Call us biased, but in our eyes, tomatoes are the crowning jewels of the summer veggie garden. Not only are their fruits delicious, but they are relatively easy to grow, making tomatoes a truly rewarding crop for gardeners of any level! And with so many varieties to choose from, there’s no shortage of varieties to taste test on your quest for the best varieties that always earn a spot in your garden. To help you get started, we’ve put together a few pointers to help you enjoy an abundant, mouth-watering tomato harvest year-after-year with just a little planning and care.
Choosing the Right Tomato
Although wild tomatoes are technically perennials, we almost always treat them as annuals in temperate gardens, which means starting over every year with new plants. We think experimenting with new varieties is part of the joy of tomato growing! They come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and can vary in color from red, orange, and yellow to white, pink, purple, green, and striped. They also taste different, with some being brighter and sweeter and others featuring deeper, more complex flavor profiles. Everyone seems to have a different favorite, so it’s well worth trying out a sampling of varieties. You might be surprised by some of the more unusual selections!
If you are gardening with limited space, look for a determinate tomato variety that will stay more compact, including dwarf selections bred for container culture, which tend to work well for patio and balcony gardeners. Determinate tomatoes grow to a set size before fruiting and they produce a lot of tomatoes all at once. This is in contrast to indeterminate tomatoes, which will continue to grow and set fruits throughout the season, often getting quite large. They yield fruits over a much longer window, but fewer at a time. Different tomatoes will also have a different number of days to maturity, meaning they will fruit sooner or later. We recommend growing a few different types with different combinations of these characteristics in a given season to enjoy a prolonged and varied harvest. Because they can take a couple of months to produce fruit, if you choose to start tomatoes from seed rather than purchasing ready-to-plant tomato starts from the Nursery, plan to start them indoors a few weeks before your projected planting date, rather than waiting to direct sow them. You will get fruits faster!
From there, what you grow is mostly comes down to your personal tastes and preferred culinary applications. Paste and plum tomatoes like ‘Roma’ or ‘San Marzano’ are fleshier, making them great for making sauces. Slicing tomatoes and their larger beefsteak cousins are great for fresh eating and making sandwiches. And cherry and grape tomatoes are great for salads — or, as often happens — snacking right off the vine! If you care to save your own seeds to grow from year-to-year, look for heirloom and open-pollinated varieties that will “come true” from seed, or else you should be prepared for a few surprises in the next generation!
When to Plant
Because they are a staple of backyard kitchen gardens across America, it’s easy to forget that wild tomatoes are actually native to tropical Central and South America, which makes temperature a very real consideration when deciding when to plant out your tomatoes each spring — or when to start your own seeds. While you’ll almost certainly be tempted to break out the shovel earlier, it’s best to wait until temperatures are solidly above 50ºF to put tomatoes in the ground, which in the Portland area generally translates to sometime in May. (Even when temperatures look stable, it’s still a good idea to have some freeze cloth handy just in case we have a late cold spell later in the month.)
If you want to push the envelope and plant your tomatoes out earlier, consider planting grafted tomatoes, which offer a slight edge in the way of cold tolerance, in addition to a stronger root system, disease resistance, and improved vigor and fruit set. Additionally, growing tomatoes in pots that can be moved to a warmer location if temperatures dip can be effective strategy to extend the season, as well as using cloches, which can act like a miniature greenhouse to protect individual plants from cold and precipitation overnight.
Getting Your Tomatoes Started
When planting tomato starts, you want to encourage robust root development to set your plants up for success. As such, we recommend planting them deeply, which will help to make your plants sturdier and more resilient. Don’t worry: Unlike with woody plants, it’s totally fine to bury several inches of the main stem beneath the ground, because tomatoes produce adventitious roots along their stems that easily root into any soil they contact. The exception to this rule is grafted tomatoes, which should be planted with the graft above the soil line. This will ensure that the scion (the grafted variety up top that you want to produce fruit) doesn’t root directly into the soil, negating the benefits imparted to it by the hardy rootstock.
Because tomatoes — and other warm season crops like them — are what’s known as “heavy feeders,” we like to add a bit of organic fertilizer specifically formulated for vegetable beds into the planting hole when setting out tomato starts. You will also want to water them well at the soil line, being careful not to splash water onto the foliage as much as possible to limit the transmission of any fungal spores in the soil. As your tomatoes grow, you can remove the lowermost foliage to help with this issue, and to help air pass through your plants to keep them healthy. Indeterminate tomatoes will also benefit from suckering, where you pinch or prune off the majority of the side-shoots forming at leaf axils to focus the plant’s energy into one or two primary stems. Additionally, indeterminate varieties will greatly benefit from the installation of some sort of support pr scaffolding — such as a tomato cage — at planting time. While determinate tomatoes are generally fine without them, it’s helpful to have a structure you can train indeterminate tomatoes to grow against to provide stability.
Troubleshooting
One of the most common problems that tomato growers run into is Blossom End Rot, a condition that causes a dark, sunken spot to develop on the bottom of maturing fruits, especially early in the season. While some varieties are more prone to the issue than others, it’s especially frustrating when even your favorite, time-tested variety begins to produce marred fruits. Thankfully, as a nutrient deficiency, this condition isn’t contagious, and with a few simple practices, you can set your tomato plants up for success to enjoy an abundant harvest.
Because tomatoes can quickly deplete key nutrients in your garden soil, it’s often recommended to switch which beds you grow tomatoes in from year to year, and why we always feed our tomatoes with E.B. Stone Tomato and Vegetable Food at planting time, and occasionally throughout the season. In the case of Blossom End Rot, the particular culprit is a lack of calcium in the soil, which can be remedied by further amending your garden beds with granular gypsum and crushed oyster shells so that there is plenty of calcium available for your plants to take up. The best time to amend your soil is in the fall during end-of-season cleanup, but this can also be done in the spring, and late is certainly better than never. That said, not all fertilizers and soil amendments are created equal, which is why it’s important to look for organic options specifically formulated for vegetable beds. As with most crops grown for their edible fruits, high nitrogen fertilizers are a no-no for tomatoes, as they encourage your plant to prioritize leafy green growth over fruit production, not only decreasing your harvest, but robbing calcium stores from those precious few fruits, and therefore increasing the likelihood of Blossom End Rot.
Erratic watering practices can also be a compounding issue for Blossom End Rot, as fluctuations in water affect how your tomato plants grow and allocate calcium to different tissues. That’s why we recommend watering deeply at regular intervals during the growing season, especially as your plants first get established. Once your plants begin to set fruits, you can back off of watering a bit as the season progresses, while still being cautious to avoid huge swings in soil moisture.
To make doubly sure you don’t suffer rotten bottoms on your otherwise gorgeous ripening fruit — or if you notice any issues early in the season in spite of your best preventative efforts — you can apply a foliar nutrient spray like Bonide Rot Stop to give your plant a direct dose of calcium that it can absorb through its leaves.
