In today's Q&A, we're going to be answering a question that I have received quite a bit over the

years, and that is, is it good to add Epsom salts to your tomato plants? This is something that I saw

a lot more early on in my gardening years than I see now, but if you are a member of any kind of

gardening group, you're probably going to see

this piece of advice pop up more than once. And what I love is that we're asking the question,

okay, is this really something I should do or not? I have to be transparent with you here because

I don't use Epsom salts on my tomato plants. I did spray them on my tomato flowers, my very first season, because I read you're supposed to.

I didn't notice a difference, quite frankly, and I just gave up because I thought this isn't

worth the time and effort to spend on it.

So as I share with you the research that I have found, understand that I am coming to you looking at

experts, horticulturist articles that you can find online readily from universities. That's what

I'm bringing to you. I have not had personal experience with this, but I think that we do need to look at

the research and decide if something is actually a good practice

or not or if it's just something that it's easy for us to turn to, especially as organic

gardeners. We want to be able to use things like this as opposed to some of the synthetic

chemicals that are available. So I get the reasoning behind this, but let's just take a look at Epsom salts in general.

Epsom salts are magnesium sulfate.

And you might recognize magnesium as a micronutrient

that our plants need.

And the thought behind this being good for our garden

and specifically for the tomato plants is that

it was shown to help plants that were planted and grown intensively on a large scale in

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