Home Grown Tomatoes

There are a few aspects that have to be taken into account when considering how to care for tomato plants:

• Supporting Tomato Plants
• Pruning Tomatoes
• Watering Tomatoes
• Feeding Tomatoes
• Pest Control

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Its around the end of May when you may be thinking that it is too late to plant your tomatoes. But a tomato planting schedule depends very much on where you are in the world, how long your growing season is, whether you are using a greenhouse and what types of plants you are planning on using.

The time to maturity becomes quite critical when leaving things a little late in the season. For example in the UK about now, approaching the end of May, it is about as long as you can leave it before getting your plants in. That said there are 3 general groups of tomatoes that mature in approximately the following periods:

• Early varieties take around 50 to 60 days
• Mid Season take around 60 to 75 days
• Late season take around 80 to 90 days

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Finding the tastiest tomatoes for 2010 is going to be a bit like hunting for a needle in a haystack. There are so many different varieties available and it’s worse than needles, because everyone will have a different opinion. A needle is a needle at the end of the day, but the tastiest tomatoes is very much a question of – well taste.

Understanding what makes the tastiest tomatoes might help a little. The answer relates to the watering program to a significant extent i.e. if you over water then there is a risk you will make your tomatoes watery and a little bland. There are some circles that advocate dry cultivation with no irrigation. But this is a little bit of a specialist activity and you need to know what you are doing, it requires a soil mix of clay and loam with a minimum rainfall of 20″ to be effective. Not an area I am completely familiar with so if you want to know more about this then you could visit Home & Garden Publications who have an article on that exact subject.

For us lesser mortals what it comes down to is getting the level of watering right so that you get a concentrated flavor as a result. Over water and you end up with those watery, bland tomatoes mentioned earlier. Maintain your watering program so that the soil is moist, not dried out or waterlogged and there is a good chance that you will get the tasty tomatoes you are looking for. As the fruit reaches the ripening stage you can consider backing off on the watering program a little so that you err on the side of a drier soil, but again not completely dry.

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“How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes” is a book that originated in Australia and was written specifically for anyone who wants to learn how they can grow tomatoes. It is a comprehensive guide to tomato growing and will help all levels of gardener irrespective of whether you have a large garden plot or simply a space on a patio.

One of the problems with writing about taking care of tomatoes on the Internet is that your readers can come from all over the world, Australia, the United States, the UK or mainland Europe. This book doesn’t care what country you are in or what climate, hot, cold or somewhere in between, it provides detailed information and pictures to help you grow and take care of your tomatoes using a step by step set of instructions that have been written by people who know their subject and have written in an easy to understand format.

So if you are just starting out or you are looking to dramatically improve your growth rates and crop yields by referring to a comprehensive, single source option with great cultivation advice. Then I would recommend that you at least check out this 88 page book How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes

We are at that time of year where many people will be faced with tomatoes that haven’t ripened or just an excess of tomatoes that they don’t know what to do with. Help is at hand, this post gives you a recipe for green tomato pickle and advice on tomato harvest recipes.

So don’t despair your green or left over tomatoes do not need to got to waste.

Green Tomato Pickles
By Peter Gitundu

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This is the ultimate upside down tomato planter, which you don’t even need to buy, it tells you exactly how to make your own from a disused plastic bucket.

Couple of things I would note, don’t miss the use a metal handle tip and I would use a drill to take out the hole rather than using a Stanley knife as demonstrated, you could just loose a couple of fingers doing it that way. Other than that, this video says it all when it comes to making your own topsy turvy tomato planter.

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Tomatoes are relatively easy to grow but can be affected by many problems, most of which are generally related to being cultivated in the same soil year after year. Old re-used soil is the main source of tomato plants disease and can cause you to have a whole crop of rotten tomatoes in the blink of an eye.

There are different ways of dealing with this problem, no one wants horrible rotten tomatoes when they can have a nice juicy crop by taking a few sensible precautions. Clearly the easiest way to avoid diseased soil is to use fresh compost each year which you can achieve by either using a growbag or some other sort of container. Tomatoes will thrive in a standard 12″ plant pot as long as they are watered regularly and fed with a dilute liquid feed once or twice a week, particularly when the fruit starts to develop. Potassium supplements in the form of a high potassium tomato feed can aid the health and development of your plants and will be available from a garden center.

If you leave a space between the compost surface and the top of the pot, you can add more fresh compost as the plant develops and the compost shrinks.

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You can if you like extract the seeds from your own tomatoes, as demonstrated in the video link I have provided. Essentially once you have the seeds from tomatoes they are no different to any other garden seed and the process of propagation is much the same as for any other plant.

You cannot grow plants with seeds taken from Hybrid tomatoes however, see the comments section for an explanation of why.

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Describing how to prune a tomato plant using the written word is a very difficult thing to do, so instead I have provided you with this video courtesy of YouTube. This particular video has a very good rating and demonstrates what is required to ensure lots of fruit by removing unwanted growth from the tomato plant.

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There is a massive range of tomato plants available, something like 700 varieties, and they come in all shapes, sizes and colours. So which is the best tomato plant for you to grow?

When choosing, one of the most over riding considerations to take into account is what they are going to taste like, after all when you are growing tomatoes at home that is one of the primary reasons for doing so, otherwise you may as well go and get the plastic ones from the supermarket. It’s quite difficult to recommend a variety for taste because everyone’s taste is different but what a lot of people opt for are the Heirloom varieties, mainly because they are as the name suggests an older and more traditional type of tomato which are full of flavour but may not have some of the more modern characteristics built in such as disease resistance.

Talking about disease resistance and to help ensure that you actually get some lovely fruit from your tomato plant it is a good idea to pick a tomato type that has a reasonable level of resistance to disease, especially if you have had trouble in this direction in the past. Check out the seed packets and make sure that they have a natural resistance to fusarium wilt and verticillium, these are two of the most common tomato diseases that they can get from the ground.

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