Best Way To Grow Tomatoes – Lakay Disiong’s Technique

So you think you know how to grow tomatoes!

I don’t know where our friend Carly Yee picked up the image above shared on Facebook, but I have just checked and Heeman’s is in Ontario, Canada and not anywhere near the Philippines. But never mind; I was intrigued by all that instruction: Wrong Way, Right Way.

Heeman’s must be talking about planting tomatoes by hand, wherever you have your garden, up there or down here.

The instruction is that planting your tomato vertically is wrong, that planting it horizontally is right. “If you plant your tomato sideways to start, you can double or triple your root system PLUS prevent your tomato from getting blown around in the wind!”

But suppose you start your tomato garden, or farm, sowing the seeds and not growing them first in a nursery? You will have to deal with tomato plants that are growing upright, right? Now, can you double or triple your root system just like Heeman’s is saying, by planting them upright?

My pure Ilocano father Lakay Disiong (bless his soul!) knew exactly what to do – it was years before I studied Agriculture so I could not have taught him anything – I’m talking sometime in the 1950s, or 70 years ago. We had a bangkag, dryland farm, just across the Chico River in Asingan, Pangasinan, that we planted with eggplant and tomato, not interplanted, as they had their own share of the farm.

And what did Lakay Disiong do to increase the yield of his tomatoes? For all his Grade 3 knowledge – and I know he did not read it anywhere – he did notplant them horizontally but he did the best thing I ever saw:

My father invented his own soil layering:
He pinned down the lowest branches of the tomatoes with soil.
Crazy? The branches were crazy enough to grow roots!

And of course those branches pinned down that way became like new tomato mother plants that grew more branches – and bore more fruits!

If only Heeman could hear me now.

From my cursory reading of my Google search results, Heeman’s is the top banana – if you will pardon the expression – in the city of London in Ontario in Canada.

Hilario’s technique, not Heeman’s. Local technology, not imported – just as good, if not better!

The Heeman’s family learned from experience over the years; neither do I remember my father telling me, nor I asking him, where he got that tomato trick of his, but I was a boy amazed – you don’t think a lowly farmer knows anything else but follow the plow following the carabao, do you?

“Maximize your roots!” That way, you maximize the fruits, and you maximize your harvest.

Now then, I am reminded me of the good reason why you should plant your rice seedlings singly following the method called System of Rice Intensification, SRI – the single seedlings will grow more roots and therefore more tillers and therefore more panicles – and therefore you get a higher harvest. SRI shows that if you maximize your roots, you’re smart!@517