So, the plants have got to the stage where they’re large enough to plant out. I grow my tomatoes in a couple of small greenhouses (since my polytunnel failed last year) in “Morissons Flower Buckets (MFBs)”. (For those of you who don’t know about them, Morissons is a UK supermarket and one of the things they sell is flowers. They don’t seem to recycle the buckets and sell them cheaply to those that would like them. Each bucket is about a UK gallon and so, provided you keep them watered and fed, they are ideal for growing tomatoes).
The tomatoes are planted at the bottom of the bucket with enough compost to get them going. As they get bigger, I’ll fill up the bucket with more compost. The buckets have holes in the bottom and they’re stood in trays. Watering from the bottom is the right way to water tomatoes as it encourages the roots and the plants are fed from above when necessary. I feed strings through the base of the bucket and tie them up to the side of the greenhouse. I can get 8-10 plants on each side of the greenhouse and then four at the end giving me a total of 20-24 indeterminate plants per greenhouse. Its a bit overcrowded but I seem to get a reasonable crop doing it that way.
My Determinate varieties are similarly planted in MFBs but they go outside when the last chance of frost has gone.
I always get “told off” for growing too many plants and filling the freezer with tomatoes but, on a different subject, we’ve just used the last of the tomatoes from 2021 so we’ll have to buy some tinned tomatoes until the first new season tomatoes start (which is usually mid-July).
The indeterminates aren’t strung up yet, it gives me the chance to move them around. The Determinates will go into the middle of the greenhouse until they’re settled. There’s a range of sizes, colours and shapes as ever and I’ll collect seeds from some of the plants to stock up my seed store.