What nutrients do tomato plants need?

On a daily basis I talk to a number of farmers and many just don't get it right. What do you need to be able to get such a yield from your tomato plant?

You need the right fertilizers applied in the right way, right quantities, and right time.

We have both micro and macro-nutrients:

Micro-nutrients are those nutrients which the plant requires in small quantities but are equally very important for good yields. Examples include boron, zinc, sulphur, magnesium, manganese, and calcium etc.
Macro-nutrients are those nutrients which the plant requires in large quantities for them to grow strong, healthy and give you better yields. The examples include nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K). This is commonly abbreviated as NPK.

Let’s roll..!

At the earlier stages of plant development, the plant requires a phosphorus rich fertilizer such as DAP (Di Ammonium Phosphate) or Yaramila Power.

Three weeks from planting, the plant should be starting to flower and it’s actively growing vegetatively, putting on so many branches and here it requires more nitrogen to support the growth requirements. CAN (calcium ammonium nitrate) is the best at this stage. The calcium will help you to prevent blossom end rot that will render your tomatoes unmarketable. The nitrate in the CAN will support in vegetative growth so you have many branches hence more flowers and fruits per plant.

In the 5 - 6^th week, your plants should be having a lot of fruits and more flowers. During this stage you need to support fruit formation as much as possible. Your plant needs more potassium fertilizer. You could use a foliar rich in potassium (K). You can as well top-dress it with Yaramila winner or NPK 17:17:17.

The key issue is knowing the needs of your plants at different stages.

Don’t just farm like our late grandparents did. Let’s go modern, let’s use the available technologies to improve our farming experience!

The above are just the macro-nutrients, we have more micro-nutrients that are equally important, and we will talk about them later.

- Ochakolong Esukaya

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