In this latest post, we tell you (actually, show you, since we made a video) how to cage up your tomato plants for maximum height and maximum deliciousness. If you did any tomato planting in Nevada this spring, those things should be getting reasonably tall by now. But let’s make them taller. Does 8 feet+ sound good? It does to us.
That’s where the cage comes in. Big, sturdy tomato plants need big, sturdy cages. And of course, the better the soil, the better the size and taste of your tomatoes. That’s why we fed our thirsty plants a little compost tea and satisfied their nutrient craving with some BOOST.
Click here to see how we did it, and read on for a little background.
NOTE: Back when we made this video we used something called “Soil Essence Elite Garden Boost”. But nowadays, so we have more time to focus on our gardening, we call it just plain BOOST.
It might sound crazy, but the tomato in this video was planted only two months before we made this tape. From May to July, that 8-foot goal was already almost within reach (literally).
We nurtured this tomato up with a Wall-O-Water until it was almost climbing out of the thing and begging us for a cage. Next, we removed the Wall-O-Water and chucked in the storage shed for next year. You don’t have to, but we can tell you from experience: if you leave a Wall-O-Water on all season long, the fruit won’t grow inside the wall and you’ll probably lose about 1.5 feet of growing area on the plant.
Then it was cage time. Now, we like our tomato plants big, so we need big cages. We’re talking 7 to 9 feet tall. (You can’t just go pick those up at the garden store, so we actually make our own.) We set it on there straight and sturdy and tried not to stress it out or break off too many of its branches.
After caging we poured our thirsty tomato some freshly steeped compost tea (learn to make some here) as we do every two weeks to keep it happy with stimulating ingredients.
Now bear in mind, tomato plants these days have very refined taste. Only the best compost tea—made from the best compost—will do. Most composts out there lack effective amounts of soluble nutrients and added minerals, which means making tea out of them won’t elevate your tomatoes to such epic heights (it’ll pretty much just get ‘em wet!).
Of course, our tomatoes love our compost tea like Popeye loves spinach, because we make it out of The Most Satisfying All-natural Soil Amendment Available, BOOST, and we recommend you do, too.
And with that, we set our caged tomato on our patio with a nice view of the morning sun, watered it normally, BOOSTed it with compost tea every two weeks and, eventually, feasted on nice, big tomatoes from some nice, big plants.
