There are some common pests on tomatoes and aphids are some of the most voracious, they are able to clone themselves every 20 minutes and even the clones that have been produced come with a built in baby ready to go. So aphids not only clone their children, they do in effect clone their grandchildren. Early in the year they tend to produce all females but as the end of the year approaches they start to produce some males.

The reason for this is that the males can go off and mate with females to start to change the genetic profile a little. This ensures that the species can continue should some unexpected change in environment occur. You can imagine that should the aphids try and survive on cloning alone, with no genetic variation at all, then should some circumstance come along that kills one, then it is obviously going to kill them all. Hence the reason that males of the species have to be retained and why aphids have sex, other than that it wouldn’t be necessary.

When it comes to aphids on tomatoes I can imagine as a keen gardener you are probably thinking ‘shame they thought about that I wouldn’t have to worry about them otherwise’. Unfortunately life is never quite that simple, but never fear, there are a few ways of dealing with aphids and not all of them involve using chemical pesticides.

First of all aphids, commonly known as green-fly or black-fly have a few natural predators. Probably the best known is the Ladybird or Ladybug, which has a very big appetite for aphids and will happily munch their way through whole colonies of aphids, whether they are on tomatoes or any other plant. The good news is that to make this method for controlling aphids easier some companies now specialise in supplying ladybirds in a small plastic tubs, and all you have to do is release them amongst your tomato plants.

The black wasp is another predator of aphids, their assassination techniques are a little more subtle, they simply visit the aphids on the tomato plants and inject a single egg into each aphid. When the egg hatches the larva has a very nice ready meal and proceeds to eat the aphid from the inside out. Wasps like brightly coloured flowers and fruit trees, so if you can plant these in your garden they will be naturally attracted.

The best way to prevent aphids on tomatoes however is prevention. Keep a careful eye on your plants and stop the infestation before it gets started. When there are not too many you can wipe them off between your thumb and finger, squashing then in the process. This is because they are soft bodied and not very robust. It is also because they are soft bodied that they don’t like soap, this tends to cake over their bodies and dry them out. Many people swear by a water and insecticidal soap mix, sprayed onto the aphids before it gets too hot in the sun. This method is probably the most widely used.

Another suggested method for getting rid of them, when they have only just started, is to blast them with a high pressure spray. Not sure I am a fan of that method as I always wonder if you can do more damage than good to your tomato plants, they are after all, not particularly robust themselves, but if you think you can get away with it then it is a suggestion.

The video below has a few suggestions on how to take care of hornworms, caterpillars and your favourite the aphid. Looks very easy!

This is a subject that has been touched on previously, but growing tomatoes in containers is definitely a subject worth revisiting.

There are obvious benefits to growing tomatoes in containers which include being able to avoid disease through the use of fresh uncontaminated compost, having the available nutrients available for your tomato plants through the selection of a suitable compost i.e. one which is nitrogen rich, and for those with space constraints or no garden at all, containers provide an option they might not otherwise have.

A favourite choice for many is the ever popular growbag, and for those that want to know how to grow tomatoes, this might just be a good starting point especially if this is your first tomato growing excursion. Considering the benefits above, two of the most important aspects of growing tomatoes are avoiding disease and having a ready supply of nutrients in a suitable soil; planting in containers takes care of these requirements nicely. Combine this with a decent amount of sunshine, around 6 hours a day, and a regular watering program and you are virtually there with respect to growing and caring for tomatoes.

Pots are the obvious alternative to growbags and are also a very viable option that take care of the same issues so shouldn’t be discounted. Just make sure the pot is large enough, a minimum 12″ diameter is recommended, and that it is clean before putting in your compost. A multi-purpose compost is a suitable option supplemented by a potash feed once you start to see the fruit developing.

A technique that is growing in popularity is to combine pots with growbags, certainly in the UK this is becoming common practice, particularly with the advent of special pots that can be inserted into the growbags to house the tomato plants and separate the 2 different root systems that the tomato plants have.

To explain this further, tomatoes have two types of roots, feed roots and water roots. The feed roots are near the top of the root ball and a little fibrous in nature where in contrast the water roots are white in colour and tend to be near the base of the root ball. These special pots, called ring culture pots, allow you to keep the feed roots segregated from the water roots in terms of where they located in the compost i.e. the water roots go down into the growbag, which now functions as a water reservoir, to access the water supply and the feed roots are in the central part of the pot where you can place a feed supplement, again a potash based one is good, so that the fruit ultimately gets the nutrients it needs in an undiluted form. Essentially this means that the fruit should be more flavoursome because the concentration of flavour is not diluted. I found this little tip in a Gardeners World video which also introduces another natty invention for use with growbags called a grow bag support frame.

This device sits under the growbag and has a support cane inserted through it into the compost to provide a very convenient way of ensuring your tomato plant is properly supported. The weight of the growbag holds the support in place and consequently the cane is also held rigidly requiring just a little soft string to tie the plant off as it grows.

Unfortunately it doesn’t appear as though either of these devices is available in the United States at the moment, but I am sure once the benefits are understood that situation should be quickly remedied.

These devices apart a growbag is still an excellent way to grow tomatoes but remember not to overcrowd the bag, a maximum of 3 plants per bag is the most you can put in and many will tell you to restrict that to two, so that you can be sure that the plants will thrive. Also when you lay the growbag down, give it a good shake to distribute the compost evenly and punch a few holes in the bottom side to ensure it can drain a little so it doesn’t become waterlogged. After that you will be well on the way to producing some great tasting tomatoes.

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 they 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.