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Fresh tomatoes from the garden are a summer staple that can’t be duplicated. From the perfect Southern tomato sandwich to the freshest cherry tomato Caprese salad, your summer recipes count on sweet, ripe tomatoes. While you may have a plentiful backyard bounty, there’s one thing you can do to boost both the flavor and health of your tomatoes as they grow: use baking soda. This simple gardening hack has several benefits, the most important of which is that it changes the pH of the soil by lowering the acidity.
The result is a change in the soil chemistry that yields sweeter fruit. Baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate, works wonders in the kitchen as well as the garden. It’s a base that, when dissolved in water, forms an alkaline solution that affects the nutrient absorption. By sprinkling the soil around your growing plants with a small amount of baking soda, they will absorb nutrients that are much less acidic, making for a far less tart tomato. But how much is too much?
It’s a great idea to start using baking soda with seedlings by adding about ¼ cup to the base of the seedlings, watering, then repeating this amount when the plants are about halfway grown. But don’t worry, if you have a plant that’s already growing but hasn’t produced a lot of fruit yet, you can still apply that ¼ cup to the soil. One tip: Make sure you place the baking soda on the soil, not the plant, so it absorbs properly.
Baking soda benefits your tomatoes in other ways
Bringing baking soda from the kitchen to the garden has supplemental benefits that will help your tomato harvest thrive. In addition to making your tomatoes even more delicious, using baking soda around your plants can help with fungal control. Fungal infections flourish with a highly acidic soil, so the baking soda can help eliminate the growth of harmful fungus on your plants. This application can also act as a suitable weed killer. It’s not uncommon to see weed seedlings surfacing around your tomato plants, and the baking soda will prevent small, newly visible weeds from taking over.
Baking soda is also a great deterrent for garden pests such as ants, slugs, and aphids (those pesky, tiny, green bugs that camouflage themselves on your plants). Fill a garden pump pressured sprayer with a solution of 1 tablespoon of baking soda, 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil, a splash of dish soap, and a gallon of water. Then, spray your tomato plants as needed to ward off pests. Take care to watch both the amount of baking soda and the frequency with which you apply it. Too much baking soda applied too frequently can result in salt buildup, which will interfere with nutrient absorption, so a little goes a long way. Baking soda is a simple trick for so many things from cleaning to cooking, and it’s an inexpensive way to yield the sweetest tomatoes for your next special Italian Sunday sauce.
