Tomato Growing

Scott Reil is an accredited nurseryman with 20 years of experience in the field, or rather in the veggie patch, so it is worthwhile listening to what he has to say about choosing tomatoes for a small garden. Scott notes that homegrown tomatoes have an incomparable flavor, nothing like the store-bought types.

A lovely variety for children are cherry or grape type tomatoes like Sweet 100 (his all time favorite), Super Sweet 100, Sweet Millions. These are small bushy shrubs and deliver great crops. Then there are patio tomatoes for containers, which are prolific producers.

Scott is keen on heirlooms and encourages you to try them. They are sometimes weird looking but they taste great. Brandywine is the absolute best, he reckons, because like all heirlooms they were bred not for shipping or storing but for flavor, and only for flavor. He also likes Cherokee Purple, although he notes that these are really ugly! You also get yellow, orange, stripey, ghost and other purple heirlooms.

Scott says he always puts a pear-type tomato plant in the garden to produce tomatoes for sauces.

David Epstein of GrowingWisdom.com fame does a neat job of planting a Roma tomato plant in his Massachusetts garden. In this short video (2:22) you get to see a lovely, lush vegetable patch in the woods. David digs a deep hole and adds compost. He then adds water to dampen the contents, but says you don’t have to if the soil is already wet. In that garden it probably i.

David says tomato plants are an exception to the planting rule in that you can plant them really deep, up to their necks. That because the stem will put out side roots. After planting, David likes to cage or stake his tomatoes. And in 60- 75 days, he reckons, he will have a wonderful crop of tomatoes.

Accredited nurseryman Scott Reil of www.safelawns.org says that planting a tomato plant is different from planting any other plant he knows. In this 2:46 he shows how to go about it.

First, you need to make sure that the tomato plant you get from the garden center is strong and healthy. The subtext here is that tomatoes are disease-prone. He says to look on the label to make sure you are buying a disease-resistant variety. Also the plant must look healthy, otherwise you will be transferring nursery issues to your garden. Make sure the plant has a well-developed root system. You do that by taking the plant out of its plastic pot. I wonder if garden centers allow this? If a plant one or two feet high hasn’t a well developed root ball, it is unlikely that it will develop it in future.

Second, when you get home you do something really surprising. You trim off all the lower branches. Some growers advise stripping off just the leaves, but Scott says take it down to the stem. The reason for this is that apart from the top branches, the rest of the stem should be planted within the soil because the stem will put out new roots.

Third, once the plant is buried up to its neck in your vegetable garden, be sure to cage it. This supports the plant (tomato plants can be rangy) and will also support the fruit clusters. You can look forward to tomatoes all year round if you follow these instructions, says Scott.

It has taken veggie garden adviser Kenny Point of www.veggiegardeningtip.com a long time to find out what commercial tomato farmers knew all along. They way to control vine tomatoes is by growing up a trellis made of a series of poles with horizontal wires between them at various heights.

In this video (4:51) Kenny tells us the shortcomings of spiral takes, cages and towers. The main problem is that they are too small. Now he has come across the solution: trellises.

You take the longest poles you can find (he uses steel poles) and plant them in a row about 5 feet apart. Then you take 14 or 16 gauge wire and string it between the posts about 2 feet from the ground, winding it around each post as you go. The little tomato plants are planted right near this. You use plastic trellis clips to fix the tomato stem to the wire. As the tomato plant grows, you add strands of wire and clip the tomato plant to it with clips.

Kenny says that pruning is important. You pinch out the suckers (tomato plant term for new shoots) which generally occur in the cleft between existing stems. You do this to thin out the plant so it’s not so bushy, and to encourage fruit production.

This is interesting. British gardening expert Chris Beardshaw how you ripen tomatoes on the vine after lifting the plants. This short video (1:12) shows Chris clearing a glasshouse at the end of the growing season. There are still many green fruits on the vines.

Nothing wrong with leaving the green fruits in a bowl with a banana to make them ripen, or leaving it on a windowsill. But according to Chris, nothing tastes quite as good as tomatoes ripened on the vine. He offers an alternative: ripening the fruit on a vine which has been remove the soil.

Chris heads for the shed, where he hangs the plant upside down. The theory is that the moisture and nutrients from the plant will filter down the plant and somehow get to the fruit. It’s worth a try if you want to make the most of a vine that you have dug up but which still has green fruit on it.