This Kitchen Staple Gives Tomatoes A Nutrient Boost — No, It's Not Coffee Grounds

If you love growing tomatoes in your summer garden, you're probably always looking for ways to make your plants healthier and increase your harvest. To that end, there are a lot of different homemade remedies you're likely to come across that are said to give your tomatoes a nutrient boost and provide you with many more of those delectable fruits. One such idea, which is also a lesser-known gardening hack for growing healthy tomatoes, is using a kitchen staple to treat your tomato plants to some extra goodness. No, it's not coffee grounds. It's actually brown sugar.

One Instagrammer, @gardeninghacks, suggests a recipe that uses 2 teaspoons of sugar and 4 teaspoons of baking soda, which you add to 4 gallons of water and apply to the soil around your plants. While this recipe is certainly not science-backed, the sugar is said to feed the microbes in the soil, and baking soda is often used as a solution for fungal problems. If you're not aware, soil microbes are vitally important as they perform tasks like decomposing organic matter, improving the soil structure, and transforming nutrients into a form that plants can easily use. Unfortunately, if there's not enough organic matter in the soil to keep the microbes fed, they'll just die, which means that without microbial activity, the nutrients present may not be available to the plants. It's believed that microbes can use sugar as a food source, and you probably know that most plant materials contain sugars in one form or another. So, in a roundabout way, that is probably where the idea of adding a brown sugar concoction to the soil around your tomato plants comes from.

To begin with, sugar water won't directly give your tomatoes a nutrient boost because it's just a combination of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. However, because it helps to increase microbial activity, this in turn can provide extra nutrients to your plants. Bear in mind, though, that microbes do use nitrogen and oxygen when they feed, effectively taking these away from the plants. You'll also find that brown sugar is not better than white sugar, because they both contain sucrose, but brown sugar has just had some molasses added to color it.

According to an article by the University of Nebraska, research has been done into the benefits of sugar application to crops in the agricultural industry. Various studies have been conducted on whether sugar increased yields in soybeans and corn, and the result was that it did not. However, spraying crops with sugar water did increase the number of beneficial insects. A further study also found that both foliar and soil applications reduced the presence of disease in rice crops.

At the end of the day, if you're already working with the best type of soil for growing healthy garden tomatoes and you provide your tomato plants with the correct nutrients at the right time, there's probably no need to use sugar water. Essentially, you have to get the mixture right for it to benefit your plants at all. If you add too little, it probably won't have much effect, but if you add too much, it could end up drawing water away from the roots and killing your plants. This is similar to the overuse of synthetic fertilizers. You're actually better off adding soil-boosting companion plants, such as beans and peas, for optimum tomato plant growth.