Ok I'll go get some asap. I guess I got scared because I've read so many horror stories about "I added _____ and now it's dying" so I've always just left whatever I grow alone (except good light and water). I've grown lots of house plants but I'm pretty new to vegetables. Thank you!

km, you're very welcome :)

If you use the MG in a pot, you have good reason to be cautious. The first time you use it, use a half of a level tablespoon in a gallon of water (no need to use all the gallon, but get the dilution correct. Use excess on other plants that might need a boost) and water well, but not to remain soggy. But afterwards check into some less potent fertilizers like tomato-tone or fish emulsion and bone meal, and while you are still figuring it out, use the MG seven days later the same dilution. After that go back to being cautious. You can additionally actually spray the MG prepared this way, in the early morning on the leaves of the plant the first time, too. In between MG applications water alone, as normal). If you are picking it up at Wally's World, pick up the MG tomato plant food formula., but if not it's not essential and the regular plant food will be fine. Your pot seems unacceptably small for a real tomato plant but there isn't a great view of it in the pic to be sure.
Cheers
PC

I wondered about pot size too, but with apt living there is only so much space. I thought I'd give it a try there's a bigger pot in the background, but the plant in it looks worse than the one I posted about, but that one I know what's wrong with it.Last year my bf kept saying "the pot is so big let's put more tomatoes in it" and I would say "no they need room . " but he never believed me so I said fine I'll grow a plant by itself in this pot, and I'll put two plants in the big pot and we'll see what happens..You can guess what happened to the two in one pot. I tried to separate them when he finally believed me but it was probably too late and I may have damaged the roots. Sorry tomatoes!! I'll do better!!

kmhelms86, I rotated the pic.
Hope it's ok with you.

The terracotta pot is small for a productive determinate like Rutgers (and hopefully it is a det. version). That plastic planter behind it is more like the size that works better. I can't guesstimate that well, but the top diameter of the pot and the height of the pot both seem to be less than 12" and the bottom diameter only about 6", so I'm thinking it has a lot less mix than a 5 -gallon bucket. We've seen problems in the forum by other posters relating to watering clay pots with the evaporation and salination they build. So, I'm not ok with the pot but it is not so small that you can't make it work if you are attentive to uniform fertilization and moisture content, without an excess of either. It may get tedious as the plant grows larger with a fruit load though.

A good supplement for this is azomite if you want to fool around with an interesting product. I'm not recommending it being necessary. But if I had this sort of system, I would try it as a source for the micro nutrients and for fertilizer going forward I might use Osmocote. Probably the safest combo I can think of. Good for some tomatoes, but not optimal because of the small sized pot. I'm not a shill for Scott's LOL. I really don't like the company, but that has nothing to do with the individual products and applications, and the shoe fits because this is the sort of market they go after.

Hope that helps
PC

Ok good info. I think the terracotta is bigger than that but I'm not home to measure. So does the pot size required vary greatly between different kinds of tomatoes? We were gifted a hanging basket with some kind of tomato but the basket is much smaller than the pot. I don't know what variety that tomato is though. I'm not even a big tomato fan. I liked my little tiny ones last year though!

I thought I just posted this so if it is doubled, sorry, but here goes again.

Yes, some tomatoes, notably "dwarfs", are routinely grown in smaller pots and some popular ones include Tumbling Tom, Mohammed, Red Robin, etc. for those sorts of arrangements. For pots the size of yours, there are many dwarfs coming out of the woodwork every day by many dedicated amateur breeders that like the idea of growing tomatoes in small pots. While the overall production doesn't normally reach the potential of the high yielding popular garden tomatoes, some of these are very interesting looking.

Remy has a site selling seeds and a few are dwarfs and marked "POT" to indicate they can be grown in "smaller" pots. The selection is rather limited and there are many more available elsewhere, but this is a good site to pick up a few seeds economically.

Hope that helps
PC

Container growing is challenging:

The smaller the container the bigger the challenge.

The inherent characteristic of small container system is that since it needs to be watered so very often, there goes down / out of the drain holes the nutrient.

MY SOLUTION::: water with 1/3 strength water soluble fertilizer AT LEAST once a week.. I am going to do just that myself this afternoon with my 20 potted tomatoes and pepper. YMMV

BTW: I would fill that pot up almost all the way to the rim. That should add another gallon of potting mix.

Sey

Thanks for all the advice everyone.I probably won't that great of a turn out this year, but hopefully I can still get some! I'll get it some nutrients and more soil tonight!

Good luck! If you go with Osmocote or Osmocote Plus, the all-in-one which probably is the easiest of the bunch, before you fill any soil, just lay the Osmocote prills on the current surface uniformly spread out, then deposit the added mix on top, no need to toss the mix., actually better this way. The there won't be much to worry about and you won't worry about over-fertilizing either.
PC