An important purchase has been made; tomato feed. Which Magazine’s recommendation of Chempak’s Soluble Tomato food was out of stock so instead I picked up a box of Chempak, High Potash Feed. It’s referred to as No.4 (numbers seem much beloved by garden product suppliers; see John Innes) and described as the summer fertilizer for better blooms and bigger crops, especially tomatoes.
Packet Instructions
- Feed weekly from early stages. Increase frequency to twice a week when fruiting to improve quality and yield.
- Normal strength use: Dissolve 2 level measuresful of crystals in 5 litres of water and apply to your plants every 7 to 10days.
Or - For more frequent use: Experts prefer to use dilute feed more often. Dissolve 1 level measure in 10 litres of water and apply at every watering. At this strength this pack will make over 2,000 litres of plant food.
No guesses which approach I’m plumping for. Who wouldn’t want to self select expert! But in addition to fuelling my ego as well as feeding my plants, 2 other reasons weigh in behind this decision. First my watering can holds 10 litres so it’s easy to measure out (pathetic reason and worthy of instant ejection from expert category ) but more importantly this method is how West Dean manage their tomato feeding routine, dividing the weekly into daily doses. And if there is truly anyone who belongs in expert category when it comes to Tomatoes it’s the growers at West Dean.
The feed compromises 15+15+30 and trace elements. This translates as:
- 15% Nitrogen of which 8% is Nitric Acid, 2.8% Ammoniacal Nitrogen and 4.2% Ureic Nitrogen
- 15% Phosphorus Pentoxide
- 30% Potassium Oxide
- .1% Magnesium Oxide
- .006% Boron
- .013% Copper
- .025% Iron
- .013% Manganese
- .0003% Molybdenum
- .005% Zinc
I’d like to get hold of a pack of the tomato specific feed just to see how it differs.
800g of the soluble food cost £6.99 and if diluted to daily strength use will make over 2,000 litres of plant food which means filling the watering can 200 times over per packet …
To distract me from this Sisyphus syphonic task I turned to calculating how much watering each plant would require over a summer. My guide in this, Tomato guru, Terry Marshall. In his book ‘Tomatoes’ he quotes 100- 200 litres over the course of a full growing season.
This is weather and temperature dependent and as he grows tomatoes for 10 months of the year is 3 or more times longer than my growing season. But even so, it looks like I might need more than the one packet.
(Just one word of warning – when you open up the packet the product is of a blue hue. The sort of blue, scratchy bath salts were made of, the sort of blue that if it still has the temerity to colour up a whole bathroom suite will invoke grand arm sweeping gestures from Kirsty and Phil house hunters accompanied by the utterance of the word replace.)
