Maintaining your plants

Tobacco plants are gross feeders, requiring alot of nurtrients from the ground. This becomes more obvious with poor quality soil as we have discovered. For this reason, people say not to plant tobacco in the same place each year, allow at least two seasons to rest the soil. Our observations support this as we tried growing plants in the same area three years in a row and found our plants were less lucious each season.

Maintainenace is minimal although some important jobs need to be attended to regularly:

• Keep your garden weed free
• Spread compost around plants
• As your plants get older they may require less watering, usually once a week depending on the heat
• Applying fertilizer definately helps, fertlizers such as tomato and general garden fertilizer, Nitrophoska work well
• Remove laterals that appear above leaves (pictured ). This helps the plant to concentrate it's energy on growing upward and fuller leaves. Although the laterals will develop into stems and produce leaves, they are usually much smaller and seem to affect progress of existing leaves.
• Remove flower heads (pictured right). As with laterals, allowing the flowers to grow will slow down the growth of existing leaves while it concentrates its energy on flowering.You could, however, select your best plant and allow it to flower then seed so you have good seeds for the following season.
• If you have farm animals you might want to keep them away. Our sheep, although haven't eaten whole plants, have partially eaten bigger leaves, broken leaves off and even broken stalks while moving between them.
• You could spray against pests, we try not to. If you have willow weed, keep it in check. We have found that when this weed is around there is a bug that attacks it. Sadly for us, this pest seems to have an apetite for tobacco leaves too.
• Protect from strong winds. Although tobacco root well, they are no match to strong winds. There is nothing more disheartening than finding stems leaning at least 45 degrees or leaves turned inside out like an umbrella.