Alright, so we’re talking bone meal and tomatoes. Yeah, I’ve dabbled with that stuff for years, pretty much since I started trying to get decent tomatoes instead of those sad little things you sometimes end up with.
My Way of Doing It
It’s not some secret magic, you know. When I’m planting my tomato starts, the little guys I’ve babied from seed or picked up from the local nursery, that’s when I think about it. Here’s what I generally do:
- I dig my hole, a good bit bigger than the pot the tomato plant is in. Give those roots some room to stretch, I always say.
- Then I just grab a handful of bone meal. No fancy measuring, just what feels right for the size of the plant.
- I toss it into the bottom of the hole. Sometimes I mix it in a bit with the soil down there, sometimes I just let it be.
- Plop the tomato plant in, fill ‘er up with soil, give it a good water, and that’s about it for the bone meal part.
Some folks probably have a more scientific approach, but that’s how I’ve always done it. Simple.
Does it make a world of difference? Honestly, I think it helps, especially with the blossoms and getting the fruit to set. Tomatoes are hungry fellas, especially for phosphorus, and that’s what bone meal is supposed to be good for, right? But I wouldn’t say it’s a miracle cure. If your soil is terrible to begin with, or you don’t water right, or pests get ’em, bone meal ain’t gonna save your harvest single-handedly.
It reminds me a bit of my early days trying to get anything to grow. I didn’t have a clue, really. My grandad, he was the one with the green thumb. He’d just walk out, kick the dirt a bit, spit, and say “plant it here.” No soil test kits, no fancy amendments from a garden center catalog that cost an arm and a leg. He used wood ash from his stove, compost from the kitchen scraps, and yeah, probably stuff like bone meal if he could get it cheap from the feed store. His tomatoes were always amazing.
Then I got older, started reading all these gardening magazines and, later, stuff online. Suddenly, it was all about N-P-K ratios, pH levels down to the decimal point, and a dozen different products you “absolutely needed.” I tried to follow all that advice for a while. Spent a fair bit of money too. My shed started looking like a chemical warehouse. And you know what? My tomatoes weren’t much better than when I just did things the simple way. Sometimes they were worse because I was probably overthinking it, stressing the plants out with too much fuss.
I remember one year, I bought this expensive “tomato booster” stuff. Had all sorts of fancy ingredients listed. My neighbor, old Mrs. Gable, she just used rotted manure and coffee grounds. Her tomatoes were twice the size of mine. Made me feel like a right fool.
So now, I’m back to basics mostly. Good soil to start with, plenty of sun, water when they need it, and yeah, a bit of bone meal at planting time. It’s one of those old-timer things that seems to have stuck around because it just sort of works, without needing a PhD to understand why. It’s not about being lazy; it’s about not getting caught up in all the noise. More doing, less worrying, that’s my motto these days. And if the squirrels get half the tomatoes, well, that’s just part of the deal, isn’t it?
