Tomato Fertilizer Requirements

If you want a truly booming crop, you need to make sure you understand tomato fertilizer requirements and follow them meticulously.

Tomatoes are hungry little plants but they seem to produce regardless of the conditions,tomato fertilizer requirements making them a welcome addition to even the most novice gardeners. The tomatoes will pay you back for the special treatment by producing an abundance of delectable fruit for your enjoyment.

One thing to remember is that too much nitrogen in the fertilizer will give you bushy green plants that could star in "The Little Shop of Horrors." However, these plants are sparse in the amount of fruit they bear. In order to produce the best crop, you need a balance of the right amount of calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and nitrogen as well as other trace materials.

Before you even begin to think of fertilizing the soil for tomatoes, consider rotating your crop. You shouldn't grow tomatoes on the same ground more than once every four years. Rotate the crop with legumes that fix nitrogen into the soil and you won't deplete your soil of valuable minerals. This isn't always possible for gardeners with only a small garden who plant only tomatoes. In those cases, you have to actively fertilize and compost the soil.

A second debate over organic vs. chemical fertilizers is also at the head of the hot topics for tomato growers. While most chemical fertilizers have exact proportions of nutrients, they fail in a couple of ways. The first is the lack of trace minerals that you find in organic fertilizers or homemade fertilizers. Tomatoes need the addition of the trace minerals to the soil, particularly if you don't rotate the crops.

Lack of trace minerals and elements can cause blossom end rot in tomatoes. You'll recognize this affliction when you notice a depression on the bottom of the tomato that is brown and the size of a quarter on the bottom of the tomato. This is from a calcium deficiency. If your tomatoes receive uneven watering or moisture, the problem is more prevalent. Compost containing calcium rich eggshells can prevent this from occurring.

The second reason an organic type of fertilizer is better is the reduction of the potential to burn the plant with too much fertilizer. Organic fertilizer is naturally slow release. You can purchase chemical fertilizer that has slow release formulas, however.

Whether using an organic fertilizer or chemical one, you have to fertilize before you plant and work the fertilizer into the soil. Be aware that if you use more than one pound of fertilizer per 100 square feet of chemical fertilizer, you stand the chance of over fertilizing and burning your plants. You can use twice that amount if you use organic fertilizers.

As the plants grow, you might have to fertilize about every two weeks. That is, if you use chemical fertilizers. You used higher amounts of organic fertilizers to begin with and they break down slower, which means you don't have to add more as frequently.

Those that use organic fertilizer as a tomato fertilizer requirements can supplement once every two weeks with an additional spray of fish tea or liquid seaweed. These contain a lot of trace elements but don't have much N-P-K to cause problems with over fertilization. Simply spray it on the ground around your tomato plants or water each plant with the emulsion.

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