Planting Tomatoes in Clay Soil

I live in a flower pot. The ground is orange, no matter how much manure and humus is added to it. The soil is so hard that it cuts into the stalks of most vegetable plants. The tender plants must be hardy to survive this difficult climate. But we give them a fighting chance.

Here is what we do.

First we grow our seedlings indoors until all danger of frost is past. Or we buy healthy ones from a nursery.

The shoots should stand about eight to twelve inches out of the soil before transplanting. The roots should be healthy. We take them outside in the daytime and bring them in at night for a week before planting them in the garden to harden them to the climate.

We don't plow the ground. It's a waste of time. It hardens up almost immediately.

We dig a hole with a shovel about one foot deep and one foot wide. Into this 'soil', we mix one shovel full of compost (which has decomposed at least a year), one shovel full of manure, and one shovel full of wood ashes. If you don't have wood ashes, you can add a half shovel full (about two cups) of agricultural lime. If we have time-release vegetable fertilizer or Epsom salts, we add about ¼ to ½ cup of this to the pile. Mix these ingredients into the original soil thoroughly and put it back into the hole. Do this for each tomato plant, spacing the holes about two feet apart.

We take a small garden spade and dig a smaller hole about six inches deep in this softened soil. We remove the bottom leaves of the seedlings about halfway up the stalk. We plant the seedling in the new hole deep enough that the bottom leaves just clear the dirt. All the little hairs on the stalk will form roots whether you bury them or not, so it's best to bury them. (Besides, tomato worms with eggs stuck to their backs look exactly like tomato plants with roots protruding from stalk, so it's best to cover the stalks so the worms are more visible and can be removed easier.) Then we push the ground down to compact the soil around the young plant to hold it in place through rain and wind. This also allows the depression to collect rain water for the roots of the plant.

We now push our four foot long tomato stake into the ground about a foot deep and six to ten inches from the stalk, making sure it won't fall over in the future. Why now? The ground is soft. It won't be this soft again. You'll never get it into the ground later without a two pound hammer.

We place a copper object near the stalk. Why? Copper conducts electricity with the iron in the soil and helps deter insects from crawling up the stalk. The best conductor we have found is a foot long piece of fine copper wire formed into a ring around the stalk, at least three inches in diameter. Any smaller and you risk strangling the stalk as it is growing.

When we have all our plants in place, we cover the ground with three to four sheets of newspaper. This holds in moisture and prevents weeds. We cover the paper with four or five inches of grass cuttings or leaves. This prevents the paper from blowing away.

We pour two quarts of water near the stalk, taking care not to remove the soil that is holding the plant in the ground. We will make sure throughout the rest of the summer to water it morning and night (unless it rains), taking care not to get water on the leaves. The magnification of the sunlight on the wet leaves burns them.

As the tomato plants grow, you must keep them from lying on the ground. The tomatoes that hit the ground will rot easily. You may use strips of cotton jersey from old t-shirts or nylon hosiery to tie them loosely to the stake.

Well, that's the gist of it.

Many people wonder which leaves we take off, since it is general practice to remove the 'suckers'.

My father taught me this: Leaves contain chlorophyll which creates sugar. Without chlorophyll, you have no sugar. If you want sweet tomatoes, keep as many leaves as possible. Your tomatoes will be smaller, but they won't be watery, and the flavor is unbeatable.

If you wish, you may remove the leaves around the green tomatoes so that sunlight will hit them and they will ripen faster.

How do you keep tomato worms away from your plants?

Insects breathe through their skin. If you use any kind of powder on the plant you will help deter the insects. We have used flower and baby powder, as well as the insecticide rotenone. All can be effective. You must be vigilant, however, since the worms blend into the plants and the rain washes off the powder.

One more note. Never, ever, bury the plants in the soil you will grow them in next year. The worms have laid their eggs in the plant, and you will have harvested many annoying insects by doing so. It is best to burn the stalks or carry them far, far away.