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Tomatoes are tasty, healthy and beautiful. Did you know that they came to Europe as an ornamental plant and were grown for a long time solely due to their beauty? Probably, they had not yet heard of late blight. Only practical Italians immediately began to eat them. And everyone’s favorite summer salad of cucumbers and tomatoes should be eaten as rarely as possible - the combination of these vegetables interferes with the absorption of vital vitamin C. Tomatoes, of course, are beautiful, especially when they are not sick, but today we grow them in order to diversify our diet . In this article we will tell you how to prepare soil for tomato seedlings.
The importance of soil for seedlings
Just as a theater begins with a hanger, so does a seedling begin with the soil. A high-quality earthen mixture for its cultivation is the key to a future good harvest. If it turns out to be not good enough, then the tomatoes will turn out to be sick or weak and we will not get a full harvest. Or even worse, the seedlings will die and we will have to start all over again or buy them at the market.
You can’t just take a shovel and dig up garden soil or bring soil from a greenhouse - with almost 100% probability nothing good will come of it.The soil for tomato seedlings is prepared from several components that require appropriate preparation. Only large farms grow tomato seedlings on clean peat, pre-treating it and saturating it with fertilizers and special additives. But they have appropriate industrial equipment for these purposes.
And do we really need tomatoes that are pumped full of chemicals even before planting in the soil? It is better to spend some time and prepare the soil for tomato seedlings yourself.
Soil requirements
The main requirement is that the soil must contain everything necessary for growing tomato seedlings. It should be:
- loose;
- water- and breathable;
- moderately fertile, that is, contain sufficient, but not excessive amounts of nutrients necessary for tomato seedlings at first;
- neutral or slightly acidic;
- purified, namely: do not contain toxic substances hazardous to humans or plants, harmful microorganisms, seeds weed, fungal spores, as well as eggs or larvae of insects and worms.
Components used for soil
Each gardener has his own recipe for preparing soil for tomato seedlings. They may have various components of both organic and inorganic origin, and may or may not contain fertilizers. But people sometimes successfully grow tomato seedlings for decades. It is impossible to say which soil is correct or best. Any component of soil for tomato seedlings taken in one area can be very different from the same component originating from another region.
Even in the same garden Earth, taken from the planting of legumes, will be strikingly different from the soil where the sunflower grew.
Soil for tomato seedlings may consist of the following organic components:
- turf land;
- meadow land;
- peat (lowland, middle, high);
- well-rotted leaf humus (its chemical composition will vary greatly depending on the tree species whose leaves were involved in the preparation of compost, for example, if there were a lot of nut leaves, our seedlings may not sprout at all);
- well-rotted and frozen humus of cattle;
- sphagnum moss;
- garden soil (although this is not recommended, many gardeners use it, and successfully);
- fallen needles;
- coconut fiber;
- rotted sawdust.
Land for tomato seedlings may or may not contain:
- sand;
- perlite;
- hydrogel;
- vermiculite
Often (but not all and not always) when preparing soil for seedlings, the following are used as auxiliary substances:
- wood ash;
- chalk;
- dolomite flour;
- lime.
Ash acts as a protective agent against diseases and pests, a fertilizer and a natural soil deoxidizer. Its chemical properties greatly depend on the type of wood being burned.
As you can see, there are a lot of components, and if you consider that most often the soil for growing seedlings consists of 3-4 components, it would be more accurate to say that there are a lot of them.
Under no circumstances should you use:
- manure (firstly, tomatoes don’t like it, secondly, it oxidizes the soil, thirdly, there is a lot of nitrogen, fourthly, it probably contains a lot of pathogenic organisms for seedlings);
- not completely rotted leaf humus (it can simply burn the roots of the seedlings);
- any soil infested with insects, worms or weeds;
- hay dust.
Preparing the land for seedlings
Before sowing tomato seeds, pre-planting soil preparation must be carried out. We must kill all spores of fungi and bacteria, insects and their larvae. You should also try to get rid of any weed seeds that may be in the ground. Again, each gardener does this preparation differently. Can:
- Freeze the soil. To do this, some people repeatedly expose containers of soil to the frost in the winter, then bring them in and let them thaw, freeze them again, and so on several times. This may be correct, but it is a painfully labor-intensive process. In addition, if, for example, the earth is poured into a bag, it is difficult to carry it back and forth. In addition, when thawing, the floor can become very dirty. And not everyone has such a warm room where bags of soil could stand, but they take a long time to thaw. Most often, they are initially placed in a cold garage or barn, and about a week before sowing, tomato seedlings are brought indoors.
- Soil calcination. The soil is poured in a layer of about 5 cm onto the sheet and placed in the oven, heated to 70-90 degrees for half an hour. This must be done in advance so that the soil can be populated with beneficial microorganisms.
- Soil steaming. Here, too, there is no limit to folk imagination. The soil must be kept over boiling water for at least 10 minutes. For this purpose, use a colander, a double boiler, or just gauze.
- Soil disinfection. This is perhaps the least labor-intensive method, but it will not get rid of weed seeds. For these purposes, iodine (3 drops per 10 l), 1% solution of potassium permanganate, antifungal drugs, insecticides + fungicides are used.
If you use sawdust or pine needles, pour boiling water over them, cover the dish with a lid and cool. Drain the water, add boiling water again and leave.
Making soil for seedlings
As we said, there are a lot of recipes for making soil for tomato seedlings. See which components are easiest for you to get and prepare a substrate from them. For some, it is enough to go outside and walk 100-200 meters to collect silt peat, but for others it is simply impossible to get it. For some, it is expensive to buy perlite, vermiculite, coconut fiber or sphagnum moss.
If you have all the components for making soil on hand, but it turns out to be excessively acidic, you can deacidify it using dolomite flour or lime.
We explain: dolomite flour itself is a fertilizer; for components poor in nutrients it will be a real godsend. If you add it to soil containing black soil, you will get an excess of fertilizers. Fatty, rich soils are deoxidized with chalk or lime.
Sometimes it is necessary, on the contrary, to increase the acidity of the soil. This is easy to do by adding a little high-moor peat - it is fibrous, has a reddish color and an acidic reaction.
Here are several recipes for preparing soil for tomato seedlings, but we repeat, there are a lot of them:
- Sand, high-moor and low-lying peat in a ratio of 1:1:1.
- Leaf humus, turf soil, sand, perlite in the ratio 3:3:4:0.5.
- Peat, sand, wood ash – 10:5:1.
- Steamed sawdust, sand, wood ash – 10:5:1 + 1 tbsp. l of nitrogen fertilizer per bucket of mixture (this mixture must be mixed very carefully so that the nitrogen is distributed evenly);
- Steamed pine needles, sand, wood ash – 10:5:1;
- Turf soil, well-rotted manure, peat, sand – 2:0.5:8:2 + 3 tbsp. l azofoski onto a bucket of mixture.
If your soil is very dense, add perlite or vermiculite.
Often, after growing tomato seedlings, we don’t know what to do with the waste soil. Under no circumstances should it be left for next year. You can’t pour it into the place where nightshade crops will grow - potatoes, tomatoes, peppers. It is best to pour it onto a pile with young compost, which will mature for at least another year.
Use of garden soil
There has been controversy over the use of garden land for many decades. Some argue that it should never be used, others smile and have been successfully growing tomato seedlings on it for many years.
You can take garden soil; it is believed that if it is included in the soil mixture for growing seedlings as one of the components, the tomatoes will better tolerate transplantation into open ground. It's best to take it:
- From a hill filled with a mole;
- From planting legumes, cucumbers, zucchini, corn, beets, carrots, herbs.
Do not use under any circumstances:
- Soil from greenhouses;
- From planting potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, cabbage.
Ready soils
Of the ready-made soils, only a special substrate is suitable for growing seedlings - the rest contain fertilizers in concentrations that are unacceptable for small tomatoes. And although ready-made soils can be of different quality, they have to be used if there is no opportunity, time or desire to create a complex soil mixture.
We advise you to buy several bags of soil for seedlings from different manufacturers and plant seeds in them, providing the containers with labels. Subsequently, you will be able to buy land that gave the best results.
Purchased soil also requires pre-planting preparation:
- Place the bag in a metal bucket;
- Carefully fill it with boiling water along the sides;
- Cover the bucket with a lid;
- Leave until completely cool.
As you can see, choosing and composing the soil is a serious matter. But after acquiring a certain skill, this task will not seem so difficult. Have a good harvest!
Watch a short video about making soil for tomato seedlings:
