With around 7500 different tomato varieties to choose from finding the tomato that suits you and the region you live in can be a little bit like finding a needle in a haystack.
A way to easily narrow down the choice and still stand a chance of finding one that will thrive in your location is to see what the local garden centre or store are stocking. That should at least help you find a tomato variety that will grow in your region.

Then the next question is how do you want to use them. The answer to this is usually in a variety of ways which could include for cooking, slicing into salads, to accompany a burger or just to pop into your mouth as a lovely little chery tomato taster.

Other factors to consider when selecting a tomato are:

• Flavour, see tastiest tomatoes 2010 for more information
• High yielding
• Disease resistance
• Open pollinating or hybrid
• time to ripening

For the States, you might be interested in the following list of tomatoes that will grow pretty much anywhere, from North Central down to the Gulf Coast and both to the east and to the west

• Beefsteak
• Brandy Wine
• Early Girl
• Cherokee Purple
• Super Sweet 100
• Black Cherry
• Roma
• Amish Paste
• Saint Marzano

This list gives you a choice of hybrids or heirlooms, cooking tomatoes to salad tomatoes and a pretty sure fired chance that they will all cope with the climate in your region. In other words thay are all safe bets for a good crop of tomatoes across a range of shapes and sizes that should suit most requirements.

There will of course be specific varieties that may be even more suitable for your specific location, so the other indicators and ways of establishing, which tomatoes grow best where still stand and may just lead you to exactly what you are looking for.

Traditionally home grown tomatoes are produced from the heirloom varieties rather than hybrid tomatoes. So what is the difference between hybrid tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes.

What are Hybrid Tomatoes?

Hybrid tomatoes come from a mix of tomato plants i.e. they have 2 different types of parent tomato. The reason this is done is usually to try and create a hybrid tomato that has the best features of both the parent tomatoes. On a commercial basis that might be to prolong the shelf life of a tomato so that they can sit in the shops longer before starting to degrade or to perhaps make them a little more robust when handled.

For home growing gardeners, the reason is more likely to be for a better flavour or to perhaps deal with season constraints in the location they are to be grown. A good example of this might be to try and produce a beefsteak tomato that matures and ripens early, so that they can still be produced in a short growing season region.

F1 seeds are produced by means of a controlled pollination which needs to be repeated each season for reproduction. This is a manual process which involves taking a male flower off one plant and rubbing the pollen into a female flower on another plant. Then when the fruit is produced and ripens you have to save the seeds for planting the following season.

Sometimes you will see hybrid plants labelled F2, this means that these plants have been produced through the cross pollination of F1 varieties. The fruit from an F2 hybrid will be less consistent than from a F1 variety, so if you want to know exactly what you will be getting its probably better to stick to F1′s.

It’s worth noting that taking the seeds from a hybrid plant is highly likely to end in a failed crop. This is because more often than not the seeds produced in hybrids are sterile or the plants produced do not retain the characteristics of the parent hybrid plant. So they could be completely tasteless for example. As a general rule of thumb nearly everyone adopts the assumption that you cannot grow new plants from F1 or F2 seeds.

What are Heirloom Tomatoes?

Heirloom tomatoes are generally accepted to be open pollinated varieties i.e. if the seeds from the plant are saved they can be grown again the following year with the same characteristics, and this applies year on year. In fact many people will say that an heirloom is not an heirloom until it has been produced for 50 years or more. You can decide if you agree with that statement or not.

The final point which relates to whether a tomato is an heirloom or not, is whether its history can be traced. Ideally this will be back to the original production of the plant saying when and where it was first grown.

The main benefit of heirloom varieties is that you know exactly what you are going to get, provided you treat the plants the same way each year. So if you find a flavour, texture or size that flourishes in your region and produces enough fruit through your growing season, then you will be able to reproduce them consistently each year. Although that might be a bit boring and mixing things up a little might be a bit more fun.

Tomatoes have to have loose soil rich with nutrients so that they can quickly establish their root system. The way to ensure the soil is rich in nutrients is to dig in well rotted organic matter and there is no better source for this than your own recycled garden and kitchen waste.

If you want to grow tomatoes and you don’t have a compostor then its time you did, and make sure it’s a decent size. You can always get it kick started with a little bit of Compost Plus and you will have some lovely well rotted compost to prepare your soil with in no time at all.

By that I mean when you prepare vegetables in the kitchen, instead of throwing away the peelings and waste leaves, keep them and throw them into a compostor. This is the same for the other half of the equation, garden waste consisting of grass cuttings and any other organic overspill from the garden such as leaves and cuttings which are usually available in abundance. Try to avoid the tough woody cuttings however as they take a long time to break down.

One word of caution, do not put anything into the compost that you suspect has been diseased, those items should be bagged and binned or burnt. It isn’t worth the risk of contaminating your compost with anything you have the slightest suspicion may have been contaminated in any way.

If you are friendly with a local farmer or anyone that keeps animals, then another good source of organic matter is well rotted manure, especially of the horsey variety. Remember the key expression here is well rotted, you don’t want part rotted components pinching the nitrogen from your plants as it continues to break down. It is only when the process has finished that you get the goodness back, particularly in the form of nitrogen, which tomatoes love.

The pH of the soil is another consideration, so when you prepare your soil for tomatoes, check that the pH level is somewhere between 6.5 to 7.0 for the best results. That can be done very easily with a pH Soil Tester

If the soil is too acidic then you can add a little lime to the mix to bring the level down. Remember when doing this, that small adjustments are better than large because you are less likely to overdo it.

That’s about all there is say to say on preparing soil for tomatoes, other than good luck and enjoy your lovely tomatoes when they arrive. Oh and if you prefer to grow your tomatoes in containers, then take a look at this post.

Tastiest Tomatoes

When it comes to choosing tomato seeds there are many synergies with choosing tomato plants. The reason is pretty obvious and that is the seeds will eventually become plants.

There are a few more things to consider than when choosing plants and the first and most important one relates to cultivating tomatoes from your own seed. Never try and cultivate seeds that have been recovered from the ‘hybrid’ varieties of tomatoes. These have been specially developed for specific characteristics and cannot simply be used to grow tomatoes in a domestic environment. They just will not grow into a plant.

That said, you are probably wondering which tomatoes can be used to harvest your own seed for cultivating and the answer is pretty much any of the others. Some are easier than others and the most popular seeds cultivated by gardeners are the heirloom varieties.

Picking up on the ‘some are easier than other’ point, the main reason behind that statement is that there are various levels of disease resistance present in tomato varieties. So assuming that most people will buy their seeds in a packet, you can take the precaution of checking that the seeds are resistant to the most prevalent tomato diseases of verticillum and fusarium wilt. Just look on the seed packet for information on disease resistance.

After that, it really is a consideration of the plants or seeds that are best suited to your requirements and location. Some things to consider:

• the climate where you live, short season needs early maturing and visa versa
• cordon or bush tomatoes, depends on available space
• cooking or salad tomatoes, some tomatoes are better for cooking and some are better in a salad or to accompany a burger for example
• taste and flavour, heirloom are known for their flavour, but typically do not store as well. Last years tastiest variety was identified as the Sioux Tomato by ‘Which’ magazine. So probably worth a punt this year as well.

Of course there is nothing to stop you growing a mix of tomatoes either. Perhaps you would like cherry tomatoes for your salads, plum tomatoes for cooking or beefsteak tomatoes for the perfect accompaniment for a burger. Be careful with the latter however, the bigger they are the longer they take to ripen. Have a look at this tomato planting schedule.

As you can see choosing tomato seeds really is just a matter of applying a little common sense, but if all else fails you can usually rely on your local garden centre to be stocking varieties that will flourish in your area.

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.

Lasagna Garden

This method of gardening gives you fluffy rich soil with very little work on your part.

Another name for lasagna garden is sheet composting. This method is environmentally friendly and best of all, requires that you do little to no digging. You just keep adding your kitchen and yard waste to the garden and compost in place to make the new garden.

To begin a lasagna garden, you do not have to dig. The existing weeds and sot can remain right where they are. You just start putting down layers over them. The first layer is either corrugated cardboard or newspaper. If using newspaper, you will need at least three layers. Use a garden hose to wet everything down and keep it in place. The weeds or grass that are underneath will just break down and become part of the compost pile. They will help to attract the friendly earthworms who will loosen your soil underneath the lasagna garden.

You can add anything to the lasagna garden that you would put into a compost pile. Those organic materials will break down and make a very rich soil that you can plant. Here are some ideas of ingredients for your lasagna: leaves, grass clipping, fruit or vegetable scraps, tea leaves or bags, coffee grounds, weeds that have not gone to seed, compost manure, seaweed, pine needles, shredded newspaper, garden trimmings and peat moss.

Add these in the ratio of two to one. This means that you need two times as much brown materials as green. Alternate the layers until you have a stack about two feet tall. The garden will shrink in only a few weeks.

It will be ready for planting in the spring.

To plant the garden, just dig down in the bed like any garden. Your shovel should cut right through the newspaper, but you may need to cut holes in the cardboard. Care for the garden like any other garden. Water and weed as necessary and keep planting until you fill the garden.

You can continue to add layers of clippings, straw and other materials while the garden is growing.

With the lasagna garden, there should be very few weeds. The garden should take less water than a normal garden as it is designed to retain water. You may not need any fertilizer since the garden is planted in almost pure compost. The soil should be easy for you to work.

You will find that lasagna gardening is an easy way to make a new garden. You should have a great garden full of fresh produce all during the growing season. This is one way to be sure that your family gets that healthy diet they need.
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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

Supporting Tomato Plants

This is particularly important for tomato care when growing vine tomatoes, they usually produce trusses on which you will first get blossom and the blossom will become your tomato fruits. To keep your plants and fruit healthy it is necessary to tie the trusses to a suitable support usually with a soft string. There are a number of ways in which you can provide support for the plants but the simplest is just a stake pushed in besides the plant and soft string to tie the plant to the stake.

Pruning Tomatoes

Pruning tomato plants is done for 3 primary reasons, to prevent lower trusses touching the soil which is the biggest source of contamination. To control the number of trusses you want on the plant so that you can ensure all the fruit you get will ripen and finally to remove non producing foliage, i.e. take out growth where there is no blossom so that the energy for the plant is directed to the fruit producing regions.

Watering Tomato Plants

Tomato plant care requires regular and consistent watering to ensure that the plants neither dry out or become saturated in water i.e. water logged. Neither of these conditions is desirable and incorrect watering is the biggest source of tomato problems related to tomato care.

Feeding Tomato Plants

Occasional feeding of tomato plants with a high nitrogen liquid feed, ideally that has been developed specifically for tomatoes, is always a good idea. This should ensure that you will produce healthy fruit in a plentiful supply. The best suggestion for this is that you follow the instructions on the product you use and also be aware that over feeding tomato plants can actually be counter productive and may result in problems such as blossom end rot for example. So the key is to follow a properly planned feeding regime and make sure you feed your tomatoes enough but not too much.

Pest Control

Tomato plants will need to be regularly checked for the presence of pests, the vast majority of which place themselves on the underside of the tomato plant leaves. Many can be removed by hand, if caught early enough, either by picking them off or by wiping the leaves between your thumb and forefinger. For persistent pests or large infestations you may need to use a suitable pesticide or sometimes a mix of 1 part soap and 4 parts water may be enough. Clearly when looking for pests the underside of leaves is the first place you should look. Tomato plant pests are much easier to eradicate if you find them early on and hopefully before any permanent damage has occurred

Useful Articles and Resources

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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

Typically it is the size of the fruit that dictates how long they take to mature, so clearly cherry tomatoes will generally fit into the 50 to 60 day grouping, medium size fruits, such as plum tomatoes, fall into the 60 to 75 days and the larger beefsteak varieties will take around 80 to 90 days. So if you select the early to mid season varieties you should still be OK up to the end of May in Europe.

This is a general guide but obviously if you are selecting specific varieties and you have left it a bit late then refer to the label for the best time for planting and when you can expect to harvest the last of the fruit.

If you are totally organised and on top of everything, then ideally you will have sorted out a range of plants that cover all the maturing periods so that you have a plentiful supply of tomatoes from the early part of the season right through to the end. But if you are anything like me, you will be rushing to get your plants in at the last minute , well this year anyway.

Of course your tomato planting schedule changes when you are growing tomatoes from seed, typically you need to be planting tomato seeds around 4 to 6 weeks before you need the tomato plants ready for planting out. Not too difficult to work backwards and figure out when they should first be going into the pots. In Europe its from around the middle of March to the beginning of April.

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.

Sorry I can’t help more than that it is very subjective and actually down to trial and error to an extent.

Of course the other thing that can help you with taste is selecting the right varieties and many home grown tomatoes come from the Heirloom varieties that have been kept going, not by the market gardeners, but rather the tomato growing enthusiasts that care less about transport toughness and shelf life than they do about getting the tastiest tomatoes. So go for Heirloom and there is a good chance that combined with the right watering program you will get very tasty tomatoes.

There is another source of information, and this was fed through to me by my brother in law who advised me that the UK consumer magazine he subscribes to, called ‘Which’, has stated that the tastiest tomato this year, identified through consumer trials, is the Soiux tomato; which is of American descendency and of course is one of the Heirloom varieties.

The second tastiest tomatoes are listed as being the Orkado tomatoes and while we are at it the worst and most bland tasting tomato was identified as, can you bear it, the Alicante. A firm favorite amongst many of you, I would hazard a guess. Sorry to disillusion you.

Now knowing what the tastiest tomatoes are and finding them for sale anywhere is a different matter. But I can advise you that if you would like to buy them in the UK you can get your tastiest tomatoes here, and I don’t even make any money out of it.

For anyone living in the USA you can get them here Sioux Tastiest Tomatoes and now I do make some money from this link. So if you go and buy some, thanks very much.

Orkado are much easier to find so I will leave you to hunt for them yourselves, and of course the Alicante which you can get pretty much anywhere, that is if you want the blandest tasting tomatoes on the market as reported by Which magazine and my brother in law.

“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