Red Tomato Mulch Boosts Yields

If you’re like most gardeners, you’re probably out in the garden every morning looking for that first juicy ripe tomato on your vines.  Home-grown tomatoes just taste so much better than anything you buy in the supermarket!   Now there’s a new product on the market that may help boost production and even extend your harvest, helping those last green tomatoes turn nice and ripe.

Researchers at Clemson University, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, discovered that red light stimulates the plant hormones that produce fruit, and helps the fruit ripen more quickly.  They developed a red plastic sheeting with micro-perforations to allow water, air and nutrients to reach the soil, and ran trials to see if placing this "mulch"  around tomato plants made a difference.  The results were quite surprising – yields of fruit increased significantly.

The University of Montana ran another trial and found that silver and red mulch did the trick, while black mulch didn’t make any difference.  Penn State found that blue mulch also raised yields of tomatoes.

Annie Farrell, the garden consultant at Millstone Farm in Wilton, uses red mulch not just for the tomato vines – she finds that it boosts production of peppers and eggplant too.

You can find red mulch at some of the online garden supply companies.  The Gardener’s Supply Company (www.gardeners.com) sells sheets of red tomato mulch as well as anchors to hold them down.  Burpees sells the red mulch in rolls as well as sheets.

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