A monstrous tomato plant means one thing — a ton of tomatoes all season long. One TikToker just shared a hack that will help you achieve this with just one simple kitchen ingredient.
The scoop
Libby Flanagan (@libbyzflanagan) uses TikTok to post about her sustainable living and gardening adventures, and her hack for tomatoes is particularly valuable.
First, she directs viewers to dig a hole for the tomato seedling, enough that a large amount of the stem will be buried in the dirt. Then, she adds her game-changing ingredient — an egg.
Just like you'd crack an egg into your cake batter, she cracks one and puts it in the bottom of her tomato hole — and throws the shell in, too. After that, she crushes up the egg and plants the tomato on top as usual.
You'll want to make sure your hole is pretty deep. This will keep animals from digging up your garden and prevent a rotten egg smell.
Also, according to Gardening Know How, with the right PH levels in your soil, a raw egg can help prevent blossom-end rot by adding calcium into the soil.
"That's all you've got to do to grow lots of tomatoes this year," Flanagan explains.
@libbyzflanagan 🍅🍅🍅 Back again with this tomato planting tip! #tomato #garden #tomatoes #tomatoplants ♬ original sound - Libby Flanagan
How it's helping
Tall, healthy tomato plants will leave you with an abundance of the versatile fruit for the whole season. If you get sick of eating tomatoes raw, there's an endless number of dishes you can make with them, and you can even give them away to family and friends if you have too many.
Plus, growing your own produce is cheaper than buying it at the store, and you can find eggs on a budget if you look for deals at grocery stores and local farms.
The hack isn't uncommon. Other gardeners have also claimed that adding eggs, especially eggshells, to your garden will help your tomato plants thrive.
What's more, growing your own tomatoes — or produce in general — is a great way to help out the environment.
Produce travels an average of 1,500 miles to get from the farm to your plate, and the vehicle that transports it often adds planet-warming gases into the atmosphere. Plus, by the time that produce makes it to your house, it's far less fresh than it would be coming straight from your garden — meaning that it won't last as long.
In America, 22% of garbage is made up of food waste, and around 119 billion pounds of food is thrown away each year.
Picking your produce fresh from the garden will help to limit those numbers because you'll have more time to eat up that food — it's a win for you and the planet.
What everyone's saying
TikTok users attested to how effective the hack is.
"I did this last year. The ones with eggs grew over 6-7 feet and produced amazing tomatoes," said one user.
Another added, "This sure worked! My plant is as tall as me!"
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