Features
What Do Organic Growers Do About Tomato Troubles?
Choice of variety is important with tomatoes. Organic gardeners prefer the old established varieties. Modern hybrids might grow better in good summers but averaged over good and bad seasons open pollinated varieties such as Alicante or Moneymaker consistently produce healthy plants and good crops. Alicante is more resistant to mildew and probably has the better flavour. However if flavour is your top priority then you won't beat organically-grown Gardeners Delight. Tomato seeds are easy to save and not being hybrids, these varieties can be used to provide your own organic seed for future crops.
Outdoor tomatoes
Growing tomatoes outdoors is a risk. In milder areas some organic gardeners get good crops with the bush variety Alfresco. It has a good resistance to diseases and produces an abundance of medium sized fruits.
But with outdoor crops, if the weather is bad in late August and September you can be left with a lot of green tomatoes infected with various fungal diseases. Mulching your plants will prevent the tomatoes from lying on wet soil and reduce the risk of these diseases. If your ground is not level and you use a mulch of black plastic, pools of water may gather on parts of the plastic. Where this happens, pierce a small hole in the plastic to allow the water to drain away.
Feeding
Regular feeding of comfrey or seaweed will prevent most of the deficiency diseases that affect tomatoes. Placing dried comfrey leaves around your plants is an easy way of feeding and mulching them at the same time. Woodash incorporated into the soil at planting, or mixed with water and applied around the roots of growing plants, will help to prevent potash deficiency.
Pests
Greenfly and whitefly are the most common pests. Planting marigolds near tomatoes will keep white fly away and poached egg plants will encourage the aphid eating hoverfly. Unfortunately the hoverfly often doesn't arrive until after the greenfly is well established- so you may have to depend on ladybirds in the meantime.
Tomato troubles
If you are only growing a small number of plants, then collecting ladybirds in matchboxes and placing them on the plants should be enough to deal with them.
Both pests are easy to control if spotted in time. A soft soap solution will take care of whitefly. For greenfly, soak nettles in water overnight and spray the affected plants.
Derris will also deal with both pests. But you are considering using it, an appropriate biological control is a safer alternative.
Nicotine was a traditional solution for many pests but is now classed as a dangerous poison. It might be interesting to discover if the plants of gardeners who enjoy a smoke while they work are more pest free ?
Bio-dynamic tomatoes?
Bio-dynamic gardeners, whose methods could best be described as a mixture of homeopathy and astrology, believe tomato plants do best if grown on their own compost. Tomato plants are composted separately and the compost used for the following year's crop. For foliar feeding they use the plants themselves, soaking the removed side shoots in water for a few days and applying the solution to the plants. Definitely a highly economical way to produce home-grown tomatoes!
