Planting Tomatoes With AZOMITE®

Sherri:

I’m Sherri with HomeShow Garden Pros, and when it’s time to plant your tomatoes, there are a few things that you can do to ensure your success. I’m going to do a complete demonstration, and I have Mike with Azomite here.

Mike:

Yes.

Sherri:

And he is going to help me with the planting and adding the product. So, Mike, we’re going to talk about what we would use Azomite for in the tomato plant process. So what are the benefits of using Azomite?

Mike:

So you’re going to get a couple of parent benefits and one benefit that you won’t see till the end of the season. At the end of the season, you’ll see a larger root ball. It really helps with building the foundation. Any plant has to have a great foundation.

Sherri:

Because I always say, “The more roots, the more fruits,” right?

Mike:

That’s exactly right. And that leads to, you’re going to see more fruit because it is a tomato, and but you’ll also get that signal of more flowering.

Sherri:

Yes. But you have to have flowers to have fruit.

Mike:

Exactly. So that’s a couple of things. Three things that you’ll see using Azomite.

Sherri:

Okay. So real quick, we’re going to add Azomite in the hole when we’re planting, right? And I do a few tablespoons in the bottom. This is going to add the minerals and the nutrients so that we don’t have things like blossom end rot, right? And like Mike was saying, it’s going to make them taste better. It’s going to produce more flowers, so you’ll have a higher yield. And it’s going to be able to fight disease and insects easier. It’s going to boost that immune response.

Mike:

Absolutely.

Sherri:

Now, Azomite is a mineral supplement, but we need to feed them at the time of planting as well. So I like to use this Nelson’s vegetable food right in the bottom of the hole. So we sprinkle it in there, give it a good stir, and then I’m going to show you actually how to plant. We want to plant most of this plant under the ground. All of this where the root hairs are, the little fine hairs, will turn into roots. And again, more roots, more fruits. So we want to plant it deep.

Now, this is one of the only things that we’re going to plant this way. So when I do that, I just dig down in there and I stick that plant in there deep, and I have all my nutrients in the hole already. I always do an extra little bit of this around the top too, because you cannot overdo it when we’re talking about minerals.

Mike:

And particularly if you’ve never used Azomite before.

Sherri:

Yeah.

Mike:

A little more than what it calls for on the bag. You won’t hurt anything, and will give that plant a chance to-

Sherri:

Yeah, we do that with vitamins that we’re taking. Sometimes we have to megadose and then we go into maintenance mode. So that’s kind of the same thing. Now, a little trick to getting your Azomite to break down a little faster is adding something like this Microlife Liquid AF, which is loaded with beneficial bacterias and fungi on here. The Streptomyces right here aids in the breakdown of minerals. So that’s going to help break your fertilizer and your mineral supplements down. And we’re just going to put a few ounces in a gallon of water and water it in when we initially plant it. So that’s going to make sure that everything breaks down really quickly. And that tomato plant gets off to a great start because we want nice, healthy, mineral dense fruits. That’s why we’re growing them.