Tomatoes

I have been gardening in the same area for 18 years. Have used all the various fertilizers commercial, organic, liquid , solid, animal based and synthetic. Have tried and retried various heirloom and new hybrid seed and plant varieties. Have had many years that the neighbors thought was impressive production to the point I could not give the produce away as fast as it grew.

The past two years I entered a new course of gardening. Trying to learn how to manually prepare beds, produce my own mulch and compost. I determined to not use any commercial fertilizer or insecticidal products. I read several books by Steve Solomon and began to follow his direction on breaking new ground, deep digging to break up hard pan and using my own produced organic compost to fertilize the soil. I also followed his recipe to make COF, "complete organic fertilizer". This year I planted several varieties of vegetables resistant to root knot nematodes( which saturate my fields) to see which ones did well and to recover seed to be seed self sufficient in the event some catastrophe prevented obtaining commercial seed. To that end I had 3 to 4 tomato plants of different varieties. With the deep digging together with the COF they have grown to virtual small trees with massive productive branches. The weight of the produce is so great that every single one of the commercial tomato cages collapsed before the fruit even began to ripen. My peas and beans also did better than ever before.

I do not know if it was the breaking up of the deep soil or the use of just the COF as the fertilizing agent, but the results have been truly astounding. I very highly recommend one read Mr Solomon's books and see what improvements you can make to your garden routine.