General discussion regarding the techniques and methods used to successfully grow tomato plants in containers.
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May 11, 2009 | #8 |
Tomatovillian™
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: PNW
Posts: 4,743
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Calcium moves fairly slowly through soils, so I would not add
more lime without doing a pH test first. If pH is still between 6 and 7, a couple of handfuls of gypsum on top of the container mix is probably a better idea (adds calcium, will not raise pH). Gypsum is fairly cheap at big box hardware stores (25-40 pounds for a few dollars) , really cheap at farm supply stores ($5 or less for 80 pounds, usually), so it does not raise the cost of growing tomatoes much to keep a bag of it around for a pH-neutral calcium supplement. Phosphorus stays put especially well once it is in soil or container mix, too, so that is not likely to leach out. Nitrogen is the main thing that you might need to add, and some potassium. They need more potassium as fruit are developing anyway, and a lot of people add more fertilizer that has more potassium than nitrogen or phosphorus at fruitset, even without excessive rain. If you were using a liquid fertilizer soil drench, this would be easy: fish emulsion for the leached nitrogen and molasses for the potassium, ignoring the phosphorus. If you want something that you can top-dress, something like a 5-1-5 to 5-1-10 would be about right. Usually you want 6 hours minimum direct sun. Less slows them down quite a bit (although you are pretty far south so you might get away with 4 hours; I would not know whether to expect that to work without having tried it first).
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