Growing Tomatoes

For several months now, I have been writing articles about some of my favorite plants. Usually those plants are perennials, edible, and have special uses like dynamic nutrient accumulation and soil-building abilities. I've written about Lambsquarters, Sunroots, and Yarrow. Future articles by me will introduce you to plants you may not know about, or give you new perspectives on favorite plants that you should grow.

It's January, and that means that it's time to break out the seed catalogs, pore over the selections, and place your order for your spring seeds. Tomato seeds really should be ordered this month so you can start them in February or early March, in time to plant them after your frosts are finished. To find exact dates on when to start these (and other) seeds, enter your zipcode on our calendar and it'll tell you what you need to know.

So, let's talk about tomatoes, the most popular home garden "vegetable" in the United States. The tomato is actually a berry, and is related to a huge variety of other berries. Gojiberries, peppers, eggplants, groundcherries, tobacco, datura, brugmansia, gooseberries, chinese lanterns, deadly nightshade, and many more, are all in the same family as tomatoes. But among them all, none is more loved and cherished than the venerable tomato.

Although tomato plants are perennials, any amount of frost will completely kill them. Thankfully, they grow rapidly and can go from seedling to bearing fruit within 3 to 4 months. They like regular moisture, full sun, and soil rich in nutrients, especially potassium and phosphorus. Excessive nitrogen, however, will inhibit fruiting. Start your seeds indoors 6 to 8 weeks before your last expected frost date. Once frost is over, plant them deeply in the ground. Bury the stem up to the first set of "true leaves", because the stem will create more roots and help your plant get established quicker.

Cage the plant so it will have plenty of support, mulch it generously with your choice of mulching materials, and sit back and wait. It'll take a week or two for the newly transplanted plant to take off, but when it does it seems like it adds 6 inches a day! Before long your cage is filled with tomato plant and you can start perusing salsa recipes.

Tomato flowers will not set new fruit if the temperatures are over 90 degrees, so it's important that you get the tomatoes in the ground as early in the spring as possible, to give them ample time to produce. On our farm, we plant our tomatoes while we're still in the "danger of frost" time. We carefully watch the weather, and if frost is threatened one night, we will cover the tomatoes.

To protect new plants from frost, we cover the plants with upside-down nursery cans. We then cover these cans with several inches of old hay. In the morning, we simply uncover them again and all is well. Using this technique, I have never lost a tomato plant to frost.

Blossom-end rot is a malady that affects tomatoes. On the end of the tomato fruit, where the blossom was, the fruit turns black and rots. It's a sad condition that once begun, is not easily treated. The only solution is prevention. A lack of calcium is what causes blossom-end rot, so you need to make sure that your soil has calcium (it probably already does) and that the other nutrients and micronutrients are present. A lack of potassium, for example, will interfere with the plant's ability to take and use calcium. Soil pH is important, too, so if your soil is too far away from neutral, you should correct that. In our acidic soil, we like to sweeten it each year by mixing in ashed and ground limestone. Inconsistent watering can also interfere with a plant's calcium uptake.

So which ones do you grow? Most Texans I know grow Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum 'Celebrity'), Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum 'Carnival'), Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum 'Heatwave'), and those are fine choices as far as hybrids go. They resist nearly every viral pathogen, and produce fine slicers. My complaint about hybrids, though, is that you are stuck buying the seed new each year, and I don't like giving that kind of control to companies that may not be in business next year.

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum 'Kellogg's Breakfast') is an open-pollinated heirloom tomato that you can save the seed from and it'll come back true, generation after generation. This beautiful gold-colored tomato has produced fruits for me well in excess of 2.5 lbs, and it has a taste that can't be beat. At our local farmer's market, I fetch top dollar for these fruits, and this cultivar has won me numerous awards at the annual Jacksonville, TX TomatoFest "Best Homegrown Tomato" competition. It can be used for slicing, and also makes a fine salsa/sauce/canning tomato. Its versatility has made it a mainstay in our garden for many years.

A lot of gardeners love the Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum 'Cherokee Purple') tomato, which is technically a black tomato. While I agree it's a great tomato, it doesn't give as large a yield as other heirlooms, so I have stopped growing it.

For cherry type tomatoes, the Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum 'Yellow Pear') produces thousands and thousands of, well, yellow pears! What they lack for in flavor, they make up for in abundance. The Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum 'Black Cherry') is another purple/black tomato that has gained prominence in recent years, being larger than typical cherries, with intensive flavor.

My favorite grape tomato is called Cherry Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum 'Mexico Midget') , a cultivar producing an endless supply of dime-sized tomatoes. It takes several hundred fruits to fill a quart jar. My children enjoy growing these and harvesting them for market, commanding an impressive price for a large bag full of these.

If you want a tomato strictly for canning purposes, you really can't grow wrong with the old standby Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum 'Roma'), which is an easily grown, open-pollinated tomato with elongated plum-shaped fruits. Consider also growing Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum 'Rutgers'), a round cultivar produced by the University of Rutgers specifically for the canning industry. It makes flattened globe-shaped fruits of about 10 ounces with a fine flavor.

Our tomatoes database currently knows about 6,464 tomato varieties, and we have information on them all. You can browse nearly a thousand photos, read growers' reports, and ask questions about tomato growing, on our site. To see our tomato database, go to The Tomatoes Database and start your journey into the vast depths of options that exist with tomatoes.