There’s a gardener in all of us and growing our own tomatoes is one of the easiest ways to begin. Growing hanging tomato plants is simple to do and can fit around even the busiest of lifestyles. If limited space is a problem, then growing your plants upside down in a hanging planter is the perfect answer.
Having little or no space to grow tomatoes
Not everyone has access to a large garden to grow their own tomatoes and this can put many “beginner gardeners “off before they even start. We’ve all seen these wonderful pictures of big green tomato plants with succulent looking tomatoes on them, growing in what seems to be at least half an acre of garden. But what if we don’t have that sort of area to play with? What if we live in a flat or an apartment and we don’t have any garden at all?
Fitting tomato growing in around a busy lifestyle
The traditional or standard way to grow tomato plants is to spend quite a lot of time turning over and specially preparing the soil. Having nurtured your plants from tiny seeds, transplanted them up to larger pots and then planted them in your garden you have then got to begin contending with pests and diseases. Regular weeding and then staking or caging your plants is also a very time consuming process.
A perfect solution to having a small amount of space is to grow hanging tomato plants. Just like the varieties that you grow outside in a garden they will still need access to plenty of sunlight. But growing them in a hanging planter also eliminates many inherent problems that you would normally face with planting in a garden.
1 – You won’t need to weed them. Forget having to bend over constantly and getting a bad back!
2 – Depending on where you hang them it would be virtually impossible for pests such as horn worm to reach them.
3 – Staking is not necessary as they will grow upside down.
4 – Hanging the planters also avoids blossom end rot because the stems don’t bend and therefore the fruits never touch the ground.
5 – You can easily re-position them to gain optimum sunlight exposure.
Setting up your Hanging Planter
Although there are proper hanging planters you can buy, it really isn’t necessary to spend money on them. You can use many different things to grow your tomatoes in including items such as buckets and old water barrels. Make sure whatever you choose to use that it has a sturdy handle or something that is strong enough to hang it up with.
Preparing your container
You will need to cut a hole in the bottom of your container big enough to feed your new tomato plant through. A neat little trick you can use to stop any soil falling down onto you when watering your plants is to use some sphagnum moss packed down tightly in the bottom of the container. Once you have made these basic preparations you can then insert your plant. It is very important to take care not to damage the fragile roots at this stage. Once in place you need to fill your planter with your soil. This needs to be a good compost soil made up of perlite, vermiculite and moss peat. To avoid any air pockets you need to lightly tap the soil down. You final stage is to water the soil just enough to keep it moist.
Once all of these steps have been completed it’s now time to hang your tomato plants. Wherever you decide to locate your tomatoes, either inside or outside, make sure they will have access to at least 6 to 8 hours of sunlight each day. If space is a bit tight, you may find that where you are placing your plants looses sunlight during certain times of day. This is no problem because your plants are not stuck in the ground so it’s easy to move the containers around!
Just because lack of space is a problem, it shouldn’t stop you from growing your own delicious tomatoes. Growing hanging tomato plants is a great solution that can avoid some of the more time consuming elements of tomato gardening. Choosing the right variety of tomato to grow is also something you need to be aware of. You should probably look at the smaller types such as cherry or roma.