Growing Tomatoes In Your Home Garden

Growing tomatoes has to be one of the most rewarding experiences for a gardener, especially in a home garden. Home grown garden tomatoes are sweet, have the perfect texture, are simply delicious, and can be used in a variety of recipes from tomato sauce right down to the simple tomato sandwich. The full flavor of a vine ripened tomato knows no equal. They are easy to grow, require minimal care, and reap great harvests. A single plant which grows vertically on a stake or cage can occupy as little as 4 to 10 square feet of garden space and yield back 200 or more ripe fruit in a season. At today's grocery store prices that could be worth several hundred dollars. I personally feel that tomatoes are one of the best plants you can choose to grow in your garden. So much so, that we've dedicated an entire section of our website just to growing tomatoes.

If you've grown tomatoes before or shopped at a local farmer's market then you know the best tomatoes can only be grown at home or locally. Why is that? Tomatoes are trade perishable. You can't pick a ripe red tomato and send it to the grocery store, it will perish, meaning it won't keep. Instead they have to be picked green and they turn red on their long journey to your local store. Even though they may turn red, they don't get any sweeter from the time they are picked on the vine. Even those vine ripened tomatoes you see in the stores aren't actually vine ripened. There are different guidelines on what can be called vine ripened but in general it just needs to have a little orange spot on it before the whole lot of them can be picked. This is why it is absolutely necessary that your home garden become your source of fresh tomatoes, there just is no other way to get sweet, vine ripened tomatoes other than to step out your back door and pick them just moments before you eat them.

Tomatoes aren't hard to grow, but they do require a little special knowledge and skills that you can easily acquire. We've gathered growing tips from around the web, our favorite books and even old magazine articles so you can learn all you need to know about growing tomatoes in your home garden and solving tomato problems before they become catastrophes. Don't forget to ask any tomato relate questions in our tomato forum where some professional growers and home gardeners are ready to help you out.

See some of our tomato gardening pages below to help get your tomato garden just right this year.

Planting tomatoes - this is a big category and can include anything from starting tomato seeds to transplanting them in the garden. Starting seeds is very simple, and you can see one of my garden journal entries about the secret to starting tomato transplants indoors for full information. It can be broken down to providing the tomato seedling with the appropriate balance of light, water, fertilizer, temperature and simulating the outdoors. This is one of my favorite steps in tomato gardening. Otherwise, see planting tomatoes for details on steps from seed to harvest.

Tomato fertilizer - tomato plants have specific fertilizer requirements. If you get it wrong you can wind up with too much green and no tomatoes. You can fertilize tomatoes at key times during their growth, such as when preparing the garden soil, when transplanting, while flowering, when there is a heavy fruit set on them, and during special conditions like drought or stress.

For those in a hurry, trying to solve a problem, aren't interested in becoming a tomato gardening expert, or just need a quick breakdown of the most important tomato growing steps, you'll find the various pages in our tomato growing tips section to be just what you need. Print them out and use them as part of your garden plan this year.

Read some of my garden journal entries from past years where I deal with real life situations in my home garden. There's the very popular and useful secret to starting tomato transplants indoors, lessons in transplanting tomatoes, lessons in transplanting tomatoes, part 2, and some suggestions about troubleshooting and solving tomato problems.