The bizarre dental hack that actually helps grow a bumper tomato crop
When you grow your own tomatoes, you want the plant to be as healthy as possible for a bumper crop and tasty fruit, so it can be tempting to try social media hacks that promise to make it thrive.
But while there are benefits to some, not all are worth your time, so nine.com.au spoke to Felicity Moody, horticulturist and owner of plant store Wattle & Bee to sort out the good tomato hacks from the bad ones.
Gardening hacks can be fun to try and some of them actually have science to back them up. iStockphoto
Electric toothbrush hack
Some gardeners placing the buzzing end of an electric toothbrush on the flowers of a tomato plant helps with pollination, which results in more tomatoes.
As weird as it sounds, Moody said this is actually a “good hack”, especially for people with balcony gardens that don’t get many pollinators.
“It's mimicking buzz pollination, which not all insects do. Most bees do, and actually, the native blue-banded bee is particularly good at buzz pollination. But yes, it will increase your yield if you don't have a lot of insects in the area, or if you just want to have fun with it, you can,” she explained.
“Buzz pollination, particularly for tomatoes, is the main way they reproduce, so they really need the full flower to be shaken to release the pollen. Not all plants need that, but tomatoes in particular do.”
If you’re going to do this hack, start doing it as soon as you see the flowers bloom and use the electric toothbrush on all the flowers on the tomato plant so you’re transferring pollen from flower to flower like a bee does.
“You can keep doing it throughout the course of the tomato's life. You'll notice that after a while, you're going to have so many tomatoes that you really don't need to worry about it,” Moody said.
Bananas under the tomato plant
Composting food scraps is a better way to take advantage of their nutrients than burying food scraps under plants. iStockphoto
Some gardeners swear by putting banana peels in the hole before they pop in their tomato plant for a potassium boost.
While potassium is important for encouraging the plant to grow flowers and bananas have a lot of the mineral, this hack isn’t the best way to give it to your tomato plants.
“If you’re in a highly urban area and you’re planting food scraps into your soil, there’s a good chance you’re going to be attracting rodents. So what I’d recommend instead is getting a fertiliser that’s high in potassium and using that,” Moody said.
The only way to do it is to plant the banana peels quite deeply to avoid encouraging cockroaches and rodents, and you’d need to add a lot of banana peels to get any benefit.
A better way to get nutrients out of your banana peels is to add them to your compost and once that’s broken down you can add it to your soil.
Eggs under the tomato plant
This hack is all about adding calcium to the soil to help grow strong tomato plants, but burying a whole egg or cracking the egg into the hole your plant is going in isn’t the best way to do it.
“The egg yolk and all of that stuff has very minimal nutrition in it for a plant, so I wouldn’t encourage doing it,” Moody said.
“At the end of the day, if you’ve got a big garden, it’s not going to do anything too bad, but if you have a small raised garden bed or a balcony garden… it’s going to encourage bacteria to grow.
“Any animal product has the potential to increase your bacteria growth, and you could be making it an unnecessarily mouldy, bacteria-filled kind of environment.”
Eggshells in the soil
What does have some science behind it is crushing the eggshells and adding that to the soil for a calcium boost.
For best results, the eggshells need to be crushed up so finely they become a powdery substance to help them break down in the soil faster.
Eggshells have several uses in the garden, including sprinkling them on top of soil as a slug and snail deterrent. iStockphoto
If the eggshells aren’t broken down enough, Moody said there is still a benefit though she warned against going overboard with it.
“Another cool thing that eggshells do is offer little homes for worms to lay their eggs, and obviously worms are really great to have in your garden, so that's a good way to help your worms by burying eggshells into the ground, within reason,” she said.
“I’ve seen some people go a little bit overboard and suddenly your soil’s full of all sorts of food scraps and waste, so we don’t want to encourage that, but a little bit of crushed-up eggshells is perfectly fine for your veggies.”
Epsom salt under tomato plants
As long as it doesn’t have added ingredients like essential oils and fragrance, sprinkling some Epsom salt in the hole before you pop your tomato plant in is OK to do as it’ll give them a boost of magnesium.
“Magnesium is another nutrient that plants, especially veggies, can benefit from. It helps them out a lot, and magnesium deficiency is one of the more common deficiencies in plants along with iron as well,” Moody said.
Tomato plants get all the nutrients they need from fertiliser so you don’t necessarily have to try hacks unless it’s for fun. iStockphoto
But like all of these hacks you don’t need to do it for a healthy tomato plant, especially if you’re feeding them well throughout the season.
“If you’re adding fresh, organic compost into your veggie garden or into your soil, it should have all of those things in it anyway. Adding Epsom salt is not going to hurt anything, and it will give it a bit more magnesium, which is great, but chances are you probably don’t need to worry about it anyway,” she said.
