Home Grown Tomatoes

Selecting a location for planting tomatoes comes down to considering 2 aspects, first of all what the tomato plant needs to flourish and secondly the practicalities of looking after them.

So focussing on the first aspect, it is fairly common knowledge that tomatoes need sunshine, sunshine in abundance and that means a minimum of 6 hours a day. They wouldn’t suffer and would probably enjoy up to 10 hours a day, so that is your first consideration and what it means is to identify a south, south east or south west facing location. Unless you are in the southern hemisphere and if you are I’ll leave you to work out where you get most sun. By providing this amount of exposure to the sunshine you will be pretty much ensuring that your tomatoes will ripen readily and that you will not be left with a whole harvest of green tomatoes, even though green tomatoes are great for chutney.

Tomato plants are also not that robust, this is the reason that you have to tie them up with soft string or find some other means that will not damage them. It follows then that if they are being battered by wind, or are exposed to odd bouts of severe weather, then they are likely to become damaged and perhaps you may lose a few trusses or maybe even a whole plant or two. So do them a favour and find them a reasonably sheltered spot. Being close to a wall or fence will go a long way towards protecting them providing you keep them on the sunny side of course.

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There are a couple of ways for approaching tomato growing in a greenhouse, you can either dig and prepare the soil of the greenhouse ready to accept the tomato plants or you can grow the plants in a container such as a plant pot (12″ diameter) or growbag.

Realistically most growbags that are available which can be 35 or 40 litres in size are only enough to support two plants. There are ways in which you can push this out to 3 plants but for the cost of a growbag its probably as well just to stick to 2 plants, particularly if you take good care of them and produce lots of fruit.

If you go for pots then you should steralise them before use, to do this you can use a dilute solution of a suitable disinfectant, something like Jeyes fluid is perfect for this task.

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fresh juicy tomatoes straight from the garden to the dining table

When you are just starting out with your own vegetable gardening, a wise choice is to include tomatoes in your choice of plants because they are one of the best plants for a beginner to try his or her hand with. Strictly speaking of course tomatoes are not vegetables they are actually a fruit, but most people categorize them as a vegetable and they are a classic ingredient for a lovely summer salad. There really isn’t anything nicer than having your own home grown tomatoes sitting freshly picked on your plate.

Tip Number 1 – correct spacing

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