Wishing to get the maximum yield, every gardener thinks about how and when tomato should be fed. The number of grown tomatoes will depend not only on fertilizers, but also on the time of their planting, conditions, ambient temperature and watering intensity.
If you have purchased ready-made seedlings or grown them in a greenhouse yourself and plan to transplant them into open ground, do not forget to water the ground abundantly beforehand. After all, tomatoes can only take root in moist soil. The next watering should be in 2-3 days. If some of the seedlings did not take root and dried up, replace them with others. The subsequent care of tomatoes will consist in regularly moistening the soil, loosening it and fertilizing it.
The first top dressing of a tomato is carried out no earlier than 2 weeks after planting young plants in open ground, and some agronomists are inclined to believe that about 20 days should pass. If you do not want to buy ready-made fertilizer for tomatoes, then you can do it as follows: 15 grams of ammonium nitrate, 40 grams of potassium s alt and about70 grams of superphosphate. Only the first top dressing of tomato seedlings is made with this mixture, while the plants are small and not yet too strong.
The next fertilization falls on the period when the tomato fruits appear. The second top dressing of the tomato should be carried out with a solution in which there is no nitrogen fertilizer. After all, an excessive amount of them leads to the fact that the plant grows. It will have strong juicy branches, large leaves, but the flower ovary on such a bush is poorly formed, usually it is small and weak. There will be practically no harvest from such a plant. Also, excessive watering of tomatoes in combination with low light can lead to such consequences.
But experienced gardeners know that this can be fixed: for this you need to stop watering tomatoes (it takes about 10 days not to moisten the soil under them). You may not get anything if during the day the temperature is below +25 0С, and at night - +22 0С. To obtain at least some kind of crop from bushes in which greenery is overdeveloped, root dressing of the tomato with superphosphate must be carried out. This will help stop their growth, because it has been experimentally established that almost 95% of the phosphorus absorbed by plants goes just for the formation and growth of fruits. For greater efficiency, during the daytime, flower brushes can be shaken a little by hand: this is how they are pollinated.
The third top dressing of a tomato is carried out 2-3 weeks after the second. The mixture used should also notcontain nitrogen fertilizers, it is enough that it contains only phosphorus and potassium. In addition to root feeding, pollination of tomatoes with special preparations is effective, which contribute to the formation of flower ovaries, the formation and acceleration of fruit ripening.
If you decide not to prepare fertilizers yourself, but to apply balanced industrial options, then carefully read the instructions and follow all the points indicated in it. Growers know better how to dilute their product, how often to water or spray tomatoes with it.
