Food - Drink
Make Homegrown Tomatoes Sweeter With A One-Ingredient Trick
By JESSIE MOLLOY
Baking soda is a versatile ingredient that's useful in cooking and baking, cleaning, and even fighting off household odors. It might also pay to keep some in your gardening shed.
If you grow your own tomatoes, you can make them sweeter without adding sugar or other extras to the fruit itself. You only need baking soda for less dull-tasting tomatoes.
Baking soda is a highly alkaline substance, which means it counteracts acidity, which tomatoes have a lot of. High acidity can make tomatoes taste less sweet and more sour or flat.
Sprinkling baking soda around the base of your plants during the growing season lowers the soil’s acidity. As a result, the tomatoes produced by these plants will taste sweeter.
In addition to bettering your tomatoes, sprinkling baking soda on soil is great for warding off harmful insects, fungi, and even small weeds, making gardening easier for you.
However, you must be careful to keep the baking soda in the dirt and not on plants, especially not on ones that actually need more acidity, like pepper, carrot, and berry plants.