What temperature does the tomato seedlings withstand in the greenhouse, in the open ground, on the balcony, under the concealed material, in the greenhouse?

A very popular culture for growing the owners of cottage areas are tomatoes. Large-scale harvests of useful vegetables are made by hard-working gardener practically in any climatic zone. The first question for beginner tomato growers is the optimal and permissible temperatures. The question of the temperature of tomato seedlings survives in different variations, because it is necessary to know the temperature regimes for germination of seeds, planting seedlings, ripening fruits in different conditions. Answers are needed to choose the optimal way for a good harvest.

Homeland and history of the settlement of tomatoes

At home, in the tropics of South America, wild species of tomatoes are growing now. Knowing this, you can unequivocally answer one of the questions, namely, what minus temperature the tomato seedling can withstand. None. Frozen in the air and especially on the soil the plant can not stand and perishes. In Europe, it fell into the hands of Columbus. This is the case when the exact date is known - one thousand four hundred and ninety-third year. Cultivate for culinary purposes it began only by the middle of the sixteenth century in warm European countries. And already with the light hand of the Italians "golden apples", the so-called fruits of the plant were called here, they became "dear" - a literal translation. Hence the Russian - "tomato". The answer to the question of how the temperature drop is maintained by the seedlings of tomatoes, scientists in Russia persistently began to search during the reign of Catherine II scientists under the guidance of breeder E. Grachev and the founder of Russian agronomy A. Bolotov. 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 climate more severe - annual. The root system is a rod with a lot of lateral branches, it is covered with a set of hairs. In the open warm ground, in the southern regions, the roots reach a meter length. In greenhouses develop up to thirty centimeters. Roots are easily formed on any part of the stem. The stems themselves are erect or requiring garters, but by the nature of growth: constantly branching - indeterminate and, conversely, determinant. Leaves are of the usual form, but their coloring changes under the influence of external conditions and the state of the plant. Flowers of both sexes are collected in the inflorescence of the "fruit brush". Fruits - fleshy and juicy berries, different sizes and shapes. The color of ripe fruits is from golden to brown and violet, depending on the variety. Tomatoes are a self-pollinating plant. It starts to blossom approximately on the fiftieth day after germination from seeds, and fruits ripen still days through sixty. During this period, any sharp external changes, especially temperature fluctuations, can be disastrous for the crop. And then you should know what the lowest temperature is maintained by tomato seedlings, and prevent the plant from getting into extreme temperatures - below five degrees. It will die in the heat above forty-three degrees.

Selection of tomato variety

In the issue of choosing a variety at the initial stages, you can use the recommendations of experienced truck farmers, but your personal experience is more valuable. In any case, you need to buy seeds of several types of tomatoes. Work from sprouting them into seedlings until harvest. Autumn work will show what kind of tomatoes lived up to expectations specifically in your garden. When choosing seeds of tomatoes for an open area without greenhouses, the first mandatory question should be: What is the temperature of the seedlings grown by the tomato planted in the open ground? Here it is necessary to give preference to short hybrid varieties with a well-developed, temperature-resistant root system. And in order not to pursue the idea of what minimum temperature is maintained by tomato seedlings, take into account the following condition. Grades are better to choose early, early or early. Vegetation in these groups passes respectively to seventy, to ninety and to one hundred days. An example of determinant varieties: Oak, very tasty and high-yielding White fill, early and with the same size fruits of Agata, resistant to temperature problems and with a special tomato taste Sanka, pink sweet Demidov, ideal for preservation. Ladies fingers. The question of what temperature the seedlings of a tomato can withstand in a greenhouse, if it is built on your site, will be no less important if you choose a variety for a greenhouse. Here it is possible to give preference to indeterminate hybrids. The main stem of different types of tomato tree can grow over a year. The height of Sprat 1, for example, is almost four meters, and the crown occupies an area of more than fifty square meters. The harvest is one and a half tons a year. This is the best grade for greenhouses, covered not just with film, but with modern transparent plastic materials for agrarians-businessmen. For industrial scales, the grade "Major" is also suitable. Even in the cold season, gardeners who have chosen this variety will not care what kind of night temperatures a tomato can withstand. It is characterized by high resistance to sharp temperature changes and the main diseases of tomatoes. In addition, long-term transport does not harm their commercial appearance. By taste, the best greenhouse and quickly ripening variety is considered by many as the pink Mikado. Increased sugar content makes the flesh of the fruit sweet and juicy. If you are a big fan of your own grown tomatoes, and the place for growing is limited to an apartment in a city high-rise building, then it's time to find out what temperature the tomato can withstand on the balcony. In this situation, choose the best varieties with small fruits and low-growing bushes such as Cherry, Cascade Red, Red Pearl. All of them are lovers of the morning or evening sun and will withstand the night temperature drop to twelve degrees.

Requirements for lighting and watering

Good lighting for light-loving plants is a necessary condition. For seedlings of tomatoes, the lack of light is especially dangerous. The seedlings develop poorly, the stems in them stretch and weaken. Adults tomatoes with a lack of light almost do not bloom, the ovaries fall off. The plant turns into a green tops. Especially acute suffer from lack of sun tomatoes of southern varieties and those grown in greenhouses and greenhouses. Lack of light is the reason for the poor taste qualities of tomatoes. Nightshade, grown without the sun, can be poisonous. In greenhouses, without natural light, plants are more often sick than those grown on the open ground. In this case it is necessary to take into account that for the soil and the greenhouse different irrigation regimes.

To save greenhouse plants from 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 up and turn into a crust. Watering it usually alternate with loosening. It is necessary to pour water under the root, without getting on the leaves, the plants tolerate it badly. Water should be left to stand for 24 hours before use. It should not be cold - it's to the question of what temperature the seedling can withstand tomato in the open ground. The necessary humidity for the soil is -70%, for air-60%. Increased moisture and lack of heat reduce yields.

Requirements for soil and neighbors

Due to the soil, not such strict requirements as to light and heat. Excellent, if you can boast of high-fertility black soil in the garden or in the greenhouse. A light loamy and sandy loam soil of medium acidity is suitable. In very acidic soil it is necessary to make lime. Tomatoes do not recommend planting more than two years in a row at the same place. It's bad for tomato harvest if peppers, eggplants or other vegetables grow on the site before them, taking many nutrients from the soil. Good predecessors are onions, potatoes, cabbage, zucchini, cucumber, pumpkin and carrots. Seasonal vegetables, potatoes and peppers are not suitable as neighbors in beds, their rooting is holding back the growth of tomatoes. In addition, diseases and pests are the same, which increases the risk of injury. Next to tomatoes, it is good to plant onions, asparagus, parsley, calendula. These neighbors have a beneficial effect and protect against the listed misfortunes.

Preparation of seeds for seedlings

Cultivation of tomato seedlings starts with the preparation of seeds. The first stage is their verification. Quality seeds are full-bodied, they sink in a 5% salt solution. All that pops up is empty or rotten seeds. Selected samples are well washed with running cold water and lowered for fifteen minutes into a 1% solution of potassium permanganate. After disinfection again rinse with cold water and for the whole night soak in a solution of special microelements. It is better to buy a ready-made solution preparation solution. Soaked seeds for sizing put on a damp cloth. In this period, perhaps up to a week, the fabric should always be moist. Excess moisture, like drying, adversely affects germination.

Growing seedlings

The soil for germinating the seed that has been seeded is more profitable to prepare on its own. It should be loose and light, it is good for air and moisture. You can mix equally divided soddy soil, sand, humus and peat. It is important that the soil used not to grow before the plants of the Solanaceae family. Instead of sand, you can mix wood sawdust with ash, ie, take the components that you can get. To water the substrate, prepare a mineral solution of about twenty grams of superphosphate and ten grams of carbamide per bucket of water. For the planting of seeds, long, better wooden boxes are used, where they are placed with tweezers a couple of centimeters from each other, into a smooth long furrow in the prepared ground a half centimeter deep. Sprinkled on top of the earth and covered with a film. Boxes put in a warm place. Here it is appropriate to ask what temperature the seedlings withstand tomato under the cover material. The boundary temperature of seed germination is ten degrees Celsius; To accelerate the process, you need at least sixteen degrees. Further, before the appearance of several leaves, the temperature should be from twenty to twenty-four degrees in the daytime, on cloudy days it is allowed up 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, artificial floodlighting is used. It is important to monitor the temperature of the air and soil, if everything is fine, remove the film in the afternoon. The room where seedlings are prepared should be ventilated, but there must not be a draft. When the first two leaves appear on the shoots, they are planted, more accustomed to gardening - they dive into small paper or plastic cups with holes for drainage below. Seedlings select healthy, with strong roots. To stimulate the growth of the lateral roots, the root root is pruned. Dive them into the prepared soil, watered and kept warm to twenty degrees. When the leaves are more than four, ten days before landing in a permanent soil, the temperature of day and night is reduced by a couple of degrees. You can put pots on the street, and in hotbeds and greenhouses remove the upper windows for tempering plants, provided that there will be no frost at night. That is, you always need to remember what minimum temperature the tomato seedling can withstand, and make sure that it does not fall below twelve degrees. After hardening, the seedlings are healthy, with a thick, even stem thickened at the base. When growing, except light and heat, seedlings require additional fertilizing. The first must be done in ten days after transplanting into a pot. It is good to prepare organic top dressing. To do this, slurry is dissolved in water in a proportion of one to four or chicken manure in the proportion of one to fifteen. Add twenty grams of superphosphate and a little wood ash. It is necessary to maintain equal intervals between top dressing in about two weeks.

Seeding time

From when it is planned to transfer seedlings of tomatoes to the ground, to a permanent place in a greenhouse or balcony, the seeding time is chosen. And it depends on the climate of the area and the chosen variety. Seedlings of ordinary low-growing varieties can be grown for fifty to seventy days, and for tomato giants, the terms increase to ninety days. On open ground in the middle latitudes, for example, seedlings are carried out at the very beginning of summer. For the closed soil, the timing can be shifted with an amendment to the question of what temperature the tomato seedlings can withstand in the greenhouse. You need to consider what type it is, what type of coating - film or polycarbonate. For balcony seedlings you need to consider where the balcony windows go out, it is open or glazed, what kind of insulation you used. If the balcony is located on the southeast side, insulated and there are plastic windows, the landing time is similar to the greenhouse dates, and for you the actual answer to the question is what temperature the tomato seedlings can withstand in the greenhouse.

Requirements for greenhouse conditions

Immediately specify the time of disembarkation, and hence the time when the greenhouse should be ready. If you call a greenhouse covered with a film, a building without heating, the seedlings can only be transferred to it in the middle of May, completely eliminating possible nocturnal frosts in your area. If the climate allows, and the hothouse without heating is covered with a film in several layers, and you use additional paper shelters and watering with warm water, you can plant the seedlings in the last days of April. In the film greenhouses, where there is heating, seedlings are planted from the tenth to the fifteenth of April. Absolutely rhetorical question, what temperature the tomato seedlings can withstand in a greenhouse made of polycarbonate, because they are built usually for year-round growing of vegetables.

Now about the size of the land under the greenhouse. Seedlings of stunted varieties are planted at a distance of thirty centimeters from each other. For tall people need at least forty centimeters of the site. The distance between the rows, according to the planting technology, should be from fifty to sixty centimeters. Planting bushes is better in staggered order - two rows, row spacing, etc. On a site of about one and a half to two square meters, you can place from eight to twelve bushes of tomatoes. For a business greenhouse polycarbonate need five or six hundred square meters of land. In any greenhouse will need additional lighting - a real lamp or reflecting the sun's rays mirror surface. They use even ordinary household foil on plywood. In a greenhouse or on a site there should be a water source, it is more favorable - a well or a well. Remembering what temperature a tomato can withstand, and that you can not water it with cold water, you need to stock up with tanks where the water will stand and be heated in the sun or by a special appliance. And if growing tomatoes in a greenhouse for you - not just another experiment in a series of failed, it is better to take care of an additional source of heat, except the sun.

The owners of hotbeds and greenhouses before each new planting are bound to have all parts, walls and coatings of the structure treated with bleach, sprinkle it and soil. The upper, five-centimeter layer of soil in the greenhouses is changed to a new substrate, dug and poured with solution of potassium permanganate after each harvest. All these measures will help to prevent frequent greenhouse diseases of vegetables. In general, the hothouse steam beds are arranged in the type of a trench, where first hot manure is laid, about thirty or 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 airing of the greenhouses. The structures of the greenhouses should contain windows not only on the sides, but also on the top.

Tomatoes from the garden

If your goal is not a tomato business project, but a ripe, sweet, juicy tomato for dinner from your own bed near the house, then decide definitively with the question of what temperature the tomato can withstand in the open ground, and begin. Choose a plot in the garden under the beds, where there is a lot of light, which means it will be warm. Last year, by the way, cucumbers grew well. In the autumn you, as it should be, plot dug up and brought in fertilizers. After winter and before planting, once again everything was well blown up and added nitrogenous fertilizers. At the end of May, a constant temperature was established. In the afternoon from twenty-two to twenty-five degrees. At night it is warm, it does not happen below fifteen plus. You can plant. Water from a well in a large barrel in the garden is warmed by day in the sun above twenty degrees. There is something to water. And no "struggle" for the harvest, just if you work with desire, kindness and love of nature - just everything will turn out.