We have two tomato planters. We converted two brick planters on the opposite side of the house from the garden to square-foot-garden planters, though I used bags of potting soil to top them off this year. The one in the picture above we call the “niche” planter, since it’s tucked in beside the back porch and is shielded by the house.
This is an 8-foot brick planter east of the house. It’s more ‘out-in-the-open,’ much more subject to wind and gets more sun that the niche planter. Sometimes all of the plants do equally well. Sometimes the plants in one planter or the other do better in a given season. I’ve planted 8 plants in this long planter and 4 in the niche planter this year.
I found a good video on pruning tomato plants to increase yield. Usually I just leave our plants and they end up with vines all over the place – an unmanageable ‘mess’ with treasures here and there throughout. I would like to learn to prune the plants so we have plenty of greenery, but they don’t get out of hand. The video I found is “How to Prune Tomatoes for Maximum Yield and Plant Health” by Epic Gardening on YouTube. So far, I’ve learned that the type of tomato plants we grow are “indeterminate,” meaning that they continue to grow until Mother Nature kills the plants.
I’ll watch it over and over again before I actually try to prune the plants, and then I’ll take my time to sit beside each plant and really study it in a way I’ve never done before. Fingers crossed it’s a successful experiment.
They’re getting a good watering with the rain we’ve gotten overnight and today.
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