Tomato plants need high-quality, nutrient-dense soil, but it doesn’t have to be in the ground; tomatoes lend themselves very well to container gardening, Daigre says. Fill containers with a premium potting soil, he suggests, “and that means not cheap. Cheap potting soils are dust. You want something with a lot of ingredients: bat guano, forest products, oyster shell, lobster shell … whatever you can get.”
And it doesn’t have to go into a traditional plant pot. “Anything that holds water and also drains can be a tomato container, as long as it’s big,” Daigre says. In addition to giving the roots ample room to grow, “it’s important that you get that plant enough real estate so that it’s not hot one minute, cold the next, or wet one minute, dry the next,” he adds. “I’ve seen people plant in old troughs, buckets of various kinds, baskets of various kinds. It just depends on what’s in the garage and what’s big enough.”
Daigre does recommend lighter-colored containers, which absorb less heat on a sunny day. “In a black pot on concrete or asphalt, the sun just fries the roots all summer,” he says. “One of our mantras in container gardening is ‘Guard the pot.’ When the summer gets hot, that means insulate: Push other plants around it, put a canvas around it, put some old curtains around it. Then your plant’s in a container more like the ground, its roots are deep and cool, and it can concentrate on making tomatoes.”
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