Growing ampelous tomatoes - varieties with a description, planting and care
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AMPEL TOMATOES: MYTHS, VARIETIES, PLUSES AND MINUSES
Tomato plants, the stems of which cascade down from the flowerpot, are good both in the country and in the apartment. The lush crowns of ampelous tomatoes both decorate and give a harvest, and boast other interesting and unexpected features.
What are ampels? Plants with shoots streaming down, which are grown, as a rule, in hanging flowerpots, baskets, pots. Usually they are flowers. For tomatoes, this form is not typical at all. And yet they are written about, spoken about and presented with photos more and more often. So do they really exist or is it a fake?
ALL THE TRUTH ABOUT AMPEL TOMATOES
Botanists do not classify ampels as a separate tomato category. The term is rather a marketing ploy to interest buyers. And all the wives, amateur vegetable growers, fans of tomatoes, nothing
makes it difficult to combine them into a separate group with common useful properties, not only purely external, but also essential for agricultural technology. Here are the main signs.
The ability to look luxurious and bear fruit, eating from a small area.
If the roots of traditional tomatoes need to go deep into the ground by at least 50 cm, then the ampels, in order to please a good harvest, have enough soil in an ordinary 3-5-liter flowerpot 20-26 cm high. The falling crown, despite the pomp, is not strategic, and secondary space: it almost does not interfere with neighbors, because the branches are located, so to speak, below the floor.
Exclusion of shaping and pinching.
And this is one of the most troublesome things in caring for tomatoes, requiring a certain skill and even art.
Well leafy stems, preferably with unrestricted growth.
Most often we are talking about tall cherry tomatoes. In fact, the shoots, of course, are not flexible and pliable, but brittle and thick, but in appearance they are quite close to ampelous ones. Without shaping, it is sometimes impossible to understand whether a plant has a central stem at all - all the main ones.
Low varieties have very long brushes with small fruitlets no more than 20-30 g. They hang under their own weight and thereby create an ampel effect, despite the fact that short stems grow only upwards. These are bushy productive dwarfs.
Mandatory decoration.
In ampels, the picturesqueness of the plant is at its height, while ordinary tomato bushes, especially tall ones, are rarely used for decoration.
For ampelous tomatoes, pile containers are good. Such containers are initially recommended for growing potatoes, but they are also suitable for cascade tomatoes - tall and compact, light and soft, with breathable walls.
Reference by topic: Ampelous tomatoes - growing on a loggia, sowing and soil (St. Petersburg)
VARIETIES OF AMPEL TOMATOES - DESCRIPTION
Already now it is worth choosing and buying seeds of suitable varieties. And here the experience and advice of tomato growers, who have been experimenting with ampels for a long time, will help.
F1 Ampelny - a short hybrid, which, figuratively speaking, instead of stepchildren, 100 days after germination forms 2-3-fold branching brushes. Each has 15-20 red fruitlets weighing 10-20 g. The hybrid is resistant to a complex of tomato diseases.
Ampelka - the height of the bush is 20-40 cm. Sweet and tasty fruits weighing 20-25 g are collected in long brushes of 10-20 pieces, they begin to ripen on the 85-90th day.
F1 Pia Drops (pear drops - “pear candies”) - a sufficient pot volume of 2-5 liters. Hanging shoots up to 3 cm long. The fruits ripen 45 days after planting, and 55 days pass from germination. Yellow pear tomatoes weigh 100-20 g.
F1 Tumbling Tiger (tumbling tiger - "tumbling tiger") - this hybrid has hanging shoots up to 50 cm long and rounded red-striped fruits of 20-30 g. They ripen 63-65 days after planting seedlings in a 3-liter pot.
F1 Cherry Fount (cherry fount - "cherry fountain") forms a powerful bush with a diameter of up to 90 cm with long lashes of 100 cm. In shape, it resembles a fountain with multidirectional jets: some stems first fall to one side, and then fall down, while others tend up , remaining low - 15-20 cm. The weight of sweet, red, rounded flattened fruitlets is about 25 g, there are up to 300 of them on a plant, 10 in a brush. The beginning of ripening is 60 days after planting seedlings.
Alas, some varieties declared in the description as ampels, if they are, then more effort must be made to this than usual. So say the experimenters.
For example, the Golden Cluster variety itself grows like an ordinary undersized tree with thick stems, which, no matter how you bend, still rise up or break if you try to “reprogram” them forcibly.
The picture on the bag of the Red Profusion variety (red profusion - “red abundance”) is quite ampelous, the tomatoes are red, medium-sized - 2-5 cm in diameter, ripen 3 days after planting the seedlings in a flowerpot. The height of the bush is up to 5 cm, the whips supposedly can go down 52 cm down. They can, but for some reason they don’t do it themselves, even if they are placed obliquely at the very edge of the container. In fairness, it should be said that by the end of the summer they “correct” - they really give long lashes. But at this time they no longer have enough sun, and in order for the tomatoes to be less acidic, additional light will be required.
See also: Ampelnye tomatoes (photo) - cultivation and varieties
DECORATIVE AND HARVEST AMPEL TOMATOES
Seedlings of indoor ampels are sown in February, outdoor - in March, 1 months before planting in the main container.
If the tomato is needed only for beauty, the volume of the pot can be small (3-5 liters) so that it is easy to hang or put it anywhere. If the goal is to get a significant harvest, the volume of fertile soil should be 6-10 liters. Plants are planted in plastic buckets, wide planters or flowerpots on a stable high leg. Such containers, of course, can no longer be hung.
In the style of ampels, tomatoes of the F1 hybrids Citizen, Cascade Red and Cascade Elow, Garden Pearl (other names Zhemchuzhinka, Arktika, Garden Peari), Talisman, Yellow Miracle, are grown. Rowan beads, Tiger.
They make up the substrate in both cases from equal parts of soddy land, peat, humus, adding 1 tbsp. spoon zone per 1 kg of substrate. In the punka lay 0 tbsp. superphosphate legs, set seedlings with a lump of earth, sprinkle 5 cm of soil on top and compact it.
Place containers with waterfall tomatoes where there is more sun. In the off-season, the apartment is illuminated with phytolamps with a full spectrum of 10-12 hours a day. It is watered with a small amount of settled water, which is 2-3 ° warmer than air, when the top layer of soil has dried up. Even if it is hot, the watering rates do not increase, just reduce the time between them. It is advisable not to spray the leaves. The soil is loosened to a depth of 3-4 cm.
Yield ampels are fed only with solutions once every 2 weeks, decorative ones - once a month. Take a complete complex mineral fertilizer for indoor flowers or especially for tomatoes. Dissolve in water for irrigation 5 g per 1 kg of soil. But if the soil in the container is initially nutritious, one top dressing in the fruit setting phase is enough.
During flowering, twigs or the whole plant is shaken for high-quality pollination. But it is better to expose the containers to the air, where the breeze and insects cope with this matter more skillfully.
LOOSE AND CREEPING AMPEL TOMATOES
Vegetable growers spied an unconventional way of growing ampelous tomatoes in nature. In the beds, plants can be ground cover! Reception for the lazy protects against soil erosion, washing off its top layer and exposing the roots, as well as from weeds.
To keep the fruits clean and not affected by blossom end rot, the soil under the plants can be mulched with sawdust or straw, or seedlings can be planted on black agrofiber.
Often, such plants are placed at the feet of tall varieties, which shifts the production of ripe tomatoes to an earlier date and increases the yield per unit area.
There are varieties with lodging stems that are convenient to grow: Marisha, Amber, Children's, Pygmy, Buyan Yellow, Room Surprise, Mongolian Dwarf, Korean Creeping.
AMPEL TOMATOES - GROWING IN POTS - VIDEO
© Author: N. LAGUTA Kursk region
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