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This is a great video for methodical people who like drawing up lists and following step-by-step instructions. It’s also good for people who hate failure. Follow these steps and you are bound to get a great tomato crop. In the unlikely event that your crop is a flop you can always blame the US government.

The steps are as follows:

1. Pick a sunny spot in your yard. Tomato plants need 6 hours of sunlight per day, if not more.
2. Test the soil. You can use a DIY soil test kit (obtainable from your local garden center) or you can get the US government involved. Go to www.crees.usda.gov/extension and contact an agricultural Extension Officer who will come and test the soil for you.
3. Choose what tomato variety to plant by reading about them, consulting a nurseryman and or looking at what the packets of seeds say. You can plant seeds (it will take 6 to 8 weeks to get a crop this way) or transplant seedlings that you buy. If you are raising seedlings yourself, plant them in small plastic cups to start, transferring them to larger containers as they get bigger. Place them under a fluorescent light indoors to help germination and growth.
4. Till your garden and then cut a trench about 7″ deep. Add fertilizer and plant your little tomato plants up to the neck, about 12″ apart.
5. Stake or cage your tomatoes. If you stake them, secure the plant to the stake with nylon hose. Wire cages are easier because you simply put them over the plant and push the legs into the soil.
6. Water your tomato plants every day for the first week, and then 2 to 3 times a week. Do not let the soil get dry.
7. Read up on tomato recipes and get ready for a great crop. Keep the Extension Officer’s phone number handy.

Although this video (3:07) has the signature Gardening Guy, it’s a gardening gal who shows us how it’s done. She makes it seem easy, but then all these gardening video types do that.

You get your little tomato plant (e.g. Health Kick which is high in licopine which is good for your, or Juliet which bears early fruit) and dig a deep hole for it in the vegetable garden. It’s important to add lime to the soil in order to increase the calcium content of the soil. This discourages a plant disease called blossom end rot. You need to add fertilizer as well.

You bury the plant deep in the hole so that some of its lower leaves will be covered. This encourages root development.

This gardener is quite keen on protecting young tomato plants from night frost, and demonstrates a number of devices for doing so. First, you get an old-fashioned glass cloche-type shelter for individual plants, then you get something called a Wall of Water, which is a plastic wall with cells you fill with water to create a wall around the plant. Presumably it waters the plant too. There is also a plain plastic shelter with an aeration hole at the top.

The Gardening Gal recommends a tall, square wire cage for staking the tomato plant. The vine-type plants tend to get rather rangy, so you need to contain them so the vine doesn’t crawl along the ground, where the fruit will rot. A cage makes pruning the plant and picking the fruit easy.

That man of few words, Stan de Freitas aka Mr Greenthumb, who speaks from the coleus department at Willow Tree Nursery in St Petersburg, Florida, is a devil may care seed grower. Nonetheless, judging from the comments beneath this short video (1:52), he inspires gardeners of all ages to embark on a fun tomato seed growing project.

MGT says you push the seeds about 1/4 inch into the potting soil in a pot or seed tray. Keep the soil moist. In 10 to 14 days you will have seedlings, which you need to thin out. He makes it seem so easy….

Yolanda Vanveen of Kalama, Washington is a third generation flower gardener and sustainable gardener. Standing in her lovely kitchen surrounded by flowers from her garden, she tells in this brief video (2:15) how to grow tomato plants upside down in a container. What Yolanda doesn’t say is that this is a good way to make the most of a container, and also a way to obscure the bottom part of a hanging basket which is generally quite ugly when viewed from below.

It is important to choose a small tomato variety, such as Sweetie, as the large beefsteak varieties are simply too heavy. The fruit will fall off. A smaller variety makes more of a vine and an attractive plant.

Start your seeds in a seed tray indoors after the last freeze. Use a good, light seed starter mix with light soil and/or vermiculite. Keep the tray watered but not waterlogged.

When your little tomato plants are a few inches tall and has 3 or 4 leaves, transfer them to the container. Yolanda says it’s fine for tomato plants to share the container with other plants, such as hyacinth bulbs in the example she shows.

You can plant the plugs (nursery parlance for the seedling in its little plug of soil) in the top of the container as normal, or cut openings in the side of the container and plant them in there. You can do both, and then you will have vines growing out of the top as well as the sides. That will give you lots of tomato plants grown upside down.

Two Australians (one sounds like a South African though) have written a definitive book for the home tomato grower, entitled “How to Grow Tasty and Juicy Tomatoes”. The book by Lucia Grimmer and Annette Welsford looks like a beautiful production and you can order it at www.bestjuicytomatoes.com.

This 3:20 video begins with an interview with Michael Morton, who used the book to perfect his tomato growing skills. Then the two ladies show how to plant seeds in trays, how to transplant them into a container or the soil, and how to treat them after that.

Unlike most growers, they advise you to place the seeds far apart on a bed of seed starter mix and then sprinkle sand over them. You water that lightly every two days until you have seedlings. You transplant the plant into a container, with a deep hole for the plug. Use seaweed emulsion or or fertilizer, and mulch the soil. Water every couple of days at the cooler time of day. Blossom end rot indicates poor watering or a calcium deficiency.

It will take 60 – 120 days to get the first fruit, depending on the variety. It’s worth it, says Michael Morton.