A Tale Of Baked Tomato Plants – How Much Water Do They Need?

Back in Ontario, I never worried about giving any of my plants, including tomato plants, too much water. No matter what I did, everything usually always turned out great. If it was hot, I’d give them all water. If it hadn’t lirained in a couple of days, I’d give them water. Another thing I’ve never really heard of back then was this idea of “only water at the root or base.” I’d happily sit and water my large garden with a garden hose and sprayer – never saw any leaf burn, mold, or anything like that.

Perhaps I always had some great soil to work with in the first place that was perfect for however I gardened vegetables. I never even fertilized, other than amend the soil with my own compost that I had created. Often, though, I also amended the soil with peat moss.

Here in Greece, it’s been interesting to learn some things, especially about tomatoes, heat and constant blazing sunshine, and watering.

The Soil Looks Bone Dry

My little garden gets hours and hours of blazing sun daily and often experiences strong winds blowing off the Aegean Sea. I can give all my plants a good deep watering and by the next day, the surface of the soil looks bone-dry, as if nothing has been watered in days. And that’s when I’ve been tempted into giving more water to everything – but now I realize that was probably the wrong thing to do.

My soil is not something I can easily describe. It’s nothing like the rich dark soil I used to work with in Ontario; instead when it is free of moisture, it’s a very hard and crumbly soil. It’s difficult to dig when dry, and even when moist, it’s difficult to get it to rake out into a nice smooth texture. Yet at the same time, it does produce healthy plants for the most part.

The Heat And Sun Bake The Tomato Plants

Here in Greece in the part I’m presently in, the sun blazes and the temps can exceed 40C some days, with night time temps only dropping a few degrees. Summer is generally above 30C during the day, and perhaps as low as 26 at night. While tomatoes do like warmth, these kinds of temperatures can really stress Tomatoes. And up until now, my way of thinking has been to help them by giving them lots of water.

I’ve watched tomato plants curl up and their leaves get crispy. The first reaction is, “Gosh – the must need more water!”

But that did not work.

I had about 8 Tomato plants that through July, were looking great, had lots of flowers, then suddenly dropped the flowers, and overnight, leaf curl would occur. I was very discouraged but thought I’d let them be instead of pulling them out of the ground. By the end of August, I was pretty sure they were not going to do anything. But I still did not pull them up.

A Soil Moisture Gauge Came To The Rescue

I really didn’t know what was going on beneath the surface of the soil. How much moisture was my soil conserving down there despite the blazing heat, sun, and strong winds? While browsing Amazon, I came across a soil moisture gauge and along with a large “Amazon Gift Certificate,” I decided it would be interesting to order the moisture gauge and it a lot of great reviews.

What I discovered astounded me!

My Tomato Plants Have Been Double Stressed

It is natural for tomato plant leaves to curl upward when they are feeling heat-stressed. And a typical response might be to think they need more water. But in my case, giving them more and more water hoping to see some signs of helping them, actually likely stressed the roots – as the soil was already holding lots of moisture.

When the moisture gauge arrived, I was astounded to see that the soil below all of the tomato plants was measuring as “wet.” The soil beneath the pepper plants measured in as “moist,” (it seems they make better use of moisture perhaps as they were getting the same watering as the tomatoes), and even the pots that I had planted some other types of tomatoes, were also showing “wet.”

So I completely backed off on the watering. “Let’s see if we can trust this gauge,” I thought to myself.

Well, the results are in with the photo above this article. It is also true the weather has cooled off a bit in the past couple of weeks, which likely has helped, but with backing off on the water, the tomato plants have created new lush green leaves and even flowers!

It will be interesting to see if there is still enough time between now and when the weather really begins to cool off to produce tomatoes from these plants, with are an “F1 Evia” variety, developed in Greece.

Having said that, I was visiting the local garden centre where I purchased these plants, and had a conversation with the owner. He told me that this past summer, getting any quantity of tomatoes from this variety was “very difficult.”

I’ll report more and update this post later, about any tomato production later in autumn from these plants.

I also have some other experiments going on which I’ll write about later, also.