I am growing dwarf Tiny Tim tomato plants in order to test out several urine derived slow release fertilizers and am struggling to find information online or in literature that gives an absolute value for tomato plant nutrient uptake. My experiment set up is to add all the fertilizer to soil at the start, into which I will transplant my seedlings, and not add any more until after 50 days growth when I will harvest the biomass. I don't want to either under or over feed them! Please help, thank you!
you can use the nearest close recommendation of other similar kind of tomato
One cannot provide you the absolute value of nutrient requirement for tiny tomato you are growing. However, if you can provide the data regarding average yield of plant, dry mass (leaf+shoot+roots), one can help you.
First you need to clarify the research question. Is it about the nutrient requirements of TT tomatoes? Or is it about the nutrient supplying capacity of alternative urine-based fertilisers? I think it is the second of these, because you are not actually growing the tomatoes through to fruit harvest - your only interest appears to be in biomass. Given this, tomato variety probably doesn't matter, so browse the hundreds of papers on tomato nutrition online for a first guide. Actually, the experiment you outline is really treating tomato as a 'bioassay', and you could do the same experiment with any plant.
Happy to comment further if you can state your aim and experimental design.
Thank you for your replies! Firstly @Shashi Pathania the average vegetative yield of tiny tim plants after 13 weeks was found to be 40 g dry mass by Reinert, Eason and Barton (1997) under ambient CO2 with a cumulative fruit yield of 20 g dry weight between 8 and 13 weeks. Unfortunately they don't report the leaf, shoot and root mass separately.
Secondly @Peter Stuart Cornish, you are right, my research question is not so much about the nutrient requirements but about both the nutrient supplying capacity of the alternative fertilizers. I also want to measure the uptake of organic micro-pollutants (pharmaceuticals) from the urine derived fertilizers, and these would be most relevant if taken from the fruit/edible parts of the plant. I therefore want to provide enough nutrients for the plants to produce at least a few tomatoes each. My experimental design is to mix a predetermined amount the solid fertilizers to the soil so that the p content of each fertilizer is balanced, and then measure both the differences in plant growth and micro-pollutant uptake.
Thank you again for your answers! I hope to hear from you again.
Best wishes,
Michelle
Reference: Reinert, Eason and Barton (1997) Growth and fruiting of tomato as influenced by elevated carbon dioxide and ozone, New Phytol. 137. 411-420
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