Tomato and Pepper Care Guide

So, You Have Some Plants

A Tomato and Pepper Plant Care Guide

Thank you for selecting my tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum)and/or pepper(Capsicum annuum) plants. With proper care, these plant(s) should provide you with hours of entertainment and enjoyment. This guide is designed to help you maximize your efforts in caring for these wonderful leafy friends.

Before You Plant

Coddle your babies. They are delicate living things at this stage. Due to the chilly weather of late, neither the tomatoes nor peppers are ready to permanently stay outdoors. You need to help them become ready. Each day for the next week, you should place your plants outside in the sun for ever increasing amounts of time. At first, find a wind sheltered location. At this stage; the wind, the rain, the cold, and the sun are the plant’s enemies. Gradually acclimate your plants to these environmental features. I’ve found that these plants like sitting under my shady maple for large chunks of the day with me putting them out for a dip in full sun several hours at a time.

You can tell that they are ready to plant when you see the main stem thicken and turn a purplish green (not always). The leaves will broaden and tend to get a darker, thicker texture.

Planting Your Plant

Be patient. Around these parts many people like to rush their tomatoes and peppers into the ground only to see them beaten down by harsh May winds and cool May temperatures. I usually check the weather and aim for planting sometime in mid to late May. I look for a stretch of weather where the temperatures will be in the 70&80’s in the day and mid-50’s to 60 at night. This usually doesn’t consistently happen until later in May around here. Beware of windy forecasts. Delicate tomatoes and peppers are no match for abusive winds.

I usually plant my babies in a rich home of compost/peat moss and soil mixed. If you’re a fertilizer kind of person, you can add a few grains of 10-10-10 all purpose fertilizer or you can add one of many organic, natural products on the market.

I usually put the plants into the ground and leave the top three to four sets of leaves above ground. Any leaves that will be underground, I strip off. If the plant is especially long (Ping Pong and a few others) you may consider the trenching method. Strip the lower leaves as I indicated then lay the tomato in the ground on its side in a trench filled with your mixtures of compost/soil. Gently bend the top of the plant in such a way that the top sets of leaves break the surface. New roots will form along the underground stem, making your plant a more powerful nutrient gatherer.

Building a small dirt moat around your plant will aid the watering process now and later in the season. Once you have your plant in the ground, water it liberally. Even if you’re a conservative, it’s important to be liberal with water.

Visit your plant often and talk with it. It’s been proven that plants that are spoken to grow stronger and more rigorously. Actually, the closer you speak to it, the better. You give off carbon dioxide and the plants think this gas from you is the best present ever. They, of course, take your gift of CO2 and convert it into healthy oxygen after they strip what they need from it. Please don’t dwell too much on the fact that your entire life, you’ve been breathing plant waste.

Mid-Life

As your tomatoes and peppers grow, they will become more and more independent. I usually stake or surround these varieties with wire cages. The plants need support of some kind to hold the massive quantities of fruit that they will produce. Smaller ornamental pepper varieties may not need any support.

You may hear some people talk about “picking off tomato suckers.” Suckers are little shoots that grow in the space between where a leaf stem meets the main plant stem. If you don’t pick off these growths, the suckers will grow and become a satellite stem. This isn’t necessarily bad. I usually let two or three grow so that my tomato plant bushes out a bit. When you get more than that, the plant tends to put more emphasis into leaf growth than fruit growth. Obviously we’re all about fruit growth since eating tomato leaves would be very, very bad for you. I like to let some suckers get a little large, then pick them off. Then I take the picked sucker and plant it in the ground. With care and luck, it will grow into a new tomato plant. Pepper plants do not develop suckers.

Harvesting the Fruit

When they are ripe, pick them and eat them before the neighborhood skunk or groundhog get them. Skinks, groundhogs, as well as my beautiful, lovable, and annoying black chow/lab mutt love my tomatoes. They sneak in and snatch them. The wild critters tend to only take a few bites and leave the rest on the vine. The pooch tends to swallow the whole thing.

Generally the peppers tend to develop into a purple, green, or yellow color then they switch over to a red color when at their maximum ripeness. Sweet Bananas are ripe when they turn yellow. The hot peppers are really fiery when they turn red, except for Habaneras, which reaches fire hotness as a yellow fruit.

No Matter what, enjoy your plants. Revel in their beauty. Drink in their goodness. Tend them when they’re in need. From this point to its old age your new plants have wonderful surprises in store for you.*

(*horn worms, maggot flies, white flies, bacteria wilt, tobacco mosaic virus, aphids, blossom end rot, and the mange)