Tomato Summer Care in the PNW on the Cheap
By June in Redmond, my tomatoes have survived the grey, the cold rain, the one week of actual sun that tricked everyone into planting too early, and whatever the deer were doing near the fence. They made it. Now the real work starts. And the good news is most of it costs almost nothing.
What Even Is a Sucker
A sucker is the shoot that grows out of the V-shaped crotch between the main stem and a leaf branch. Left alone, it becomes a full stem. Left alone long enough, it becomes basically a second plant fighting the original one for resources. Which, if you think about it, is a lot of drama for something most people have never heard of.
Here’s where it gets interesting: when you remove a sucker, the plant redirects its photosynthate (the sugars it produces from sunlight) into fewer growing tips, which means bigger fruit on the ones that stay. One sentence of plant biology and it suddenly makes sense why people are out there pinching shoots every weekend.
But not all tomatoes want you doing this. Indeterminate varieties (most heirlooms, most slicers, basically any tomato that keeps growing until frost kills it) benefit from suckering or at least training to one or two main leaders. Determinate varieties, the ones bred to ripen everything in a short window and stop growing, do not. Sucker a determinate and you are literally cutting your harvest in half. Check the seed packet before you start pinching things.
Cheap Ways to Hold Them Up
I have bought tomato cages from a garden center exactly once. They were the thin wire kind that collapse the second an actual tomato plant touches them. I think they were $4.89 each at Lowe’s and I bought four of them. The vine truth about tomato cages is that the cheap ones are useless and the good ones are expensive, so I just stopped buying them entirely.
What I use instead: rebar stakes (cheap at any hardware or big box store, buy once, use forever) with jute twine looped loosely around the stem. You can also do t-posts and string in a row, which works great if you have multiple plants in a line. Or, if you want to feel slightly smug about it, bend a cattle panel into an arch over the bed. Sounds fancy, costs almost nothing at a farm supply store, and you can grow climbing plants on it every year after.
Whatever you use, get it in the ground now, before the plants are so big you can’t stake without breaking half the branches. I have made that mistake. Twice. Both times I told myself it would be fine.
Mulch. Seriously. Do It Now.
If I had to pick one thing that moves the needle most for PNW tomatoes in early summer, it’s mulching. Not because it sounds impressive, but because of what it actually does: it keeps soil temperature stable, reduces evaporation, and suppresses the weeds that would otherwise compete with your plants for water and nutrients during the driest part of the year.
There’s a soil biology angle too: a thick layer of organic mulch feeds the fungal networks (mycorrhizae) that extend your plant’s effective root zone. The tomato isn’t working alone down there. Anyway, you don’t need to think about that. You just need three or four inches of wood chips, straw, or shredded leaves around the base of each plant, keeping a little gap right at the stem so it doesn’t rot.
Free sources: the city of Redmond (and most PNW cities) offers free wood chips through municipal programs. Ask a local arborist if they’re chipping nearby. Straw is cheap at any feed store, I picked up a bale at Wilco for $8.47 last August. I have also just used cardboard under wood chips in a pinch, which works fine and makes me feel like I’ve gotten away with something.
Feeding Without Going Broke
Tomatoes are heavy feeders but they don’t need expensive bottled fertilizers to prove it. Once they start flowering, they want less nitrogen (which pushes leafy growth) and more phosphorus and potassium (which supports fruit set). A bag of balanced granular fertilizer from the big box store, applied every few weeks, does the job without drama.
If you’re composting, side-dressing with finished compost is genuinely excellent and essentially free. The microbes in compost do the slow release work for you. That’s it. That’s the whole expensive fertilizer secret.
One more thing: water consistently. Inconsistent watering is the main cause of blossom end rot and cracked fruit, both of which hurt. I learned this the hard way one July when I got lazy about it and lost about a third of my Early Girls to rot before I figured out what I was doing wrong. Mulching (see above) helps a lot here. Which is just another reason to go put mulch on your tomatoes right now instead of finishing this article.
Go. I’ll be here.
Photo by Diego Geraldi on Unsplash
