Growing Tomatoes in Containers

You can grow ANY tomato variety in a pot, IF you do it right! Growing tomatoes in pots or containers is much more demanding than growing them directly in the ground. They rely on you for all of their needs.

Use at least a 15-gallon container.  This will hold only one plant. The container must provide drainage. Anything other than a fabric pot will need drainage holes (not merely gravel in the bottom). If you use black or dark-colored plastic for your container, at some point around mid-June you will need to start shading the dark color from the sun. If you don't, no amount of water will keep your tomato happy.

We recommend E.B. Stone Raised Bed & Potting Mix. Other good potting soils (aka “mixes”): E.B. Stone Bhang, Recipe 420, or Fox Farms Ocean Forest. You will also be adding amendments to the potting soil, but first add four inches of potting soil on the bottom. Our perfect planting amendments for pots are: 1 cup of Alfalfa Meal, 1 cup EB Stone Tomato & Vegetable Food 4-5-3, 1 cup Bone Meal, four or five crushed chicken eggshells, 1 cup 100% pure worm castings, two aspirin tablets. Give the amendments a little swirl with the soil, add some more soil, and plant your tomato deeply in the soil, about halfway up its stem (bury half the plant, in other words, leaving only the upper half sticking up out of the pot). Be sure to sprinkle 1⁄3 cup or so of Mykos Mycorrhizal Fungi directly onto your pre-moistened rootball as you hold it over your planting hole, so that the Mykos that doesn’t stick to the rootball will fall directly underneath it and you will end up placing the rootball onto the spilled Mykos. Then backfill with more potting soil. Be sure to fill the pot up to the tippy top. No need to press down, watering will compress the soil just fine. 

Water them in well. We'll water them once, wait about 10 minutes, then water again, wait, then again. It takes a lot of water to completely saturate the potting soil. Even if you see water draining out of the holes, that doesn't necessarily mean the rootball is soaked. You need not water them like this each time thereafter, though.

The tomato in the pot will still need staking. We recommend 7-foot tall concrete reinforcing wire coiled into a two-foot diameter cage. The two-foot wide cages can go right over a 20-gallon pot and contact the ground. For extra support, you can tie your cage to a 5-foot rebar stake pounded into the ground next to the pot. Sometimes we have those cages for sale. Email us at info@loveapplefarms.com to inquire.

Supplemental fertilizing: Your plants will decline in health around July 1st if you don't start fertilizing them. Use worm casting tea. Mix two big handfuls (about ⅔ - 1 cup)  in a 5-gallon bucket of water, add 2 T molasses, drop in an aquarium bubbler (brew for 24 hours)  and fertilize at least once a week. Or you can use a liquid organic all-purpose fertilizer once a week. You'll need at least one gallon of the diluted-according-

to-directions fertilizer per pot per week. Start the fertilizing regimen around July 1st.  Along about July 1st another thing happens, and that is the plant is getting big and the weather is getting hot. You need to start watering more often. You may end up watering every other day or even every day. When a tomato is grown in the ground, it never needs watering that often. But in a pot, it does (once the plant gets big and the weather gets hot). 

Any questions? Email Zach at info@loveapplefarms.com. Or take our Tomato Masters class!