Hello Dear Gardeners! It has been a while giving updates of how my tomatoes farm is faring. This is due to being tight working in my maize farm. The weaver birds have invaded in the maize farm trying to removed the maize grains we've sown get about five days ago, even though we've not completed. So, It has put pressure on me to monitor and drive them away every morning and evening while combining that to my main work. Yesterday we continued with the final sowing of the maize grains after contact hours in School, unfortunately the rain stopped us and we had to rush to our house.
Well, that is part of life. So far so good in my tomatoes far, though there is little labour work to carry out till harvesting. But, the stage that the tomatoes have reached I've to take keen monitoring very seriously. I hired some labourers to remove the weeds by handpicking them around the base of the tomatoes stem. It's also advisable to ensure that *"Earthing up is done."* This is the process of reforming the dismantled heaped soil at the base to the top especially in yam, tomatoes, groundnut and potatoes farms. So all the base soils are collected upwards. This is done to promote healthy growth and formation of bigger root or stem tubers.
When the earthing up is done in the tomatoes farm, it raises the ridges upwards for good growth and aeration to take place seamlessly. It does prevent animals from excessive damage to the plants and more importantly the fruits that would be emerged. The whole farm isn't up to an acre so I spent less than $50 for the labourer work.
I have paused Fertilization for now due to fast growth of the plants. When I began the transplanting, I soaked more of the fertilizer in the water that I used for irrigation on the plants. This supported them to grow very quickly. Now I could see that the canopies are closing, the branches are elongating and the adventitious branches have growing with the leaves becoming broader. So far I haven't seen any visible diseases attacking the leaves when I examined using my hand. Normally when there is enough water leaf curling is likely to occur, by this time I haven't seen such a thing.
It would surprise you to know that my first transplanted tomatoes have began flowering when I checked yesterday. Few of them have started flowering. During this time, too much water isn't required since it can damage most of the flowers. The bumper rain wants to begin and that's my fear of affecting these flowers. Very soon, for most of these flowers fertilization would take place and the fruiting would begin. I'm planning to get some chemical that would let the flowers to maintain.
It's about 1 month and 2 weeks now since I did the transplanting from the nursery beds to the ridges. So I have been saying this that to start the farm is difficult, but when you reach at the midpoint, the farming itself will just motivate you to work harder upon the beautiful nature of the farm. I'm anticipating fruiting for the middle of May. We have barely left with only 10 days for this Month to end. I wouldn't hesitate to bring you all the updates on my tomatoes farm. Thanks for your attention!