organic tomato magic -...

Organic Tomato Magicby Kacper Postawski

www.JoyfulTomato.comCopyright, 2006 © Powerful Life, Inc

Organic Tomato MagicHow to Grow Mouth-Watering Organic Tomatoes In

Half The Time, With Less Effort, And Twice The Numbers!

By Kacper Postawski





Table of Contents

What Is a Real Tomato?… Page 3

You’re Not Growing Tomatoes, You’re Growing Leaves!... Page 8

Tomato Plant Grooming...Explained in Detail... Page 14

The House Of The Rising Sun... 0

Snake On a Line... Page 26

Mass Pollination in 5 Minutes or Less... Page 30

It Won’t Grow Until The Cows Come Home... Page 33

Watering With A Vengeance... Page 42

Sickness and Disease... Page 44

What If Your Plants Do Get Fungal Disease? … Page 47

Growing Other Plants in Your Green-House... Page 49

Genetic Deformations and Growing Great Plants Year After Year... Page 52







What Is a Real Tomato?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an amateur gardener with a small backyard patch of space to work with, or if you own acres of land suitable for mass production. This little guide is going to reveal to you the secrets of growing the most beautiful, tasty tomatoes you’ve ever experienced.

That may sound cheesy, but really, I’m extremely excited to be writing this to you today. I’m sitting here in the living room of my grandfather’s house, in Poland, Europe. My grandfather, Stan, spent almost his entire life in agriculture. Not the agriculture that is responsible for the produce that you and I are used to when we walk into the grocery store. Real Agriculture. Real Food. Let’s take the tomato for example, as it is the subject of this report.

Now, when you cut open a tomato, what happens?

Well, first of all, notice that most tomatoes you buy today are thick skinned, they’re uneven, and most of them are deformed. Cutting them is almost like trying to saw your arm off. Unless you have an extremely sharp knife, cutting tomatoes is a massacre. You get this thing, or a couple of them, you cut them open. The first thing that you’ll see is segregations in the tomato, as if it had walls, or veins, it’s freaky. There’s almost no smell to it, except for a light scent.

When you cut it open, some kind of glue like substance pours out of the inside and spills all over your cutting board. What you’re left with, are almost tasteless strips of red membrane which sometimes have a few seeds stuck to it.

Often, this red inner membrane isn’t red at all, but green towards the center...

It seems natural when you think about it; after all, almost all tomatoes today look like that. If







you haven’t seen a real tomato before, you probably might think that this is what a tomato is supposed to be like which most people do.

What you’re going to realize after reading this book and my grandfather’s tomato wisdom, is that this isn’t a tomato at all!

It’s a Genetically Deformed Mutant!

Why do tomatoes and most produce in the stores look like this these days? Many reasons, but it’s mostly due to consumer ignorance, poor knowledge, and cost savings. Most producers now-a-days will do anything to make the easiest and cheapest bang for the buck, and feed the masses with imposter produce.

If you’re sick of imposter tomatoes, and you want the real thing, the simple yet powerful wisdom you’ll find in this quick report will be priceless.

The funny thing is that there is a cheaper way to grow beautiful, delicious tomatoes, in half the time, with twice the results in numbers produced. And doing so without any steroids or damaging chemical additives all with simple age-old gardening wisdom.

My grandfather once grew over 12 TONS of organic tomatoes per season. That’s 12,000 Kilograms, or about 20,000 lbs, all in just 2 mid sized green houses! People from cities over 60 miles away would drive here just for those tomatoes. They were that mouth-watering delicious! Living in a poor country, with little money to feed his 3 children, he did most of this work by himself.

Every one of his friends who owned farms asked him about his supposed secret. It wasn’t a secret at all. He would tell it to them straight. They continued producing junk; he kept on making the good stuff. Even though they knew the secret... Why? I don’t know.







I guess people don’t like change. Or maybe they were too proud to change their ways.

But here it is; now it’s yours. If my grandfather can grow 12 tons of organic tomatoes with 2 mid sized green houses, imagine what you can do yourself with whatever garden, farm, or space you have.

Now, when I say "organic tomatoes”, most people probably have no idea what this is, or why I’m so excited to be talking about it. So before we move on, here’s what I mean when I say "real tomato", or "organic tomato".

Here’s what I remember a real tomato to be:

When I was young, my grandfather grew incredible produce in a little farm here in Poland. He grew all kinds of things including berries and roses, but mostly vegetables. Coming from a poor family, he had to rely only on his knowledge of gardening, passed down from generations, to grow produce that people would buy.

Everything my grandfather knew came from decades of experience, and maybe a little bit of scientific knowledge that was available during the latter period of this time. The bottom line is the tomatoes he would grow were absolutely mouth watering! What is the difference between the tomatoes you see sold today and these tomatoes?

The first thing was their evenness. Every tomato was exactly the same size. This is almost impossible to believe today. Look at tomatoes on the shelf today, they’re all different sizes. This isn’t natural, it’s genetic deformation.

Every tomato had a STRONG amazing aroma to it. You could smell these tomatoes without even cutting them. When you brought a batch of tomatoes into the kitchen from the garden, the smell would fill your nose, even from several feet away.

The skin of the tomato wasn’t thick at all, it was paper thin. The skin was completely digestible and had a texture similar to that of a peach, except without the fuzz. (When you touch a tomato now, the skin feels almost like it’s made of plastic)







When you cut his tomatoes open, it was amazing!

The wonderful smell of the tomato would fill the entire room. It’s the same thing that happens with oranges when you peel them in a room, almost everyone will be able to smell them. There was no glue-like substance in the tomato, or odd white, green or red vein like membranes. It was like cutting open a peach. Solid meat!

The tomato was filled with a lush juicy substance! Literally almost like a peach. If you took a tomato that is sold in stores now, and compared it to his, it would be unrecognizable as the tomatoes you've grown accustomed to. You’d think grandfather's was a different fruit entirely!

(Actually, people think tomatoes are vegetables because of the way they look and taste today. Grow tomatoes this way and you’ll see why.)

If you took a knife to the tomato, as opposed to just biting into that juicy sucker, the tomato slices would cut like slices of cheese. They were flexible, and held their form unlike current tomatoes, which explode into a puddle of gush upon cutting.

And the TASTE!

It tasted SWEET! Like a fruit, duh!

What do tomatoes taste like now? Nothing close to "sweet” You could eat these tomatoes like apples.

Now people put salt on their tomatoes, as if they had to use it to take some bad taste out, or actually give it some taste.

It’s a sad thing what has happened to the tomato, but here are the keys to producing these amazing vegetable/fruits (as I like to call them). Don’t take my word for it; just check it out for yourself. Just don’t blame me when you have neighbors, friends and relatives banging on your







door every day asking you if you’ve got any of these left.

(Which of course you will because you’ll have so many of them, you won’t know what to do with all of them!)







Tomato Secret One

You’re Not Growing Tomatoes, You’re Growing Leaves!

Normally if you were reading a book like this, you’d expect it to start with a section like, "Here’s how to plant the seed... Prepare the soil” etcetera...

However; this isn’t a normal book... instead, I’m going to start this off with the most exciting chapter about Tomatoes you’ve ever read. I’m going to start off with the grand Kaboom! Secret of growing tomatoes.

If you do just this one thing, you’re going to experience a world of a difference in your tomatoes. This will make your tomatoes grow faster...it will make the tomato plant produce 4 to 10 times more tomatoes, and it will make your tomatoes juicier than you’ve ever tasted.

It will also protect your tomato plants from rot, fungus and disease. If you don’t do it, there is a very high chance that in the 2nd month of growing, your tomato plants will not make it. Especially if the weather gets a little cold, your plants could die very quickly. I’ve seen 2 month old tomato plants completely die in 48 hours. This is probably why it’s important I tell you about this first.

This one tip is so basic, yet, from what my grandfather has told me, it is still surprising how many people don’t do it, don’t know about it, or they know about it, and still don’t do it!

If you’re already growing tomatoes, all you need to do is go out to your garden/







green house today and do this. Within 4 weeks you’ll have so many tomato flowers; when they ripen, you’ll have to carry them out in crates.

Or, if you have already ripening flowers, they will ripen much quicker, and be much healthier, juicier, and tastier.

To start explaining this secret, let’s listen to one of my grandpa’s short tomato gardening stories.

Grandpa Story #1

About 20 years ago I was visiting a friend in Florida. He lived far away from the city where there were a lot of crops and lots of fertile land. When I got to his house, he quickly took me to the garden to show me his tomato plants.

When he took me to the garden, I shrieked! Where I expected to see tomato plants, I saw instead, my worst nightmare as an experienced tomato producer. Tomato Plants WITH Leaves!

"What are you doing?” I asked. My friend looked bewildered. "You’re not growing tomatoes my friend, you’re growing leaves.”

To his protest, I quickly found a pair of gloves and some cutters. I spent an hour in his garden and chopped all the leaves off his tomato plants. When I was done, there was nothing left. Where there were sprouting bushes of green leaves before, were now bare skinny stems, as if winter had come and took everything off in an hour.

He came back and yelped in horror at what he saw, "Stan! What have you done to my tomato plants? You cut everything off! It looks horrible! They’re going to die.”

I told him to wait and see. In 3 weeks, when I was back at home, he called me all the way from Florida to say "Stan, I can’t believe it, I have so many tomatoes! I’ve started giving them away to the neighbors; I don’t know what to do with all of them.

”Told you so!”







I hope you enjoyed that short story. Now, let me explain this to you in detail with some science behind it.

The number one, topmost mistake tomato gardeners do, unknowingly, is growing tomato plants with leaves. It’s an innocent mistake… because, after all, we’re used to seeing plants with leaves.

With any other fruit or vegetable, you can simply plant it in the ground, add some random fertilizer and fruit or vegetable food, water it, and see what happens. This is not the case with the tomato.

Most of the time when you look at tomato plants in gardens; they’re full of leaves and resemble bushes. This is what happens when you just plant it, and see what happens. After you read what I’m about to tell you, you’ll be far ahead of the amateur tomato gardener.

There’s a special technique for growing tomatoes that professional tomato producers have known for decades, I don’t know what it’s called, so we’ll just call it grooming your tomato plant.

Here is the general rule of thumb for the tomato plant, the science of which I’ll be repeating and explaining in much more detail in the latter part of this book.

The Tomato Plant Two Golden Rules

WATER &

AIR

Here’s where the secret is: The tomato plant is a water and oxygen plant. It is not a sunlight plant. It needs warm weather to grow, yes, but it doesn’t rely heavily on photosynthesis (conversion of sunlight to energy.)







Most people do really well on the water, but they mess up on the air. Why?

Because they’re growing LEAVES, not Tomatoes!

Do you know how many leaves a tomato plant really needs to thrive? Are you ready for this?

A Grand total of.....

*Drum roll...........

3 Leaves! Yes. 3 little leaves. Yet, at the 8 week mark, most people will have about 40 or 80 leaves! This is serious trouble for the tomato plants. Here’s why.

1. The tomato leaves and the leaf branches suck away all the food, water, and energy from the fruit! They need to be removed so that the food, water, and energy go into the flowers! (The fruit!)

2. The tomato leaves form a thick coating around the entire tomato plant. Preventing the flow of oxygen to the plant! You’d think the tomato plant could breathe, but it’s suffocating!

The tomato plant needs a constant flow of fresh air! The air needs to be re-circulated about 60 times per minute. The leaves completely stop this process.

3. If the weather becomes too humid, the huge jungle of leaves offers a nice damp area for fungal diseases and all kinds of other nasty stuff to form and kill your plants within 48 hours or less.







4. If you’re growing tomatoes outdoors, and it rains, the damp leaves offer a spring board for fungal diseases.

The list goes on and on, however, point 1 and 2 are most important. I’ll say it again...

The tomato plant needs a constant flow of fresh air! The air needs to be re-circulated about 60 times per minute. The leaves completely stop this process.

And

The tomato leaves and the leaf branches suck away all the food, water, and energy from the fruit! They need to be removed so that the food, water, and energy go into the

flowers! (The fruit!)

RESULT = Fewer Tomato Flowers

A Much Lower Turn-Out of Fruit, Poor Tomato Quality,

Dwarfed, Often Deformed TomatoesTomato Plants Take Longer Mature

It’s a simple case of energy re-direction. The tomato plant needs only 3 leaves to assimilate carbon-dioxide and absorb the suns energy. The rest of the leaves are un-necessary. They’re dead waste.

If you want to grow incredible tasting tomatoes in half the time and produce 3 to 10 times more tomatoes, you need to use this secret.

When you remove the leaves from the plant as it grows using this special technique, amazing things begin to happen with your tomato plant. All the energy that would normally be used to growing and sustaining the thick tomato branches and the bushy leaves goes right into the flowers and the fruit. The tomato plant then produces







more fruit, the fruit grows quicker, and the fruit is much tastier and healthier!

As explained in later chapters, the tomato plant is a very sensitive plant. It is very prone to fungal diseases. Almost half the time, amateur tomato gardeners loose entire harvests due to fungal diseases, which surprisingly attack the plants when they’re full of leaves! Hmmm, co-incidence?

I’ve seen entire tomato plants, with almost ripe fruit, completely wiped out by fungal disease in 48 hours! The disease takes out everything, including all the fruit.

If you follow this simple grooming secret, it drastically reduces the chance of this happening, why? Because, it allows the plant even and unlimited access to fresh air which keeps the plant happy, healthy and strong.

Don’t take my word for it, go out and give it a try, and see how quickly your tomatoes will grow into beautiful tasty fruit! You’ll have so many of them you’ll need a wheel barrel to carry them out of the garden.







Tomato Secret Two

Tomato Plant Grooming...Explained in Detail...

In the previous chapter I gave away the biggest tomato gardening secret known to man. However, some serious complications can arise if you do not know how to do it right, so we’re going to get down to the details here.

As we go along, keep in mind what we’re trying to achieve.

1. We’re trimming un-necessary leaves to increase vital airflow to the plants, increase flow of vitamins and nutrients to the fruit flowers, not the leaves or leaf branches, to give us juicy incredible fruit.

2. We want to always leave only 3 leaves on the top of the plant to act as solar panels and CO2 (carbon-dioxide) assimilators for the plant.

3. Our primary goal is also to keep the plant ALIVE, we do not want to kill it; we do not want it to get sick, which is so common in tomato plants. Once your tomato plants get sick, you can usually kiss them good-bye.

If you groom your plants improperly, you can greatly increase the risk of disease to the plants, which is why this Chapter is so important.

Take out a piece of paper and write this down:

‘‘I Will Never Use Scissors or Knives To Groom My Tomato Plants!’’

When you use scissors or a knife on the plant, you are potentially introducing bacteria and other harmful particles into the open wounds of the plant.

Always Use Your Hands! It’s best if you use gloves. If you remember this, then







you’ve just saved yourself a lot of frustration of having dead, sick plants.

Next,

Now that you’re using your hands to trim the plants, what you want to be doing is snapping off the unnecessary branches right at the stem of the plant. You do NOT want to break the branches in half and have them sticking out like sawed off limbs (hence, you don’t want to use a knife)

Why? Because if you do not properly and completely remove the branches; they will just keep growing, often more and faster. Just like body hair in men, the more you cut it, the more it grows :)

What you want is a nice clean snap right at the stem of the plant; you want the open wound to heal quickly and the plant to continue to grow upwards. Always straight up, this maximizes the amount of fruit you get!

How to remove the branches correctly:







Note: It’s really ideal to wear gloves for this; tomatoes are a very strong smelling plant and leave your hands with a hard to wash off green tissue that has a strong tomato odor. Unless you enjoy the smell of tomato all over your body. It itches too! ☺

Grooming Step by Step

Now that you know the proper technique for removing the unnecessary branches, the rest is really easily.

Just keep this rule of thumb in mind:

1. Leave three leaves at the top

2. When a flower patch appears, remove the leaf branch underneath it.

If you’ve never grown tomato plants, here’s how they will typically grow:

1. The first branch will be a branch with leaves.

2. The next branch will be a branch with flowers (once pollinated will become tomatoes).

3. The next branch will be a branch with leaves.

4. Flower branch.

5. Leaf branch.

6. Flower branch.

And on and on and on :) You get the flow.

Now, when people usually grow tomato plants, (unaware of the grooming secret) this isn’t always the case. Because the tomato plant will not only grow leaf branches, it will grow entirely separate stems and entirely new tomato plants!

Result: The tomato plant turns into a vine-like plant that wraps around everything







it can find, grows like a weed, full of leaves, spider-webs, ant colonies, and who-knows-what.

Looking at a plant like this, you would not be able to tell which branch came first, where is what... You’re happy if you see a few tomatoes on there. But in reality, this plant is seriously underdeveloped and is producing minimal fruit due to the mass of leaves and branches.

This is why it is so important to keep grooming your plant and removing branches that don’t show flowers.

When you do groom your tomato plants like this, they will grow straight up, like neatly organized little soldiers. When time for fruit comes, and you walk into your green-house, they’ll look like assorted apple trees :-)

If you’re finding this hard to picture in your head, here are a couple of pictures to help you visualize this before you do it in practice:

Picture 1Tomato Plant Begins to Grow With Some Leaves.

Leave the plant alone to grow; it's not time to groom yet.







Picture 2

As the plant continues to grow, and the first fruit flower branch appears, remove the leaf branch below. Continue this process as the plant grows and more and more leaf

branches begin to appear. Warning: If you do not remove the leaf branches they will continue growing until monstrous in size!

New Stems From Open Wounds

As I said just before those pictures, the tomato plant will not only grow new branches, but often, entirely new stems (This is not good!).

Especially, if you just snapped off a leaf branch, and left an open wound. Often while healing from the wound, the tomato plant will try to grow an entirely new stem. You can tell this because it will appear like a little cone that resembles the pointy top of the plant.

You want to remove these as soon as possible. They can grow extremely fast, you







may be surprised to come back to your garden after being away during the weekend and find you have 3 new stems growing in different locations.

If you do notice new stems growing from the places where the branches where snapped off, do not remove them too soon, they're soft and you might make a mess and not break them off completely. You want to snap them off cleanly, just like the branches.

Wait until the new stem is just over a centimeter in length (half an inch), grab it with your thumb and index finger, if you haven’t yet lost them due to gardening accidents :-), and snap off the stem by pulling down. It should tear from the main stem and come off easily.

Your goal is for the wound (from snapping off the branch) to heal completely, without anything new growing. New stems will not always grow from the wounds, sometimes the wounds will just heal right away, sometimes you’ll have to do a little bit more grooming, and that's just how it goes.

Hot Tip: If you want a later harvest, you can wait until the new stem gets a little larger, snap it off, place it in a jar with water until it grows some roots, and then plant it. You’ll have a whole new tomato plant and even more tomatoes!







Tomato Secret Number Three

The House Of The Rising Sun...

If you want to grow great tomatoes in abundance, then you must grow them in a green-house. In this chapter and the following, I’ll explain exactly why, and exactly how to lay out your green-house, how to organize your tomato plants, and how to approach growing other plants and vegetables in the same green-house as your tomato plants (if you choose to or want to grow other stuff in the green house, like cucumbers).

The simple fact is; you will never achieve the same output of quantity and quality with your tomatoes in a garden, than you will in a green-house. This fact is true for almost any plant.

Like people, plants like to be taken care of, they like shelter, and most of them, prefer warm stable temperature.

This little piece of advice may seem trivial, but from my point of view, it’s very big. There’s nothing wrong with growing your tomatoes in an outdoor garden, many people do. In fact, when you first tell a friend that you’re planning on having an outdoor garden, one of the first things they’ll tell you is ‘‘Grow Tomatoes!’’

In my opinion, growing tomatoes in an outdoor garden is a waste of space. Why?

Well, for one, tomatoes do take up a lot of space; they need to be spaced out at least 2-3 feet apart. Unless you have a huge amount of land to work with, 4-6 tomato plants will take up quite a nice chunk... (we’ll talk about the details of planting later on).

Secondly, the amount of tomatoes your plants will produce in an outdoor garden is quite minimal. (Especially if you do not practice the tomato grooming secret we talked about.) Outside, your tomato plant will probably grow a maximum of 3 fruit batches, and you’ll be lucky if you end up with 10 tomatoes from each plant by the end of the season.







Now if you don’t like tomatoes and you’re just growing them for the heck of it, well then, no problem. But... a meal of ham (bacon) and tomato sandwiches for the family will easily take up 2 to 3 tomatoes.

If you planted 6 tomato plants in your outside garden, do the math, you’ve waited 3 months just to be able to eat a tomato sandwich for maybe 3 weeks. Not very exciting numbers :-) All this time, these plants took up 2 yards of space in your garden. In this space could have been 200 carrots, 3 mass producing zucchini plants (which love the outdoors), many onions, or whatever else you fancy to grow outdoors.

Granted, of course, that your tomato plants don’t keel over and die...which is another reason for having a green-house.

Outdoors, your plants are very likely to get sick, especially if the temperature suddenly gets really cold for a few days. I have seen this many times before. And if you haven’t groomed your tomatoes, the likely hood is they will get sick, and die.

I sure talk about this a lot don’t I? It’s important!

Now, in a green-house, it’s an entirely different story.

Tomatoes like green-houses. Period!

The tomato grooming thing is a brutal knee-to-the-groin secret for growing extraordinary tomatoes in great numbers. Coupled with heeding the advice of doing this in a green-house, and you’ll have even MORE tomatoes, and they will grow even faster.

A few things will happen when you grow tomatoes in a green-house:

1. Your tomato plants will grow taller, and produce anywhere between 7 to 10 fruit branches. Granted, you must be growing the right type of plant and not some genetically deformed breed (more on this later.) And of course, you must groom the plants for this to happen.







Of course this also depends on if you’ve got a tall enough green-house. :-)

2. Your tomato plants will grow faster, because of the more regulated, warmer temperature. If you grow the plants outdoors, it can take up to 6 months for them to reach maturity. In a green-house, the process from planting a seed to having a mouthful of juicy tomato shouldn’t take longer than 3 months.

3. Your tomato plants will be healthier, and are much less likely to keel over and die. :-)

4. A bonus is also, that you get greater control of the soil in which the plants are growing in. (More on this later)

The bonuses of having a green-house for such fragile plants are endless, like the fact that you can plant the tomatoes earlier, before the really warm weather arrives, or during the approaching end of the warm weather, and you can still get a nice harvest. A green-house is your friend with tomatoes.

Now, everything can be a blessing, and everything can be poison. Growing tomatoes in a green-house can also kill them fast too. :) So let’s review the basics to make sure this doesn’t happen.

The Temperature In Your Green-House

Tomatoes thrive best in temperatures between 18 to 28 degrees Celsius(64.4 to 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Anywhere smack in the middle of that and you’ll do great.

If it gets cold outdoors, tomato plants can easily die. Especially if the weather falls below freezing temperature and with wind chill...

In a GREEN house, however, even if the temperature falls slightly below freezing temperature, the tomatoes can still make it.

Low temperature in a green-house really isn’t something you have to be too worried about. The real trouble comes when you go OVER the comfortable temperature of







tomatoes.

On a hot, sunny, summer day, the temperature in a greenhouse can get really high! High temperature in a closed greenhouse means high humidity, high humidity means fungi and other bacteria begin to multiply at rapid rates, and that...can mean...

You guessed it...

Plants keel over and die!

Here’s the good news...

Most modern green-houses will have temperature gauges and sometimes even super-computers that regulate temperature with air-conditioning systems, shutters and whatever. So you don’t have to worry about that.

Let’s move on.

...

I’m kidding! Of course, most of us don’t have thousands of $$$ to spend on a green-house with super-computers and air-conditioning.

If you’re reading this because you’re seriously considering mass producing tomatoes, I suggest you do invest in a super-duper computer regulated air-conditioned green-house.

However, if you’re growing tomatoes in your backyard and you’ve made your own foil green-house, or bought a small one, there are simple methods to regulate the temperature if you find that it is a hot sunny day and your plants may be in danger.

#1) Immediately increase the ventilation in the green-house to a maximum. Open all windows, doors, and roof shutters if you have any.

#2) Do anything to block out the sun. Trapped sun-rays are what create the green-







house effect; remove the sun, and the temperature gets bearable for the tomatoes. You can throw a tarp over the roof, or block out the sun with any other big non-transparent material.

Some yard green-houses you get these days come with sun-shutters. If you are in the market for a green-house, try to get one with this feature, it’s priceless and will save you extra effort.

That covers a major danger of green-house tomato growing, but not the main one...

‘’HELP! I Can’t Breathe!’’ -The Air-Flow In Your Green-House

Do you remember I said tomato plants like two things most, water, and air?

They need a constant flow of fresh, warm, air. The most dangerous aspect of growing them in a green-house is the lack of fresh air-flow.

If you leave the doors and windows closed in a green-house during a warm sunny day regularly, don’t be surprised when you walk in there one day and find that your tomatoes....Yes...

They’ve keeled over and died!

Again, if you do have a super-duper air-conditioned green-house, you have no worries! Otherwise, you will need to do the alternative.

#1) Always keep AT LEAST some source of fresh air open. On a cool day opening the windows is enough.

#2) On a warm day, open ALL vents and doors. Often green-houses will have two doors, one in front and one in back. Open both so that the air can flow directly







through the green-house.

#3) Practice the tomato grooming technique described earlier religiously. Can you see how not grooming your plants at this stage would almost guarantee their doom in this situation? The leaves from the tomato plant would create an impenetrable forest of green stuff through which air wouldn’t be able to flow!

#4) Plant your tomato plants in such a way that they get maximum ventilation depending on the shape and size of the green-house. (Next chapter.)







Tomato Secret Number Four

The Snake On A Line (not a stick)

This next little trick I’m going to share with you, allowed my grandpa to grow 12,000 kilograms (12 Tons) of tomatoes in just 2 small foil tunnels. Not only did he groom his tomatoes as described, he arranged the tomato plants in a genius way, so much so that if he didn’t cut the stems at the top once they reached a height of 2.5 meters (almost 10 feet), they would keep growing much taller, and his green-house just wasn’t that tall. :)

That’s not the amazing part. The amazing part is that this little trick not only allowed the tomatoes to thrive and grow healthily without disease...

... He could also pollinate all 12 Tons of those tomatoes to be, in less than 5 minutes.

That’s what this little trick allows you to do. You’ll see how the pollinating thing works in the next chapter; first, lets get this down.

Tomatoes grow like a vine. Your goal is to keep the plant neatly groomed and always keep it growing straight up to the sky. Otherwise, it will not reach its full potential.

To do this, in an outdoor garden most people dig a hole, put a stick in the ground, and plant the tomato near the stick, then wind the tomato plant around the stick as it grows.

This can get really messy!

For one, the tomato plant becomes really heavy, if you groom it like I told you to, because you’ll get a lot more tomatoes. A stick is likely to bend over, etc. You have to go out there and fix it.

Secondly, yup, it’s the ‘‘keel over and die” factor again. If it rains, gets too moist or humid, all kinds of things can happen with this stick, which is essentially dry wood with lots of places for bacteria to grow. The wet moist wood is an excellent place for bugs,







bacteria, fungus, mold, and all kinds of nasty’s to flourish.

Combine that with the open wounds in the tomato branches as you are grooming them, and things could turn ugly.

Add to that a sudden burst of cold temperature, and you’re really walking a fine line.

Again, these are all good reasons to get a green-house. But, in a green-house, you do not want to use a simple stick in the ground. It’s just messy, and it will limit the height and health of your tomato plants. When you do everything I’ve told you to do so far, and if you follow the instructions on preparing your soil like I will soon tell you, your tomato plants will grow HUGE in this green-house!

A simple 4 foot stick simply isn’t enough. You could get a huge stick of course, but then, that’s just too many big sticks!

There is a far easier way to maximize the height of your tomatoes and reduce the risk of moist wood rubbing up against it all the time.

And that is: Medium Width Sterilized Rope.

Quite simply, you attach the bottom of the rope to a weighted object beneath the soil. Then attach the top of the rope to the top of the greenhouse (but in a very specific way.)

The rope is sterilized, so it doesn’t risk disease, and it acts as an excellent elastic guide for the tomato to grow upon. As you do the tomato grooming, you simply keep wrapping the tomato plant around the rope. It’s excellent!

Some people may opt for using fishing line, if you do, be sure you get something a little bit thicker. No, make that a lot thicker! Fishing line can be like a razor to plants.

Okay, this sounds very basic doesn’t it? So why am I making such a big fuss about it? Because, there is a very specific way you attach this rope to the top of the green house! And, it will let you pollinate your plants extremely quickly.







Attach The Line To a Bar! I will try to explain this to the best of my ability. And show you some pictures.

What you want to do is get a heavy long object, like a metal pole or bar, something that has some stability. You will mount this bar above the row of tomato plants you desire to grow, and attach it to the very top of the green-house. You will probably need a little handy-man work to do this, some nails, some screws, duct-tape, do whatever it takes, it shouldn’t be hard.

Then attach the lines, that will be the guides for the plants to this pole, and when you are finished, it should look like this.…







I apologize for my poor artwork, but can you picture organizing your green-house like this? It’s extremely efficient!

Now, wait 'til you hear how this little trick pays off big time in pollinating...







Tomato Secret Number 5

Mass Pollination In 5 Minutes Or Less!

This next little secret is just GOLD! I’m almost ashamed to give it away. It’s really funny, so here we go:

First of all, that little bar trick is kind of necessary mechanically anyway because it’s not that easy to attach a line to the roof of your green-house, and this is more convenient.

Secondly, you can use this to pollinate your tomato plants with lightening speed, at zero cost!

The Tomato plant is an asexual plant, meaning it pollinates itself with the help of wind, bees, and birds. However, in a green-house, you don’t get that much wind, and not that many helpful little bees. (If you ventilate your green-house, the presence of bees can help a lot and they will not be harmful to the plants)

When the tomato blossoms are ready to be pollinated, they will appear as bright yellow little flowers on the flower branches.

Most tomato farmers use pollinating gels, or other contraptions. They go up to each blossom individually, and dip the flower into this gel, the gel mixes up the pollen into the right space in the blossom, and poof! If the blossoms are not pollinated in time, what can often happen is they will, like most flowers, dry up and die over time. You see this very often in outdoor gardens, there are 5 juicy ripe tomatoes, and next to them 4 shriveled up blossoms. What happened? They were not pollinated.

In outdoor gardens, you can most often let nature do its work and hope the flowers will pollinate themselves, with the help of bees and wind, etc... but even that doesn’t work 100% all the time. If you want to maximize your tomato output, you just can’t do that, especially in a green-house.







Now, you probably don’t want to go around dipping your tomato blossoms in gels, and you probably don’t want to spend money on gels.

1. It costs extra money, and who wants to spend extra money on stuff you don’t need?

2. And, the gels imply...there are chemicals involved.

And since this book is all about growing beautiful ORGANIC tomatoes..., I will strictly recommend you DO NOT use any pollinating liquids containing chemicals.

My grandfather had his own way of pollinating, which was literally as easy and as cheap as a stick, and massively effective. To quote Stan, my grandfather:

"I never had a single problem with it, and not a single flower went un-pollinated. When my friends came they always asked me how I pollinated the flowers. I told them the truth! I use a stick!"

‘What are you stupid Stan? You BEAT your tomatoes with a stick?’

"No, no, no... I make vibrations”

Obviously you don’t beat your tomatoes with a stick. :) Here’s what you do.

1. You take a stick of your desired length and consistency. :-) You can find this kind of thing anywhere in your local bush or somewhere laying around on the ground. Or if you’re hell bent on spending money on this, go on out and buy a stick... or even a decorative bamboo pole.

(PS, You better find my jokes in this book funny, if you don’t, I hope your plants keel over and die... just kidding :-) )

2. So, you take this stick, and you DO NOT hit the tomato plants or the string. YOU HIT THE METAL POLE THAT THE STRING IS ATTACHED TO…SEVERAL TIMES!







Your goal is to create vibrations throughout the entire plant. To do this, bang on the pole, right at the place where the string is tied to it. This will send vibrations throughout the entire plant.

You do not want to slam the pole too hard, or too lightly; just enough so that you see the whole plant and flower branches are vibrating nicely. This creates the safe effect that a bunch of bees on each blossom would make: vibrations.

Go throughout your green house and repeat this process on each plant. Presto, you’ve pollinated all the blossoms that were ready to be pollinated.

You do this process more than once of course, you must do this continually, as more and more flower branches appear, and as more blossoms are ready to be pollinated. When you see blossoms beginning to appear, you can do this process once or twice a week, until the season is over.

Sure beats the hell out of watching TV doesn’t it? ‘’Honey, where’s my pollinating stick!?”

It’s that easy. So, get yourself a stick, and start beating some poles, err, some bars. Or, alternatively, go spend money and dip your plants in chemicals :-)

PS. Please don’t hit the string or the plant with the stick, the reasons are obvious as you can imagine. (Damaging the plant, or breaking the string/rope and having the plant fall to the ground.)







Tomato Secret Number 6

It Won’t Grow Unless TheCows Come Home

This Chapter is the single most important chapter in this entire guide to growing incredible tomatoes. That’s why I saved it for near the end of this guide.

If you noticed, I have included very little information here on planting the tomato, because that’s really not that difficult and not the most important part.

We’ve talked about grooming, ventilation, green-houses, support and pollinating, but we haven’t talked about THE most important part of growing tomatoes, or rather, the most important aspect of growing anything.

The Food! Which, in gardening terms, comes down to: THE SOIL!

Even if a body builder has the greatest equipment and work-out-plan, if you just feed him potato chips the whole year, he probably won’t make it.☺ The same goes for tomatoes and all plants...

The number one reason why plants don’t grow to their fullest ability is because often gardeners have no idea how to properly prepare the soil (the food). I can’t stress how crucial this is.

It’s really quite an innocent mistake... Let’s think about it. Normally, when you imagine plants growing, you think of getting some soil, putting some seeds in there, watering, getting a green-house or de-weeding the garden, watering some more, creating a fence so your dog and raccoons don’t mess it up, keeping the pests away from the leaves... on and on.

You put all this attention on the external aspect of growing the plant… on what you can see and touch, what sticks out of the ground...







You completely forget about what’s going on in the soil, underneath the plants. This is the invisible secret world that holds it all together and is the source of all life for plants. Or, maybe, you didn’t take this into account at all from the start.

Creating the proper soil environment for tomato plants is a precise science which entire 2 inch books have been written about in the agricultural world!

When I visited my grandfather and asked him to spill the beans on how he achieved such miraculous things with his tomatoes, I was clueless, and didn’t know the first thing about growing tomatoes.

My first guess was that he’d start telling me about taking care of the plants, or putting them near the sun. Instead, to my surprise, he spent an entire day drilling me on just this part! The soil.

I bet you don’t have all day, so I’ll save you the time, and give you the short, summarized; one chapter version of what your goal with tomato soil is...

Here it is:

The Soil MUST be:

1. NON-Acidic!!!,2. HEALTHY... (without any fungal diseases),

3. ALIVE (presence of micro-organisms and life-giving minerals), and

4. FULL OF OXYGEN.

Again, there is enough to write about this subject to write a whole book on it, so I want to keep this simple and just paint you a picture in your mind of what soil really is, why and how to achieve those 4 things with your soil.

The first thing to realize is that soil isn’t just a bunch of dirt/earth and sand. Commonly when we think of growing plants we just think of dirt, and watering the dirt.

When we think of good soil we think it’s moist and full of water, and when we think of







bad soil we think of dry soil, like those pictures we see of dry cracked dirt.

Okay, that’s part of it... but... water and dirt are as much to good soil as, well frankly as lubricant and a bed is to good sex. You won’t have good sex without the people in the bed. And you can’t have plants without the little guys in the earth/dirt and water.

‘‘What little guys?” I hear you asking and scratching your head. No, not those little guys...you and your dirty mind... all this talk about dirt and sex has taken us off track. (Pun intended! :))

What Is Soil?

I think no one says it better than my grandfather, so let’s quote him directly from my transcripts of his tomato teachings:

“We look at it and say ‘‘Look... Earth” ... but we have no idea what happens in there! My God! It’s a miracle in there... if you just see it under a microscope, it’s amazing. It’s an entire other Universe full of micro bacteria, plankton, thousands of micro elements, all life giving things that the tomato plants love and need to survive. It’s a whole living, life support giving organism!” - My Grandfather, Stan.

Are you starting to get the picture?

The soil isn’t just dirt and water; it’s an entire universe of life stuff. And the most important part that is easy to overlook about this, is that the “stuff” in the soil is ALIVE. It includes plankton, micro bacteria, bacteria, vitamins, minerals, living organisms, organisms that kill other living organism’s and bacteria that kill micro bacteria.

The soil in your garden is really like a giant, pulsating life giving power-plant! If you want to grow extraordinary tomatoes, you need to optimize this power-plant for maximum output. Your tomatoes will not thrive unless you do. Why? Because all this stuff in the soil is what they FEED on!

How do you optimize this life-giving power-plant?







The answer is: you don’t, nature does it for you. The power-plant will take care of itself, if you create the right environment for it to take care of itself.

During a trash strike in New York, you will see piles of garbage on the streets, and simultaneously you will see packs of giant rats feeding on this garbage everywhere.

At a time like this, would it make any sense to say: “Look at all this trash the rats brought!” What came first? Was it the environment for the rats or the rats?

The number one principle of all good gardening pivots around this one law: Create the right environment. So all I need to share with you from here on is just simple age old tips to create this rich soil environment, specifically for tomatoes...

General Healthiness...

First, the soil has to be healthy; it cannot have diseases, fungus, and other nasty's. The way fungal diseases in soil form, is usually over time from other plants growing and rotting in there. Do not plant tomatoes in soil that has already been used the year before, or at the very least has been used often. Get new soil! I’ll tell you what type of soil to buy later.

Over-all the soil texture must be like fresh dough for bread. It must mold in your hands, be soft and fluffy. This is great soil for incredible tomatoes.

The Acidity...

The most important part about the whole tomato soil business is ACIDITY LEVELS. The soil MUST be non-acidic for the tomato to grow and flourish!

Besides all the other reasons we’ve listed here...when you walk into the average back-yard tomato garden, and you see a miserable looking plant with very little fruit, the number one reason for this is because the soil is acidic.

When the soil is acidic, nothing survives in there. You have a bunch of dirt with water, that’s all. A lot of the micro-life elements in the soil just cannot survive in the acidic environment and your soil-power-plant is malfunctioning! The plant needs this food to







survive.

If you wanted to get really scientific about it, and many professional tomato gardeners (including my grandfather) have, the best Acidity levels for Tomatoes is 4.5 peh. “Peh” is a unit used to measure acidity in soil. Do not confuse it with the standard “pH” acidity scale, it’s different.

Don’t ask me how to measure Peh in soil, I have no idea. And I don’t think you have to, just stick to what I’m about to tell you, and your tomatoes will be more than grateful to you...

So WHY do most gardeners have highly acidic soil?

The #1 reason: They do not use the proper kind of fertilizer.

Fertilizer...

Before you got this book, I told you I would tell you how to save BIG money on fertilizer. Here it is.

There’s a reason I called this chapter: “It won’t grow until the cows come home.”

Most fertilizers these days that you buy in the garden warehouses are bird based fertilizers. (Yep, Bird Poop) It’s cheap and quick to make, has a great mark up and sells well. The trouble is that this type of fertilizer is highly acidic!

It does have its uses, you can get by growing, flowers, lettuce and other things in it. Plants that aren’t so hungry for life as tomatoes are.

But, tomato plants are hungry little buggers, they suck food, water, and air like there’s no tomorrow. They simply cannot thrive in acidic soil.

There is a much cheaper fertilizer that is perfect for growing tomatoes It is the most







over-looked fertilizer on the market.

Yes, you may have guessed it now with all the foreshadowing I’ve put in here...

Cow Fertilizer!

Cow manure based fertilizer is single-handedly the best fertilizer for tomatoes. It’s also much cheaper than the name branded stuff you buy, and has a lot more natural life-giving stuff than any of the other chemically engineered stuff.

However; be-ware, you want to get the right kind.

If it is simply cow manure based fertilizer, it could still be highly acidic. What you want ideally is cow fertilizer that has been mixed with straw, if not, then woodchips or something similar. But preferably straw.

When this fertilizer is made, they mix the cow manure with the straw and let it sit there for a while. There is a special chemical reaction that happens when the straw and manure ferments, which turns the fertilizer non-acidic.

Secondly, when the straw ferments with the manure, billions of micro life-forms appear in the fertilizer. This is all very good for the soil, as you know by now.

This fertilizer stuff is really fascinating because it’s really a science. Most of the time when you think of cow-manure and fertilizer you might picture a hill-billy farmer with a pitch fork and the smell of cow poop, and that’s as far as it goes.

But really, forget that, there’s a whole science to it. People have spent years measuring, doing tests to create the best fertilizers for certain plants. There’s probably been more research done on fertilizer than Stephen Hawking has done on the nature of the Universe.

You do not need to know all about it and all the chemical reaction stuff that happens when they make the fertilizer, even I have no clue. All you need to know is the basics, which we’re covering here, and you’ll be way ahead of the average green-thumb







gardener growing tomatoes.

The last thing I’ll add here about cow-manure fertilizer is to be careful with what you buy. Make sure the cows have been organically fed. It’s really quite scary with what has been happening with farms in America today. If you’re not aware, go to www.themeatrix.com. It’s an excellent little video put together on the whole subject, with a little humor put to it.

Minerals and Oxygen...

Okay, now that you’ve got the right type of fertilizer, what do you do with it?

You are going to mix it with your new soil, and prepare it for planting tomatoes.

You are going to use from 10 to 15 kilograms (20 to 30 pounds) of fertilizer per one square meter (3 square feet) of soil in your green-house.

Let me repeat that in American units for ease. (I’m from Canada, eh, so bare with me as I say stuff in meters first...)

Use 20 - 30 lbs of fertilizer per 3 square feet of soil in your green-house.

The number one mistake with fertilizer and tomatoes is not adding enough. You can never add too much fertilizer. If in doubt, add more.

Now that you know how much fertilizer to use, you’re going to mix it with your soil.

But wait, we haven’t discussed what type of soil you’re going buy, so let’s go over this now.

Of course, you could just mix the fertilizer with a bunch of soil you’ve dug up from underneath your lawn. Your tomatoes will still grow, but you probably won’t maximize the plants abilities. My best advice is to go and buy fresh, new soil for every new







harvest.

There are so many different types and brands of soil. Personally, I don’t know a lot about types of soil. Obviously, do not buy potting soil as this soil is not firm enough. ;-) Most soil will be labeled if it’s ideal for growing vegetables (or for us fruit!).

We want the soil to end up being like soft dough, but not too soft so the plant cannot root itself properly.

What you really DO want to know is that the soil contains at least the following minerals in high quantity.

* Phosphorous,

* Magnesium, and

* Iron,

Now-a-days soil manufacturers will often add these in excess to the soil to help plants out. But it is often still not enough to maximize the full growth of your plants. So you will be adding food supplements when watering the tomatoes (more on this later.)

Now, as to mixing the soil with the fertilizer.

Here’s the real secret to this...

Remember, the soil is an entire living organism. And there’s one thing all living organisms on this Planet have in common.

They all seem to enjoy being around this Oxygen thing.

When you mix the fertilizer with the soil, toss it around and mix it well, almost like kneading dough.

The secret is to leave the mixed, fertilized soil alone and let it rest for 7-10 days.







Why? Have you ever baked bread? When you knead the dough, you usually leave it for about half an hour so that the dough rises before you stick it in the oven. The same thing happens with new soil!

When you leave the soil as is, without watering it, for about a week, the soil will begin to absorb oxygen at a rapid rate, new life is going to begin to form in the soil, and when it comes time to planting your tomato seeds in there, they are going to grow like mad!

After that nice, already fertile, soil has been sitting there breathing for a week, the soil is just going to be vibrating and crawling with all kinds of life!

You do not want to water the soil during this time, as there would be no plants to absorb that water, and the soil can become damp for too long and turn fungal on you. Bad.

So, just wait it out for a week. If it takes 7 days for your plants to have a solid foundation. So much so that you’re going to have the juiciest, absolutely most frigg'n amazing tomatoes in the world, which all your friends and family will drool over... so do you really care about waiting 7 days? Mix the fertilizer with the soil, then wait and relax, watch reruns of Seinfeld, go play Canasta, I don’t care, do this one thing and it will make a world of a difference!

Okay, that’s enough of the soil business. You’re set.

So far, we’ve covered a lot of soil, err, ground I mean...wow I’m tired; I have been writing this book for 3 days straight.

These next few secrets are going to be a collection of “little things” that make a BIG world of difference. Some of them, like you may have guessed, draw the line between your plants thriving and…

Keeling over and Dying!

I just love saying that.







WATERING With A Vengeance!

How much and how often do you water tomatoes?

The Answer is: A LOT, and EVERY DAY.

The biggest mistake with watering tomatoes is not watering them enough. The other mistake is watering them incorrectly.

Do not get water on the tomato plant itself, and do not get water on the leaves. Unlike grass, you cannot just pour water all over the plant and expect it to be happy with you.

The tomato plant loves to be dry. If it gets too damp in the green-house, or if you get it damp directly by getting water on it, it could easily get diseased. Therefore, never pour water directly on the plants or the leaves; always pour it on the ground.

How much water?

My grandfather put it this way when he was teaching me: “Make it swim!”

As much as the visible part of the plant likes to be dry, the roots of the plant love water. Water, Nutrients and Air are the keys. Water, Water, Water, Airflow, Airflow, Airflow!

I have seen some gardeners only give the tomato plant about 2 cups of water per day. This is not enough water for the tomato. When you are growing the tomatoes in your greenhouse and the temperature is constant, the tomato will be constantly sucking in water and nutrients, and turning it into vapor, that water is going to get used up very fast, especially in the later parts of the growing process.

Obviously, when you are just seeding the plants, you do not need as much water, but when the tomato plant begins to grow, after about 4 weeks, the water consumption of







the tomato is going to go way up.

There really is no set amount of water, as it might depend on the soil you have, what’s important is that the soil is moist during the day. Just before you can visibly see that the soil is saturated with the water, this is the sweet spot for watering tomatoes.

Water this way daily, and on extremely hot days, water this way twice a day.

Food Supplements

As we explored, the greatest reason for poor growth is food deficiency. Now that you’ve gotten the best fertilizer and some new soil, often, this soil still doesn’t have enough food to sustain the tomato to maximum production.

The tomato will have enough nutrients to make it past the first month; but often, after that, it will be short of nutrients. Therefore, it’s important to add a food & nutrient supplement to the plants 2 to 3 times a week.

There are dozens of food supplements for tomatoes on the market. Make sure to get one that contains Azot, Phosphorous, Magnesium, Iron, Molibden and Nitrogen.







Sickness And Disease

No doubt as you have realized from my constant repetitiveness of this thing, the most frustrating thing about growing tomatoes is losing them to disease. If you grow tomatoes in the way I’ve described in this book, the likelihood is you’re going to have incredible tomatoes with little worry about disease. But, I’d like to point out again what are the most common sources of disease, and a few extra small things you can keep in mind to avoid having your plants keel over and die.

The top on reasons for disease with tomatoes is:

1. Poor climate conditions (growing them in colder climates, no green-house, etc…).2. Poor airflow and ventilation (because of the mass bushiness of the plant and not trimming leaves properly).3. Dampness. (Again, usually due to poor ventilation, or growing tomatoes in climates where the temperature can get cool and you don’t have a green-house.)4. Poor nutrition.

Tomatoes can get by, if necessary, without good food, but the first three points, Climate, Airflow, Dampness, are the major ones you have to worry about.

The number ONE enemy of tomatoes is FUNGUS. Or, as it’s commonly referred to in Europe, Mushroom disease. There are many different varieties of this disease.

The peskiest thing about this fungus or mushroom disease, is once it starts, there’s almost nothing you can do to save the plant, it’s as good as dead. From the time you notice the fungus, you might have only 48 hours before the whole plant is dead. Not only does it spread extremely fast, it also attacks the Tomato right at the bottom of the stem and spreads upward.







It’s also sometimes called gray fungus disease, because it appears as a grayish/black rotting of the stem that just spreads everywhere. It will travel up the stem, to the fruit branches, and to the fruit. Everything dies, including all the tomatoes you’ve had.

Again, if you have the proper environment for your tomatoes, they will be healthy. If not, fungus and other diseases might easily come by. The environment that fungal diseases love most is a humid environment.

This is why you have to be careful with Ventilation!

During the day, the tomato plant is CONSTANTLY emitting vapor, especially on a warm day. The tomato plant is sucking up the stuff from the damp earth which it loves and turns that into vapor. This is why, if you ever walk into huge commercial tomato green-houses, it will feel like you’re in a rain forest. It can get really humid really fast.

You MUST Ventilate! At night, when the temperature drops, all that humidity gets heavier, and boy, that can be a time when fungus just flourishes.

When growing tomatoes in colder climates(like Europe), if you are planting your plants in a colder month, before the spring for an early summer harvest, during the first and second month of growth you really cannot allow for intensive ventilation of the plant, unless it’s really warm...because the temperature of the air is just too cool. Your plants could easily catch a cold.

If you are planting at that time in those climates, it’s good to spray your plants with anti-fungal spray at that time. It helps. Whether you want to use chemicals or not is up to you, but that’s a fine line you’ve got to decide on.☺ If you want to avoid using chemicals all together, just plant a little later.

By the way, these are all things which sound so simple, it almost makes it hard to believe how these things could mean life/death to plants...but... all these simple things my grandfather practiced almost religiously, and, for all the decades that he grew tomatoes enough to feed entire communities, he never had any problems with disease. He always grew healthy, juicy, tomatoes, and never lost crops to fungus.

If this simple advice worked for him, it will work for you; sometimes the simplest advice is the most powerful.







Another tip I’d like to tell you about, which my grandfather also practiced rigorously, is...

NEVER wear your outside shoes into the greenhouse! Get yourself a cheap pair of shoes and put them in the green-house where they will wait for you every-time you come in, and switch to those when you come in. Or if you want to get fancy, get those surgical one-use slip-ons that come in those Kleenex® boxes, ha-ha.

What is the reason for this? You want to keep your green-house as sterile as possible. You don’t want to bring outside bacteria, bugs, and dog poop, whatever, into the green-house. My grandfather always practiced this rule, and made all of his employees and family follow it, even if they found it annoying every-time he said “Take those shoes out of my greenhouse!”

It saved him time and frustration. There’s nothing more frustrating than losing entire crops to disease.

A couple of other obvious things would be, don’t let pets or small children roam around the green-house, or any other creatures that love to smell, touch, lick and slobber all over random things. ☺

Most gardeners, who plant tomatoes outside without green-houses in cooler climates, loose A LOT of tomato plants to disease. Can you imagine why? There are just so many factors, like some of the above, that you just cannot control.







What If Your Plants Do Get a Fungal Disease?

Should the worst come to worst, here’s what you do:

If you spot gray/black areas that look like a plague moving up the stem of the plant, you’ve got a big problem. You’ve got bad news and even worse news.

The Bad news is that plant is pretty much as good as dead. If you have lots of space and time on your hands, you could try to spray it, give it medicine, cut off the top and replant it or some other fancy garden surgeon trick; but, in a small to medium sized green house when your plant is in such close proximity to your other plants, you do not want to risk the fungus spreading to other plants.

You might as well not bother with trying to save that plant. Say your prayers for it, and cut your loses. Your number one priority is now saving the other plants, and you are racing against time.

The even worse news is that...if the plant is not eliminated quickly, the fungus will travel through the root systems of the plant, where you cannot see it, and begin to thrive there and kill every other tomato plant.

So... This is what you MUST do, in this exact order, if you want to save your other tomato plants.

#1) Go quickly to the store and buy some anti fungal spray for the tomatoes and use as instructed on the package.

IMPORTANT: Do this step first, you do not want to be picking up the plant affected by the fungus, ripping it out, removing the roots, while the other plants are not protected. The fungal particles will be flying all over the air, and if the conditions are still poor, you will infect the other plants!

#2) Get a plastic garbage bag.







#3) Take the plant out with the roots and immediately put it in the bag. You can replant this plant somewhere else later and try to save it, or just throw it out.

#4) Get another bag for soil, and remove the soil around the plant, near where the roots are. Throw it out.

That’s a pretty brutal “get-to-the-point” strategy for acting quickly when you spot disease, and doesn’t show much compassion for the poor affected plant; but, it does the job and saves your other plants. Your next task is to figure out how the fungus might have gotten the chance to thrive in your green-house. Was it ventilation? Dampness? Did the temperature drop drastically all of a sudden and you had the greenhouse wide open while you were on vacation?

Find out. If it is something you can control, improve on it. If it was something out of your control, cut your loses and be happy you still have other plants which are going to make it.☺

Now, this strategy is specifically for fungal disease, which is most common and most deadly to tomatoes. There are many other things that could go wrong with your tomatoes. However, if you stay on track with all this advice, your plants will easily thrive and not attract any thing serious.

I will publish a report in the near future on precision nutrition and care for diseased plants. However, if I were to get into it in this book I would easily turn it into a huge 2 inch thick thing, and I want to keep this short and to the point, something you can quickly read and go out there tomorrow and apply.







Growing Other Plants In Your Green House

The simple truth is, like human beings... not all plants (contrary to belief) get along with each other very well! We’ve all got our differences, and it’s unfair of us to assume things about nature and plants that just aren’t true.

Most of us have this idea about nature that it’s this amazing fluid force that is always in harmony with itself and is always singing happy songs and growing pretty flowers, la la la.

This is true! Very true.

But, and a very BIG but which is essential for us to notice...

That harmony ALSO includes nature KILLING other things in nature to preserve its own balance and to survive.

Some of the stuff nature does, seems pretty cold-hearted to us humans... After all, what are sharp teeth and thorns for?

Grizzly bears will murder and eat their own cubs if the river is short of fish that year.

Hamsters, Rats and Mice will devour their young new-born babies if they smell a foreign smell on them or if there’s not enough food to feed them all.

Seals leave their pups on rocks as they go fishing to feed them, if they return and the pup has been touched by a human being, and they smell it, they will abandon the pup and let it starve to death.

The list of cruel things goes on, and there are certainly no exceptions to plants. Some plants just don’t like living in close proximity to other plants!







I, for example, am pretty open-hearted and am willing to open up, for the sake of truth and exploring myself... but I don’t care how much you convince me, I’m not going to move in with my mother-in-law any time soon.

With how picky tomato plants can be, why put them through the same horror?

Yet, very often, you will see gardeners’ plant tomato plants next to so many other fruits, vegetables, flowers, all kinds of stuff. It is no wonder the plants don’t produce their maximum, or die half way from disease.

My best advice to you is, if you want to grow tomatoes, dedicate a single green-house just to tomatoes!

In fact, in commercial agriculture, this is all farmers do! If they grow lettuce, they have one green-house for lettuce, if they grow cucumbers; they have a green-house for cucumbers.

I don’t know where the idea for mixing stuff up together came from. I guess it’s really beautiful when you see a flower garden with all kinds of varieties of flowers, it’s wonderful, and we assume we can do the same thing with vegetables too, but it just doesn’t work so well!

If you’ve got a rather large green-house, and you do not want to grow just tomatoes, because you have no idea what you’ll do with all those tomatoes, and you’re hell bent on growing other stuff there with the tomatoes, the only thing I’d suggest you grow there is cucumbers or something small that grows fast and you can remove quickly, like radishes.

Cucumbers and tomatoes seem to get along okay. If you live in cooler conditions like Europe, Canada, etc. But, the tomato plant MUST be ventilated a lot more.

Plant the tomatoes close to the sources of ventilation, and near the door so that they can always get air quickly.

Cucumbers, however, don’t like warmer temperatures so much... and if it gets too







humid on warmer days (which it will because tomatoes emit vapor like mad), the cucumbers can start emitting spores and all kinds of things, and infect your tomatoes.

It just gets nasty! Can you see how troublesome this can get? There are so many things that happen when you combine plants I could write a book on it. Yes, yes, I know we’re all trying to get along on this planet, and so far we humans aren’t doing a good job of it, but let’s not try to project our human affairs onto plants. We can’t set up a United Plants committee for the plants and say “Okay Cucumbers! Stop attacking the tomatoes or we’ll cut off your water supply and stop sending you medicine.”

Ah, my jokes are getting lame...

If you do want to divide your green-house and grow other things in there, what you CAN do is divide the green-house with foil. Get that thick foil stuff that construction workers use to divide a room when painting one area to avoid getting paint on the other part, drape it across the green-house, and if you insulate it well; you’ve got a pretty sterile wall.

This is a cheap, fast, effective way you divide your green-house in two, and now that you’ve done this, you can create the perfect environment for both types of plants. One environment for tomatoes, and one environment for cucumbers, or whatever. ☺

Now, this is a book about Tomatoes, so I won’t say anything else about cucumbers, I will write a book on Cucumbers later, as my grandfather also grew tons of cucumbers, just wait 'til you read my jokes in that one :-)







Genetic Deformation and Growing Great Tomatoes Year After Year

If you grow tomatoes like I’ve described here with these simple street-smart, age-old techniques, it won’t matter what breed of tomato you get, you will maximize the potential of that breed, and you won’t have to deal with the frustration of losing plants to disease. However, when my grandfather grew tomatoes, there was one and only one breed of tomatoes he grew.

This breed of tomatoes was called “super-elite tomatoes,” and the people that created this breed were, from Holland!

By far, the agriculture researchers from Holland have done more research on tomatoes than any other organization on Earth as far as I’m aware of. In the 1960s - 1970s they were the number one supplier on earth of the purest tomato breed ever.

However, I have searched all over the Internet for this breed, and have only found traces of articles mentioning the breed, I have no idea what happened to it, maybe they sold it to someone else and it’s called something else now.

I’m mentioning this because our concern here is growing incredible tomatoes...and... As far and as good as you can get at perfecting your gardening techniques, there are just some factors which are out of your immediate control.

The greatest factor which is out of your control is the breed of tomato you are growing, and how this breed was created. You’d think when you’re buying tomato seeds, you’re getting good stuff.

But, let me put it this way...when you buy commercial seeds at the gardening store, you might as well be buying cheap drugs from the guy in the back of the alley. You have no idea what you’re buying, and how these seeds were created. Often, they are made cheaply and they have already gone through a process of severe genetic deformation.







Which means, when you grow them, they will already have certain genetic deficiencies. This results in you growing deformed tomatoes that get sick easily, taste poor, and have a green/white mass in the center and over all a jelly like composure that spills out all over when you cut the tomato in half.

Let me tell you a bit about how tomato breeds are created if it is done properly, as in the case of that Holland breed my grandfather grew for years.

It’s not the case of just growing some tomato plants, picking the seeds out of the tomatoes and putting them in little paper bags, there’s a lot more to it. This is why I strongly recommend that if you want to grow great tomatoes, not only once, but year after year, then never replant your own seeds from the tomatoes you just grew. It might save you some money on seeds, but it will give you poorer tomatoes every year.

For each new year of harvest, buy fresh, new seeds. Don’t use left over plant seeds you bought last year. Seeds don’t “expire” but some of them do rot inside

The other reason for this is...

Well, it’s kind of like... err... like cousins marrying cousins and brothers and sisters having children in medieval times... Rumor has it, some of those people would start getting a weeeeee bit crazy down the line as generations of people cross pollinated...err... I mean cross bred.

Agricultural companies that produce specialty breeds of tomatoes go to great lengths to keep the breed pure and strong. They do thousands of tests and experiments year after year to strengthen the breed. They cross pollinate, mix and match, all kinds of things which I have really no idea about because I’m not an expert in that field.

The bottom line is, their goal is to sell a good product, not just seeds. In the old pre-Enron days when integrity in business mattered, the companies that made these seeds, especially in Europe, would spend 4 years experimenting and creating the perfect tomatoes before they decided to sell the seeds on the market.

Now, however, this is really not the case. In the area that I live in, the last place I would get my tomato seeds is at the garden store. Because they just sell the same







name-brand stuff everyone sells and the label reads: “Tomatoes"! …. hmmm, not very specific...

I am not currently growing tomatoes as I am traveling and doing a lot of work abroad so I haven’t investigated in what’s going on in the tomato breeding area; however, if I were to start growing again, I would take my car and drive out to the farm fields near by here and find someone that grows tomatoes. I'd ask them where they get their seeds... I recommend you do the same.

Today, I hear a lot of people grow Heirloom tomatoes, but then again, that’s very vague, your number one concern isn’t the variety of tomato breed, but how that breed was created before the seeds were put on the market.

Go around and see what other people are growing. Look at their tomatoes, ask how they taste, how they look inside. See if they’re following the tactics in this book. If they’re not following the things presented here and their tomatoes taste good, that’s a pretty good sign that when you grow that breed and follow this stuff to a T, your tomatoes will taste and look 10 times better!

The last piece of advice I have for you, in all these chapters, if you want to grow great tomatoes year after year is this:

Always get fresh new soil for each new planting! Do not plant next years harvest in the same soil you planted this years. See the chapter on soil for reasons why. ☺

Now, go out there and have some fun growing tomatoes. When my grandfather grew tomatoes this way, each one of his plants produced between 30 to 40 lbs of tomatoes!

That to me is incredible...that’s almost around the weight when that flight attendant at the airport weighing your bags tells you you’ve got to pay $2 extra per pound because your bags are over-weight!

I’ve lifted plenty of those bags when I traveled with my wife, and they were HEEEAVVY! Now THAT’S a lot of tomatoes!





Now, your exact results may vary a little based on the breed or variety you’re growing, but I can guarantee you’ll have wheel-barrels of mouth-watering organic tomatoes!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this guide as much as I’ve enjoyed humorously imparting the age-old tomato growing secrets of my family to you while writing this.

I am going to be publishing articles and reports to follow up on the many other topics pertaining to tomato gardening, so look out for that stuff in your email.

I will also be looking out for any of your questions and will answer them in those articles and reports. So if you’ve got any questions, please email me directly at [email protected]

May your days be warm and your tomatoes merry!,

Kacper,

The Tomato Guy,

http://www.JoyfulTomato.com

organic tomato magic -...

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