you normally would and had all this bare soil in between. So what I ended up doing is, I took an old packet of salad mix that I had. They had lettuce and mazuna and arugula and beet greens and all kinds of different things in it. And I just sprinkled it in between the tomato plants. And then a month later, this is what it looked like. So I had all these greens and these great veggies that I could eat and we could eat from our garden all the time. And you can see the tomatoes are no worse for the wear. In fact, they did really well that year. The tomatoes eventually got so big that they shaded out all those greens that were growing in there, but that was okay. A few of them survived, sent up flower stalks. I left those there too because they attracted beneficial insects. So this idea of inter-planting, something in between plants like tomatoes that take a while to get big and so big that they're gonna fill out a space is a real nice way to maximize how much you can get in one bed. So you can do a mixed salad mix like this. You can just plant individual lettuces, little plugs of lettuce. You can put radishes in. You could put anything that's a fast growing crop that will be done within a month or so. That will work really well with an inter-planting system. So let's talk a little bit about the different kinds of tomatoes are out there. If you haven't bought your tomatoes yet, or if you have them and you haven't thought about what kind they are, this might be a good little review. So the first one I want to talk about is called the determinate tomatoes. These are ones that'll grow up about three and a half feet or so tall and then they stop growing and they produce their fruit. So it's not as a bountiful harvest as you would get with an indeterminate variety, but the determinate ones are nice because they're a manageable size. You still have to stake them, cage them, do something to them, but because they only get three to four feet tall, it really makes it more manageable in your garden. And again, if you're not looking for a huge production for canning or freezing or drying, this might be a nice alternative. Indeterminate is just the opposite. These are the ones that keep growing until frost, insects, diseases, or you stop them. In fact, that places in the South where they can grow tomatoes forever, I've seen photos of people standing on the roof of their garage picking tomatoes because they trellis the tomato all the way up to the top of the roof of their garage. Pretty crazy, huh? Most of the heirloom varieties and those large-fruited varieties and the cherry tomatoes, they all fit into this indeterminate characteristics. It's important to know the difference because how you're gonna support those and take care of them and prune them is really gonna be dependent on which kind of tomato you have. And then there are the dwarf ones. These are the ones that stay short and bushy, they're great for containers. And these are the ones like the pixie too, I think is one that's been out forever. They stay short, they're nice, they're dwarf, they give you a handful of tomatoes and that's it. The nice improvement over this, and I'll mention a couple varieties in a minute, are what we call dwarf indeterminates. So you mix an indeterminate that keeps producing fruit right to the end of the season with a dwarf that stays small and you get a plant that maybe grows a couple feet tall, produces a nice consistent supply of tomatoes, but it stays small and it's much more manageable. Those are the ones if you have a small space patio, deck, that kind of area where you just don't have a lot of room, you wanna look for those varieties. And then of course there are heirlooms versus hybrids. So heirlooms are anything that was produced, that was a variety that's been grown for decades, usually ones that originated before the Second World War. They are very regional in their habits, meaning that a lot of times, a small little river valley in Kentucky would have their own little varieties that are there that are very adapted to that weather and those conditions. So you always wanna look for heirloom varieties that are adapted to where we live. So in the Northeast, I tell people to check out High Mowing and Johnny's because they have trial grounds and they will take an heirloom and they'll grow them out there for a number of years just to be sure that they're gonna work in this kind of climate. So that's a good way to kind of watch and see which ones are best. You can buy varieties from all over the place, in fact, all over the world. There is a variety, for example, in San Francisco called San Francisco Fog that was bred in San Francisco to be able to produce fruit during the summer where if you know San Francisco, it's pretty foggy and cool in the summer. So that's a variety that does well there, probably wouldn't do well in most other places. Hybrid varieties are anything after say the 1950s after Big Boy, the first hybrid tomato. And these are varieties that have been crossed by breeders that normally those crosses wouldn't happen because they were looking for certain characteristics, disease resistance, vigor of the plant, size and shape of the fruit, that kind of thing. They're pretty consistent. You grow a big beef in Vermont and you grow one in Arizona and grow one in Florida, they're gonna look pretty much the same. So which ones you choose is really up to you. The heirlooms, I feel like there's a lot of nice variety and tastes and colors and just the beautiful visuals and flavors of the hybrids are consistent. Some of them are pretty good tasting too. So let me just talk about some of those as we go along here. But first I wanna tell a story because everyone loves a good story. This is a story that takes place back in the 1920s and 30s in Logan, West Virginia and the man's name was MC Biles. Now MC in Logan, West Virginia in the 1930s had to do a bunch of things to get by because it was a depression era. So he was a mechanic, he worked out airplanes, he was even a professional wrestler for a while, right? He got this idea that he was gonna start a radiator repair shop. And he's gonna start that radiator repair shop at the base of a big hill, a big mountain that goes out away from Logan, West Virginia because Logan of course, like a lot of West Virginia is very hilly. And back then in the 30s, trucks didn't have great radiators. So they would come rumbling through town, go by the repair shop, go up the hill, radiator would burst, they turn around, roll back down and there was MC Biles radiator repair shop. So business was booming and he got the nickname radiator Charlie. Now radiator Charlie, and here's the only photo I've ever seen of him taken in the 60s, radiator Charlie also loved to garden and he loved tomatoes, but even like any of the varieties that he could find in Logan, West Virginia in the 1930s. So he decided to make his own. So he collected 10 different varieties he could find in the area. He put them in a garden right in front of the radiator repair shop in a circle, put nine in the circle, put one in the center and he crossed them all with that one in the center. Then he saved the best fruit from that center tomato, grew those seeds out, took the healthiest, most vigorous seedlings, put those out the next year in the circle again, took nine of those and put one in the center and crossed them again. So he did that process for seven years, crossing and back crossing until he got a variety that he loved. This variety is about eight to 10 ounces, pinkish red flesh, beautiful skin, nice shape to it. The best part was the flavor. You bite into this on a hot July day and the juices drizzles down your chin and it's the sweetness that you can't even compare to anything. It was a delicious tomato and he would give it to the truck drivers waiting for their trucks to get repaired and they were like, wow, this is the best tomato I've ever tasted. So Charlie got an idea, said, I think I'm gonna sell it. But he said, I'm not gonna sell tomatoes, I'm gonna sell the seedlings. So in the 1940s, he decided to sell the seedlings for a dollar a seedling. Now, if you do the math for inflation, that would be like going to a garden center now and paying $25 for one tomato seedling. But people would do it. They would come from miles around because the tomatoes were that good. He was able to sell enough of those seedlings to pay off the mortgage on his radiator repair shop. So to this day, that variety is known as radiator Charlie's mortgage lifter. And I grow this variety. I'm not something I'm growing it this year, but I have grown it in the past and it is a very good variety to grow. And it grows really well here. So something like that, it's fun to grow. There's a lot of different stories around many of these different varieties. Cherokee purple, for example, the variety that Native Americans would grow, things of that nature. So it's fun to experiment with different ones out there. So let's talk about some popular heirloom tomatoes. That is Cherokee purple up there on the, let's just say we'll do it on a, like a face of a clock. That's 11 o'clock right there. Beautiful purple tomato, red flesh, great sandwich tomato. The one right across from either one o'clock, that's one called persimmon. That's one of my personal favorites because it has beautiful color to it, like a mango almost. And the flavor is more of a mild flavor. Again, a nice slicing tomato, great one with a little mozzarella, a little basil, a little balsamic vinegar, and olive oil. Down below that is brandy wine, of course, a famous one, there's pink brandy wine. And then across from that, the green one is called green zebra. And that one has more of a tang to it. So as much as persimmon is a mild flavor, green zebra has a little more of a tang, a little more of a lemony kind of flavor to it. Really nice variety. So just a small smattering of different types of heirlooms that are out there. Of course, cherry and paste tomatoes are really popular. Like I said, many of these are indeterminate. There are a few determinate ones now that are smaller. This, of course, is my favorite sun gold that a lot of people love just because of the flavor of it. And of course, there's lots of different paste tomatoes. I grow one called speckled Roman, which unfortunately I didn't have an image of it, but it's a long, thin one like this one you're looking at here, but it has these kind of golden colored streaks to it. And what I really like about it, it has a lot of flesh, not much seed in it, not much juice, just a real fleshy tomato. Amish paste is another one that's kind of like that. So if you're canning tomatoes, that's really what I'm looking for. And we do canned tomatoes every year. So think about the usage of your tomato too. So are you just gonna be having them for snacking, like the cherry tomatoes or sun gold, or are you gonna be actually canning them and freezing them too? A determinate variety, I've mentioned determinates. I kind of spoke highly of them here. Celebrity is probably the most famous of the determinate varieties, one that's widely known, widely found in garden centers. So if you're looking for something that's gonna stay a little shorter, this would be a nice one to use. If you have problems with leaf blight diseases, and I'll talk about more of that at the end, iron lady and defiant are two disease resistant varieties. So if we have early blight, septoria leaf spot, late blight, these varieties might be good ones to try. They produce nice red tomatoes and really healthy plants. These are some of the examples of dwarf indeterminates, a bush early girl. Early girl, of course, has been around forever. There's a bush version now that is a dwarf indeterminate, meaning that it will stay short, but it'll produce fruit all summer long. And if you have very little space, there's a dwarf indeterminate lasano. This is a nice one, nice cherry tomato could fit, as you can see in a basket or a container. And what's great about this is it produces fruit all season long. I had one last year called Little Bites. I think it was a Bonnie plant. And that one was great. You know, the plant stayed small and I got a handful of tomatoes every few days or so and it really kept doing that right up until September. And of course, you can grow these in tomatoes. This is another one I grew last year called Goodheart, not ripening, well, just starting to ripen, you see there. It's got a little kind of tip on the tomato, kind of interesting, almost like a heart shape. That's where the name comes from. But you could see that they grow really well in small containers. This one actually has, made notice some nasturtiums growing in it too, and kind of a little edible landscaping touch. If you're growing tomatoes in containers, look for self-watering containers. These are really gonna save you a lot of time and a lot of energy. There's lots of different ones out there. There's a classic one from Gardener Supply where it has a reservoir, three and a half gallon reservoir in the bottom. You fill it up with a little hole that's on the side there with water. And then they have a capillary strip or a mat that goes from the water up into the false bottom that's there. And that's coming in contact with the soil and the roots and that just keeps moving the water through, excuse me, through capillary action, right up into that soil. That way you can go away for two, three, four days, early in the season, maybe even five days without having to worry about watering your tomato plants. Of course, when we get to August or so and the tomatoes are really big, even this may not be enough and you might have to do a little supplemental watering, but this system really will save you a lot of work and it's kind of a nice safeguarding in case things don't go right and you're busy or you forget about things. Another way to grow tomatoes is with straw bales. And I use hay bales, actually. And this is a very popular concept, number of different people have written books on the topic. Joel Karsten is probably the most famous one. And if you go to strawbalegardening.com, he'll talk about the whole process. In fact, you go to my website, GardeningWithCharlie.com. I've written some stories about strawbalegardening. The idea is that you put your bales on a side and you condition them for two weeks. You water them every day and every other day you put down some fertilizer. I use this as a simple progro, five, three, four, granular fertilizer, just put maybe a cup or so on each bale and then you just water it in. After two weeks, what happens is those bales start decomposing and they start actually warming up. It's kind of a cool experience. And then you can take your tomato transplant like they've done here, pop it right into the bale. What they often will do is take maybe a handful or so of potting soil or compost and kind of pull the bale apart and put a little soil in there and then put the tomato in there and that's it. Then you keep watering it, maybe give it a little more fertilizer if it needs it. But you can see here from one that I did last year, this is a cherry tomato I grew in a hay bale. I actually had to put a cage up. You can see the wire cage there and that cage is kind of pushed right into the bale and attached to a fence behind it so it doesn't flop over. But you can see how well the tomato is growing. It's producing a ton of fruit. Keeps the animals off of it, which is really cool. If you grow other things other than tomatoes it may even keep insects away. I've had less cucumber beetles from cucumbers grown on hay bales. Hay bales may have grass seed or weed seed in it so they might sprout but even when that happens it really is not a big deal and it's so much cheaper and easier to get a hay bale versus a straw bale. And the other thing tomato related that's really nice to note on this is you look at the leaves. There's not much blight on there, is there? That's because you're off the ground. You don't have a lot of soil. It's not splashing up onto the leaves and getting started. So let's talk about some tomato care then. Tomato supports. So unless you're growing those dwarf plants you're gonna have to support them somehow. This is a traditional Italian one. This is what my grandfather used to do on the farm is he would have a steak per plant. He would prune off all the side shoots and all the side suckers and you'd have that one steak going straight up there. You tie them up to that steak and then you get fruit along that steak and that's it. But he would plant a lot of plants this way. So it's one technique. It's a really little more labor intensive technique but it certainly is a way to keep plants looking small. Most people use cages. And if you're doing a determinate plant like that celebrity, one of these four ring tomato cages is fine. If you're doing any indeterminates it's not gonna be enough. Unless you are really pruning your plants down so you're removing all the suckers and a lot of the side shoots kind of like that previous photo but maybe not that extreme. Because what'll happen is as the windstorms start coming up in July and August, thunderstorms happen it'll just blow them right over. So what I usually do is I would use these cages on indeterminates but I would put stakes in them. Maybe one or two stakes in them that stabilizes them. You also can tie them together. You can tie them a couple feet apart. So just tie them together, kind of create a nice secure area so that one cage doesn't flop over and so they're all supporting each other. There are new cages out there like the Vertex cages here that are made out of a lightweight aluminum. I didn't have great experience last year as far as keeping them from flopping over but one nice thing about the Vertex is that it comes with clips. So instead of having to fit a tomato cage over an existing plant and maybe break branches in the process these you can wrap them around them and then clip the cage together. That's probably the biggest selling point of those Vertex cages. Tomatoes don't need any extra pollination from bees or honey bees or bumble bees. It won't hurt, of course but they are wind pollinated. So you don't really have to worry too much about this. If you're in a greenhouse you're gonna hand pollinate them because of course there's no wind in a greenhouse but outside usually a tomato set is not really that much of an issue. If we got a cold snap when the flowers are out there you might actually get some damage on the flowers and that would kind of delay the onset of fruiting but usually tomatoes produce a ton of fruit. One thing you might wanna do is think about giving them a little boost in the summer. So tomatoes are a long season crop especially those indeterminate ones and they keep growing all summer into the fall. So maybe in July, early August give them a little shot of some granular fertilizer right around the edge of the plant just something that'll keep them growing keep them boosted up and growing strong and it could be a granular 555 organic like organic fertilizers is better for the soil. If you have seedlings that look a little peeked looks like they're not doing so well look like they need a little help you might even use a fish or seaweed fertilizer mix it up with some water and apply it right on the plant it'll the fertilizer will be taken up through the leaves as well as the roots and you'll see that the plants will bounce right back. And then of course you wanna water if you're gonna water water by hand you wanna water thoroughly and deeply but infrequently meaning that every two or three times a week maybe if we don't get rain. If you water deeply the roots will follow that water down and so if something happens where it gets really dry you'll have deep roots that will be able to withstand the drought. You water shallowly every day or so the roots tend to stay right near the surface. Of course even better than that would be to here we go would be to put on soaker hoses. So a soaker hoses will go down the rows you can hook them up with a garden hose these coupler system is a snip and drip system is what it's called is nice because you can cut your get some extra garden hose and cut the lengths of it so that you don't have to be running the soaker hose across a driveway or a path like lawn and wasting water there you really can just focus the soaker hose where the plants are and the rest can be garden hose that you couple to that soaker hose. So it's kind of a nice system to use. You shouldn't have to do a lot of weeding especially if you have raised beds and especially if you're doing the no dig system but if you do have some weeding to do now is the time to do it. If you have just shallow weeds popping up you wanna use that hoe on the left hand side that's a shallow hole that just scrapes the soil surface and cuts those weeds right off so that they die pretty quickly. If you have deeper rooted weeds like dandelions and dock and things like that you can use that cultivator on the right hand side but if you just do this a couple of times early in the season by the time mid season comes the plants get so big they're gonna shade out that soil you're not gonna have to really worry too much about weeds in your tomato patch. The other thing you can do of course is after you're done weeding is to mulch and you can use a hay mulch, grass clippings from untreated lawns, straw mulch, chopped leaves anything that's organic material is really nice to use cause it breaks down, feeds the soil and keeps the soil nice and cool and moist and weed free. The thing though is you wanna wait till the soil has warmed up so you don't wanna pop it out right now maybe wait a couple more weeks let things really warm up then put your organic mulch down cause you wanna make sure that soil is nice and warm cause that's what tomatoes like. When harvesting tomatoes late in the season you can harvest them even if they're not totally ripe as long as they're showing a little color that's usually the rule of thumb. So if you get into September, October and frost is threatening and you're thinking I gotta harvest my tomatoes. If it's showing any color like this you can bring them inside into a warm room space them apart put some people wrap them in newspaper individually and they will continue ripening and you'll have some nice fresh tomatoes right into November maybe. If there's still totally green you can harvest them still as a green tomato but they are not going to ripen. A few points on pests that people might wanna think about the tomato horn worm you could see it right there, right? Oh, we've all seen this. You know, July or August day you kind of haven't seen any signs of horn worms you think, oh, maybe I won't get any this year. And then all of a sudden you walk out one evening and the tops of your plants are kind of mowed down. First you think of deer cause that's what we always think of but usually it's a tomato horn worm. If you look close enough, you'll see them there. They are big insects but it's amazing how camouflaged they can be. They will not only eat the leaves but they'll eat your fruits too. You can see they're starting to take a chomp out of the tomato that's right there. So there's a couple of things to keep in mind with tomato horn worms. First of all, there's one generation a year up here and usually like I said, it's mid summer so you wanna keep your eye peeled for things, leaves being chopped at the top of the plant. The other is if you find a tomato horn worm that has all these white little protrusions on them leave it there. Cause that is a parasite. That is a, it's a predator. It is a bryconid wasp. It's laid eggs and those eggs are gonna hatch inside the tomato horn worm and basically use it as a growing medium to create more bryconid wasps. So this is a good thing. This is a beneficial insect has found your tomato horn worm and so it's good to leave them there. So if you see those protrusions leave the tomato horn worm there. The other thing is that there's been some new research on companion planting and a way to keep tomato horn worms from finding your tomatoes is to grow a bunch of basil around your tomato plants. What happens is that as a tomato horn worm moth is looking to lay its eggs on the tomato plants it's looking for a scent, a pheromone scent something we're not gonna smell but it's looking for. And if you have basil of course, basil has a very heavy scent to that growing around your tomato plants it tends not to find the tomatoes as easily. So is it gonna be 100% effective? Probably not, but is it worth doing? Absolutely, because you wanna have basil with tomatoes. They're two of them walk hand in hand anyway. So why not grow some extra plants right around your tomatoes and just have them there so that it can confuse those insects. The other big problem we often have is with leaf blights. And this could be early blight, septorial leaf spot, bacterial spec, late blight, all of those. Your tomatoes are growing fine. The bottom leaves start to yellow a little bit have some spots and then it spreads. And before you know it in the middle of the summer your tomato plants look like that. You get some fruit on them but they really die prematurely. So the keys with this is some of those resistant varieties I mentioned earlier in the talk those would be a good ones to start with. The other would be to when you plant your tomatoes make sure you mulch that soil really well with grass clippings, hay straws something like that so that it's not splashing up onto the bottom leaves. Then as the summer progresses you'll notice those bottom leaves will get spots start yellowing, pick off all those bottom side shoots. In fact some people do it proactively and pick them off even before they show signs of the disease creating a little space between the bottom of the tomato and the top of the soil. That's gonna make it less likely that we're gonna get that disease started really quickly. So those are some nice things to try. You can try some preventive sprays and I stress the word preventive like serenade, this is a fungicide. That is organic, it's a bacteria actually that will attack the fungus. It prevents it from spreading. It does not kill it once it's on the plant. So that's one copper is another possibility. And some more research with cover crops. If you want to grow a cover crop of hairy vetch. Hairy vetch is a legume, a native plant you see around. You probably not gonna help you this year but what you can do planning for next year is that in the summer plant some hairy vetch in a bed that you're gonna plant tomatoes next year and then just leave it all winter. It'll make it through the winter. Chop it all down next spring, let it die back and plant your tomatoes right into that mulch. What they found is that this protected the plants from blights probably because of the nature of the mulch as well as the hairy vetch itself. So a couple ideas to keep in mind if you have leaf blights out there and of course you can always do the straw bail gardening and container gardening which will slow down the onset of the disease. And the last one I wanted to talk about are critters, isn't he the cute squirrel in the world. They love to eat our vegetables, don't they? So if you have squirrels and chipmunks, if you have containers for example and they're getting in there eating your cherry tomatoes there's not a lot. You can try some sprays and things like that. That may work, may not work and really kind of dependent upon the veracity of your chipmunks in your squirrels. You can hang out there with one of those water cannon gun things and shoot your squirrels as they come close. That will deter them of course. You could probably try to put some caging around them but if they're really tough and tenacious it might be really hard to do that. So I think containers with caging around them and do it early in the season before there's fruit that's ripened that might be a way to deter them. So hopefully these are giving you some ideas on how to have some tomato joy because we all love that taste of fresh tomatoes eating them right from the garden or making delicious dishes from them in our home for our friends and our family. So thank you all very much. I'm just gonna stop sharing my screen. Thank you all very much for coming. I appreciate it, appreciate your time and hopefully you're gonna have a great tomato crop this year.