by Growing tomato seedlings is a difficult and labor-intensive process. It is necessary not only to prepare seeds, soil, containers, but also to correctly calculate the sowing dates, otherwise the seedlings will outgrow on the windowsill and suffer from a lack of nutrition. These troubles can be avoided if you sow tomatoes directly into the ground.
It is advisable to grow tomatoes without seedlings in the middle zone in protected soil: a greenhouse, a hotbed, a warm closed bed. The soil warms up much faster there, and tomato seedlings are protected from the night cold. The more hermetic the greenhouse, the earlier you can sow tomatoes. Of course, everything depends on the weather, but on average – this is the second ten days of April.
Soil Preparation
The bed for sowing tomatoes should be prepared in advance. If green manure is growing on the plot, dig it into the ground using a flat cutter or cultivator. If green manure was not sown, add a bucket of compost or humus per 1 sq.m, since tomatoes need fertile, light soil. Then loosen the bed with a cultivator and water it with a solution of the biopreparation Ekomik Urozhayny, which contains beneficial microorganisms that accelerate the decomposition of organic matter and improve the soil.
To prepare a solution for soil treatment, add 10 ml of the preparation to 100 liters of water at room temperature and mix. Water the soil a week before sowing at the rate of 3 liters of working solution per 1 sq.m.
After watering, cover the bed with black agrotextile so that the soil warms up faster. Beneficial soil bacteria and earthworms will become active in the moist soil under the cover. As a result, the soil structure, its air and water permeability will improve.
Seeding of tomato seeds
For sowing in the ground, it is advisable to use seeds of early ripening tomato varieties: Bonnie-MM, Little Red Riding Hood, Summer Resident, Sanka, Bullfinch, Debut, Labrador, Apple Tree of Russia etc. The day before sowing, soak the seeds for 30-60 minutes in a solution of the drug Ecomic Harvest (5 drops per 200 ml of water) to improve their germination and protect them from phytopathogens.
After soaking, there is no need to rinse the seeds: you can immediately start sowing. Make shallow holes in the bed at a distance of 30-40 cm from each other, depending on the characteristics of the future bushes. Moisten the soil in the holes and put several seeds in each of them. Then cover them with a layer of light fertile soil about 1 cm thick. All that remains is to cover the crops with transparent film or five-liter plastic bottles with the bottom cut off.
Care of tomatoes
As soon as the shoots appear, remove the film and install a frame of arcs over the bed, and cover it with spunbond on top. If the plantings are covered with plastic bottles, remove the lids in sunny weather, and screw them back on at night. In hot weather, open the vents in the greenhouse, monitor the air temperature. As the soil dries, water the sprouts with settled water at room temperature.
After 2-3 weeks, when the tomatoes have real leaves, remove the weaker shoots and leave one strongest plant in each hole. Then fertilize the tomatoes with complex mineral fertilizer: 1 tbsp. nitroammophoska per 10 liters of water, and after a month you can fertilize with superphosphate (1 tbsp. superphosphate per 10 liters of water) or ash infusion (200 g per 10 liters of water). Liquid fertilizers are considered the most effective, since nutrients dissolved in water are absorbed by plants much faster than when using granulated fertilizers.
Alternate fertilizing with root and foliar treatments with the biopreparation Ecomic Urozhainy to increase the resistance of tomatoes to bacterial, fungal and viral diseases and accelerate the ripening of fruits.
Advantages and disadvantages of seedless tomato growing
The seedless method of growing tomatoes has many advantages: you don’t need to take up space on the windowsill with containers of seedlings, you don’t need to provide additional light for the seedlings, you don’t need to pick them and make a mess in the house, and then worry about where to place the picked plants and how to create the right temperature conditions for them.
Tomatoes grown from seeds in a garden bed are stronger and more seasoned, they develop faster, get sick less often and bear fruit longer. Such plants have a more developed root system: the main root of the bushes can penetrate to a depth of up to one and a half meters. This means that these bushes can be watered rarely and fed less. And if the bed is mulched, then the care of the tomatoes will be minimal.
The only drawback of the seedless method of growing tomatoes is that the fruits on such bushes ripen several weeks later than on other plants of the same varieties grown through seedlings and sown a month earlier. But with the right choice of early ripening varieties, the harvest can be obtained already in July-August.
Growing tomatoes without seedlings is an interesting experiment, and it is worth trying to conduct it with at least a small part of the seeds for which there may not have been enough space on the windowsill this season.
