Remember how great that first bacon, lettuce and tomato
sandwich was last year?

The bread was toasted just right and slathered with
mayonnaise. Then came bacon cooked
to perfection, leaf lettuce just picked from the garden and the
final crowning of your
first homegrown tomato — sliced ceremoniously, piled high with
some hanging over the edge
of the sandwich. With a glass of iced tea and chips on the side,
it was close to heaven.

Well, the makings of that sandwich are within your grasp
right
now in the garden.
Please handle the tomato plants carefully in anticipation of
“The Day.”

Tomatoes are 95 percent
water

Make sure your garden gets 1 inch of water per week. (In
excessively hot weeks, make
that 2 inches.) If you get a half-inch of rain on Tuesday,
give
the garden a half-inch
later in the week.

Water early in the day to cut down on evaporation losses
and
to give your plants plenty
of time to dry out, too. Wet foliage overnight may help
trigger
some diseases.

With drip irrigation or soaker hoses, which deliver water
right at the soil surface and
not on the leaves, you can water almost anytime.

Watch the
fertilizer!

Tomatoes need it, but they need it in the right amount and
at the right time. You
should be side-dressing now, and timing is critical.

The fertilizer you put out originally was enough to carry
the plant until the first
fruits “set” and the little tomatoes are the size of
a dime to a nickel.

Then, and only then, you should side-dress with more
fertilizer. If you put out more
fertilizer sooner, the plant will slough off the blossoms. It
will grow vegetatively and
not reproductively — it won’t produce tomatoes.

Mulch and
stake

Keep diseases down by placing the plant up on stakes or
cages, and mulch around the
plant to place a barrier between the plant and the soil. Mulch
will also keep the soil
moisture more uniform, which helps the tomato plant grow
best.

Mind pests and
diseases

Keep a lookout for insects and diseases. Check your plants
as often as you can — at
least two or three times a week. Get down on the bugs’ level
and look at the underside of
the leaves. This is where the insects hide and do their
damage.

If you keep these points in mind as you tend your garden,
the “Day for That
Sandwich” will come.