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Warning: stop babying your balcony tomatoes with tiny pots, my 5 gallon buckets doubled my harvest
Everyone in my building's garden chat keeps saying you need cute 12 inch pots for balcony tomatoes, and I followed that advice for two summers with sad little plants. Back in April I said forget it and drilled holes in three old 5 gallon buckets from the hardware store on Vine Street, filled them with plain potting mix, and stuck my starts in. The plants got taller than my railing by June and I picked 41 tomatoes off just one bucket, way more than the 9 I got from my fancy pot the year before. The roots finally had room, that is the whole thing. Has anyone else gone bigger on containers and seen the same jump, or did I just get lucky with the weather?
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robinson.quinn1mo ago
Yes! Finally someone says it out loud. I did the same thing last year with those cheap food grade buckets from the restaurant supply place and my cherry tomatoes went nuts, I was giving away bags of them at work by August. People act like a tomato plant is a houseplant or something, it is a full on bush that wants to send roots down a foot and a half. I had one plant in a 12 inch pot that stalled out at like two feet tall and never did anything, same soil, same sun, same everything. The bucket ones just kept going, so no you did not get lucky, the pot size is the whole ballgame.
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