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.

Now for the second aspect, caring for tomatoes. This primarily refers to watering, when watering the practicalities are that ideally they need to be watered little and often. This is because they love to be sitting in moist well drained soil and hate having saturated feet and being water logged. So unless you have some sort of automatic watering system plumbed in then you need to be physically delivering water to your plants on a fairly regular basis, so planting near a source of water is the best solution.

Finally, tomatoes need to be inspected regularly for signs of disease or pests. It is much easier to do this if they are planted in a reasonable sized raised bed that gives you access from all sides. It doesn’t have to be a raised bed, containers can also be very effective or you can just make sure you have a path through your garden close to the tomatoes. Basically you will need reasonably easy access to the plants so you can inspect, treat and prune them as required without walking between them and compacting the soil.

If you don’t have the facilities to provide the ideal conditions, it’s not the end of the world. You just need to work with what you have got. This will mean careful plant selection so that you can deal with the conditions the plants have to grow under. For example choose an early maturing variety if you have limited sunshine. Perhaps grow cherry tomato varieties if you are tight on space or use containers on a patio if your garden is very small or you don’t actually have one. Where there is a will there is a way and when you produce your first fruit you will be glad you persevered.

As you can see from the photograph if you follow these rules you will end up with some pretty perky looking tomatoes

You can follow this link to find out how to build a raised bed if you are interested.

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.

While we are on this subject, you really should wipe down the inside of your greenhouse with disinfectant as well to ensure any residual contaminants that could also cause disease are removed from the glass.

One of the reasons I am suggesting using large pots or growbags for growing tomato plants is because the soil in the greenhouse is going to need to be dug out and replaced every 2 or 3 years anyway to ensure that you get rid of any build up of disease and also because the soil will be pretty much spent in terms of nutrients.

Space is limited in a greenhouse so the best option for plant varieties is to use the indeterminate variety of tomato plant i.e. a vine plant. You can prune the plant to the required size, leaving about 4 to 6 trusses on the main stem, which is about 6′ to 7′ in height, greenhouse size allowing. This will give you lots of fruit over an extended period. You will have to pinch out the main stem when you have enough trusses to stop further growth.

As an aside, using the bush variety is less convenient for greenhouses because they, as the name suggests, form a determinant size of bush without pruning which is probably a little too large in diameter for the average greenhouse. The fruit also has a tendency to all come at once.

Irrespective of the growing method you choose, you should start to feed the tomatoes at the first sign of fruit and for the duration of the growing period, twice a week should be sufficient. Also as you are in a greenhouse regular and consistent watering is also very important and I recommend 2 to 3 times a day with water that has been allowed to warm in the greenhouse.

As the end of the season nears a way of helping the last remaining fruit ripen is to hang a couple of bananas in the apex of the greenhouse. If that fails to ripen the last bit of fruit you can always use the green tomatoes for making a delicious chutney.

Visit Good Tomato Growing for more tips and advice on tomato growing in a greenhouse and to get access to expert advice that could double or triple the size of your crop of tomatoes.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brian_R_Stephens
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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

Always leave enough space between your tomato plants when you plant them, a common mistake of a newbie gardener is to place the plants too close together. The plants then end up fighting for everything, nutrients from the soil, sunlight and water. Far better to leave enough space and let them prosper in adequate space even if that means having a few less plants.

Tip Number 2 – warm soil

Warm soil, anyone who has grown tomatoes in a hanging planter will probably have noticed slightly better yields from the plants than when they are planted in a normal garden, providing attention is paid to all the other aspects of growing tomatoes of course, and the reason for this is that the soil is warmed slightly by the sun in a way that normal ground in a standard garden isn’t. What you can do however is to create that same affect by placing black plastic sheeting over the ground and using the thermal heating effect that results to warm the soil.

Tip Number  3 – plenty of sunshine

Tomato plants need a minimum of 6 hours full sunlight a day and some people would recommend up to 10 hours of sunshine. Whichever camp you fall in, it is clear that a good location needs to be selected where the plants can get the required amount of sun.

Tip Number 4 – prepare the soil

You need to prepare the soil for where you are going to plant your tomatoes with a nitrogen rich fertilizer, compost and mulch. The mulch will help with water retention and the compost fertilizer mix will provide the much needed nutrients that are particularly required when the fruit starts to appear.

Tip Number 5 -proper watering of tomatoes

Watering, not too much and not too little. You should aim for a happy balance where the plants neither dry out or are absolutely drenched in water, a moist root ball is a happy root ball and this will allow the nutrients to be absorbed that are required to produce the tomato’s fruit.

Always remember that you are not growing tomatoes for the supermarkets, if they turn out a little less than perfect now and then, don’t beat yourself up over it, they will probably still taste great and there are other alternatives for the ones that don’t get served fresh, for example making tomato chutney is a brilliant way to preserve some of your tomatoes for outside of the normal growing season.