A very popular crop for growing at the owners of summer cottages are tomatoes. Hard-working gardeners get large yields of healthy vegetables in almost any climate zone. The first question for beginner tomato growers is the optimal and acceptable temperature. The question of what temperature tomato seedlings can withstand sounds in different variations, because you need to know the temperature regimes for germinating seeds, planting seedlings, ripening fruits under different conditions. Answers are needed to choose the best way for you to get a good harvest.
Homeland and the history of the resettlement of tomatoes
In the homeland, in the tropics of South America, wild species of tomatoes are still growing.
Knowing this, one can unambiguously answer one of the questions, namely, what subzero temperature the tomato seedlings can withstand. None. The plant does not withstand frost in the air and especially on the soil and dies. It came to Europe from the light hand of Columbus. This is the case when the exact date is known - one thousand four hundred and ninety-third year. Cultivation for culinary purposes it began only in the middle of the sixteenth century in the warm European countries. And already with the light hand of Italians, “golden apples”, as the fruits of the plant were called here, became “help” - the literal translation. Hence the Russian - "tomato". During the reign of Catherine II, scientists under the guidance of breeder E. Grachev and the founder of Russian agronomy A. Bolotov persistently began to search for the answer to the question of what temperature drops tomato seedlings can withstand. With their light hand, a juicy vegetable appeared on the tables of people across the country.
Botanical Description
Tomatoes are a nightshade herbaceous plant. At home, it can be perennial. In countries with a milder climate, annual. The root system is a rod with many lateral branches, it is covered with many hairs. In open warm soil, in the southern regions, the roots reach a meter long. In greenhouses, up to thirty centimeters develop. Roots are easily formed on any part of the stem. The stems themselves are erect or requiring garter, but according to the nature of growth: constantly branching - indeterminate and, conversely, determinant. The leaves are of the usual form, but their color changes under the influence of external conditions and the state of the plant. Flowers of both sexes are collected in the fruit brush inflorescences. Fruits - fleshy and juicy berries, of different sizes and shapes. The color of ripe fruits is from golden to brown and purple, depending on the variety.
Tomatoes are a self-pollinating plant. It begins to bloom on the fiftieth day after germination from the seeds, and the fruits ripen for another sixty days. During this period, any sharp external changes, especially temperature fluctuations, can be fatal to the crop. And here it would be necessary to know what the lowest temperature is maintained by tomato seedlings, and to prevent the plant from reaching extreme temperatures - below five degrees. It will die in the heat above forty-three degrees.
Selection of tomato varieties
In the question of choosing a variety at the initial stages, you can use the recommendations of experienced gardeners, but your personal experience is more valuable. In any case, you need to buy seeds of several types of tomatoes. To carry out work from germinating them in seedlings to harvesting. Autumn works will show which tomato variety met your expectations specifically in your garden. When choosing tomato seeds for an open area without greenhouses, the first mandatory question should be: what temperature does a tomato seedlings planted in open ground withstand? Here you need to give preference to low-growing hybrid varieties with a well-developed, temperature-resistant root system. And in order not to be haunted by the idea of what minimum temperature the tomato seedlings can withstand, take the following condition into service. Varieties are better to choose early, early or mid-early. Vegetation in these groups lasts up to seventy, ninety and up to one hundred days, respectively. Example of determinant varieties: Oak, very tasty and high-yielding White filling, early and with the same size Agate fruits, resistant to temperature troubles and with a special tomato flavor Sanka, pink sweet Demidov, ideal for conservation Lady's fingers. The question of what temperature a tomato seedling can withstand in a greenhouse, if it is built on your site, will be no less important in the case of choosing a variety for a greenhouse. Here you can give preference to indeterminate hybrids. The main stem of different types of tomato tree can grow more than a year. The height of the Octopus 1 variety, for example, is almost four meters, and the crown covers an area of more than fifty square meters. Harvest a year to one and a half tons. This is the best grade for greenhouses covered not just with a film, but with modern transparent plastic materials for business agrarians.
For industrial scale, the Major variety is also suitable. Even in the cold season, gardeners who choose this variety will not be bothered by the question of what night temperatures tomato seedlings can withstand. It is highly resistant to sudden temperature changes and the main diseases of tomatoes. In addition, lengthy transport does not harm their presentation. By taste, many consider pink Mikado to be the best greenhouse and rapidly ripening variety. The high sugar content makes the fruit pulp sweet and juicy. If you are a big fan of tomatoes grown on your own, and the place for growing is limited to an apartment in a city multi-storey building, then it's time to find out what temperature a
tomato seedling can withstand
on a balcony. In this situation, it is better to choose varieties with small fruits and undersized bushes such as Cherry, Cascade Red, Red Pearl. All of them are lovers of the morning or evening sun and will withstand a nighttime drop in temperature to twelve degrees.
Lighting and Watering Requirements
Good lighting for photophilous plants is a prerequisite. For tomato seedlings, a lack of light is especially dangerous. Seedlings are poorly developed, their stems are elongated and weakened. Adult tomatoes with a lack of light almost do not bloom, the ovaries fall. The plant turns into a green tops. Tomatoes of southern varieties and those grown in greenhouses and hotbeds are especially acute from a lack of sun. Lack of light is the reason for the poor taste of tomatoes. Solanaceae grown without the sun can be poisonous. In greenhouses, without natural light, plants are more often sick than those that are grown on open ground. In this case, you need to consider that for the soil and the greenhouse there are different irrigation modes.
To rid greenhouse plants of leaf mold, you need to reduce watering. In open areas, the plant should be regularly watered, especially during the period when the fruits are formed and ripen. The soil under the roots should not dry out and turn into a crust. Watering it is usually alternated with loosening. You need to pour water under the root, without falling on the leaves, plants do not tolerate this well. It is better to defend water before use during the day. It should not be cold - this is to the question of what temperature a tomato seedlings can withstand in open ground. The required humidity for the soil is -70%, for air - 60%. Increased moisture and lack of heat reduce productivity.
Soil and neighbor requirements
Soil requirements are not as strict as those for light and heat. It’s great if you can boast of highly fertile black soil in the garden or in the greenhouse. Light loamy and loamy soil of medium acidity is well suited. Lime should be added to very acidic soil. Tomatoes are not recommended to be planted for more than two years in a row at the same place. It is bad for a tomato crop if peppers, eggplants or other vegetables, which take a lot of nutrients from the soil, grew on the plot before them. Onions, potatoes, cabbage, zucchini, cucumbers, pumpkin and carrots are considered good predecessors. Solanaceous vegetables, potatoes and peppers are not suitable as neighbors in the beds, their root secretions inhibit the growth of tomatoes. In addition, they have the same diseases and pests, which increases the risk of damage. Next to tomatoes, it is good to plant onions, asparagus, parsley, calendula.
These neighbors have beneficial effects and protect against these misfortunes.
Seed preparation for seedlings
Growing tomato seedlings begins with the preparation of seeds. The first stage is their verification. High-quality seeds are full-weighted, they drown in a five percent saline solution. All that comes up is empty or rotten seeds. The selected samples are washed well with running cold water and immersed for fifteen minutes in a one percent solution of potassium permanganate. After disinfection, they are again washed with cold water and soaked for a whole night in a solution of special trace elements. It is better to buy a ready-made composition for the preparation of the solution. Soaked seeds for spitting are spread on a damp cloth. During this period, possibly up to a week, the tissue should always be wet. Excess moisture, as well as drying out, adversely affects germination.
Growing seedlings
It is more profitable to prepare the soil for germinating hatching seeds on your own. It should be loose and light, well permeable to air and moisture. You can mix evenly selected soddy soil, sand, humus and peat. It is important that plants of the nightshade family never grow on the soil used. Instead of sand, you can mix sawdust with ash, that is, take the components that can be obtained. A mineral solution of about twenty grams of superphosphate and ten grams of urea per bucket of water is prepared to water the substrate. For planting seeds, use long, preferably wooden boxes, where they are laid out with tweezers a couple of centimeters from each other, in an even long groove in the prepared soil and a half centimeter deep. Sprinkle on top of the ground and cover with a film. Boxes are put in a warm place.
Here the question of what temperature the tomato seedlings can withstand under the covering material is relevant. The boundary temperature of seed germination is ten degrees of heat; to speed up the process, you need at least sixteen degrees. Further, until several leaves appear, during the day the temperature should be from twenty to twenty-four degrees, on cloudy days it is allowed to sixteen degrees. At night - from fifteen to seventeen degrees with a plus sign, otherwise growth stops. When the seeds germinate, they are transferred to a lighted place. If there is not enough natural, apply artificial lighting. It is important to monitor the temperature of the air and soil, if everything is fine, the film is removed during the day. The room where the seedlings are prepared should be aired, but there should not be a draft. When the first two leaves appear on the sprouts, they are planted, more usual for gardeners - they dive into small paper or plastic cups with holes for drainage at the bottom. Seedlings select healthy, with strong roots.
To stimulate the growth of lateral roots, the core root is trimmed. Dive them into the prepared soil, watered and kept warm to twenty degrees. When there are more than four leaves, ten days before planting in permanent soil, the daytime and nighttime temperatures are reduced by a couple of degrees. You can put pots on the street, and in greenhouses and greenhouses remove the upper windows for hardening plants, provided that there will be no frost at night. That is, you always need to remember what minimum temperature the tomato seedlings can withstand, and make sure that it is not below twelve degrees. After hardening, healthy seedlings are to be planted, with a thickened, clean, even stalk thickened at the base. When growing, in addition to light and heat, seedlings require top dressing. The first one needs to be done ten days after transplanting into pots. Prepare organic dressing well. To do this, dissolve slurry in a ratio of one to four or
chicken droppings in a ratio of one to fifteen in water. Twenty grams of superphosphate and some wood ash are added here. It is necessary to maintain the same intervals between dressings in about two weeks.
Seeding time
From when it is planned to transfer tomato seedlings to the ground, to a permanent place in the greenhouse or balcony, the time of planting the seeds is chosen. And it depends on the climate of the area and the selected variety. Seedlings of ordinary low-growing varieties can be grown in fifty to seventy days, and for tomato giants, the terms are extended to ninety days. On open ground in mid-latitudes, for example, seedlings are taken out at the very beginning of summer. For indoor soil, the dates can be shifted, adjusted to the question, what temperature can a tomato seedlings withstand in a greenhouse. You need to consider what type it is, what kind of coating - film or polycarbonate. For balcony seedlings, you need to consider where the balcony windows go, whether it is open or glazed, what kind of insulation you used.
If the balcony is located on the southeast side, the windows are insulated and plastic, then the planting dates are similar to the greenhouse ones, and the answer to the question is what temperature the tomato seedlings can withstand in the greenhouse.
Greenhouse Requirements
Immediately specify the time of planting, and therefore the time when the greenhouse should be ready. If you call a greenhouse a film-covered building without heating, then the seedlings can be transferred to it only in mid-May, completely eliminating possible night frosts in your area. If the climate allows, and the greenhouse without heating is covered with a film in several layers, and you use additional paper shelters and irrigated with warm water, then you can plant seedlings in the last days of April. In film greenhouses, where there is heating, seedlings are planted from the tenth to the fifteenth of April. An absolutely rhetorical question is what temperature a tomato seedlings can withstand in a polycarbonate greenhouse, because they are usually built for year-round vegetable growing.
Now about the size of the land under the greenhouse. Seedlings of undersized varieties are planted at a distance of thirty centimeters from each other. For tall, at least forty centimeters of the site are needed. The distance between the rows, according to the technology of planting, should be from fifty to sixty centimeters. It is better to plant the bushes in a checkerboard pattern - two rows, aisle, etc. On an area of about one and a half to two square meters, you can place from eight to twelve bushes of tomatoes. A polycarbonate business greenhouse needs five to six hundred square meters of land. In any greenhouse, additional lighting is needed - a real tube or reflective sunlight reflecting surface. Craftsmen even use ordinary household foil on plywood. In the greenhouse or on the plot there should be a source of water, more profitable - a well or well. Remembering what temperature the tomato seedlings can withstand, and that it cannot be poured with cold water, you need to stock up with containers where the water settles and is heated in the sun or with a special device. And if growing tomatoes in a greenhouse is not just another experiment in a series of failed ones for you, then it is better to take care of an additional heat source, besides the sun.
Before each new planting, the owners of greenhouses and greenhouses must always treat all parts, walls and coverings of the structure with bleach, and spray it with soil. The upper, five-centimeter layer of soil in greenhouses is replaced with a new substrate, dug up and watered with a potassium permanganate solution after each harvest. All these measures will help prevent frequent greenhouse diseases of vegetables. In general, greenhouse steam beds are arranged like a trench, where first they put hot manure, about thirty to thirty-five centimeters, and then prepared, as for seedlings, a nutrient mixture up to fifteen centimeters up. Do not forget about the mandatory and regular ventilation of greenhouses. , .
If your goal is not a tomato business project, but a ripe, sweet, juicy tomato for dinner from your own garden bed at home, then decide on the question of what temperature the tomato seedlings can withstand in the open ground, and start. Choose a plot under the garden beds where there is a lot of light, which means it will be warm. By the way, cucumbers grew here last year, by the way. In the fall you, as expected, dug up the site and fertilized. After the winter and before planting, they all loosened well again and added nitrogen fertilizers. At the end of May, a constant temperature was established. In the afternoon from twenty two to twenty five degrees. It’s warm at night, it’s not below fifteen plus. You can plant. Water from a well in a large barrel in the garden warms up in the afternoon in the sun above twenty degrees. There is something to water. And there is no “struggle” for the harvest, just if you work with desire, kindness and love of nature - everything will work out for sure.