Does Colored Mulch Improve Tomato Growing?
Mon, 02/19/2018 - 6:16am
Debbie Ornquist
If you’re a die-hard tomato grower, you’ve probably heard about using red plastic mulch to improve your yield and get your tomatoes to ripen earlier. Some early testing did show a considerable benefit from mulching with a specific shade of red plastic. But like all things scientific in the garden,there are still a lot of variables that prevent the results from being conclusive.
The idea behind using red mulch is that it reflects and bounces far-red light wavelengths back up into your tomato plants. These red light wavelengths stimulate the growth of tomato plants through a reaction with a specific pigment in the tomato plants (phytochrome). This seems to be true, but it also seems to be dependent on the amount of sunlight and maybe even temperature - something very much out of our control.
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