As summer draws closer, it’s time to start putting out your garden. And no matter where you live or how big your garden is, almost every gardener plants out tomatoes. Tomatoes are adaptable; they work well in almost any sunny area, if they’re planted correctly to begin with.

Knowing how to plant your tomatoes can make the difference between weak plants that just do okay, and strong, healthy plants that actually thrive. The strong plants are the ones that get the best head start. Here are some instructions and tips for getting the most out of your tomato plants.

1) Choose your tomato plants by roots, not foliage.

A tomato plant may be well leafed out, and look good up top, but if it doesn’t have a sturdy root system, it won’t grow well. There are a number of ways to check a plant’s root system. The easiest way is simply to lift the pot or cell pack and look at the bottom. If there are fine white roots trying to peek out the drainage holes, you have a plant with a healthy root system.

Another way, although not quite as reliable, is to gently hold the stem between your thumb and forefinger, being very careful not to bruise or break it, and tug lightly. If it gives, it isn’t well rooted in. But never tug too hard, or you’ll end up uprooting and damaging even a healthy plant.

2) Dig a deep enough hole for your tomato plant.

With many plants, when you plant them from a pot into the ground, you want your hole to be the same size as the pot the plant just came out of. Tomatoes are different. When you plant your tomato, you want to bury all but the cluster of leaves at the very top. Look at the stem of the tomato plant. Do you see the fine hairs on it? When buried, those hairs turn into roots. This gives the plant a jump start on a healthy, established root system.

What if you have a tall tomato plant, or your ground is too shallow to be able to dig that deep? It’s not a problem. Instead of digging a deep hole, dig a trench, as deep as you can make it, and long enough to hold all but the top cluster of leaves. When you plant the tomato, you’ll lay it on its side in the trench, with the top curving gently upwards to poke above the soil.

3) Puddle it in.

Instead of planting the tomato in a dry (or even lightly moist) hole, then putting more dry (or lightly moist) soil around it, then watering it in, give your tomato the best possible start by puddling it in. The extra water will help the tomato get over its transplant shock faster.

4) Mulch your tomato plants.

Adding two or three inches of hardwood bark mulch around the tomato keeps the soil moist longer. Tomatoes don’t like to have their roots too wet for too long, but they don’t like to completely dry out, either. Mulch helps create this essential balance between too much water and too little.

These four tips will give your tomatoes the best possible start. So what are you waiting for? Get those tomato plants started!

By Keesa Renee DuPre

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This video is by Insightful Nana, who has started YouTube series on everything from making popcorn to container gardening. The idea is to promote Better Living for Today’s Woman.

Dear old Nana. She makes a song and dance about putting a Celebrity tomato plant in a container and projecting what the plant will do. In this video (9:09) all that Nana really says is:

1. You can grow tomato plants in containers — all kinds of tomato plants whether bush types or vines
2. Use potting soil in the proportions 11 parts Fruit & Veg Growing Soil to one part Perlite
3. Get a plant from a nursery and plant it up to its neck in its roomy container, burying the lower branches
4. Give your tomato plant it 8-9 hours sunlight a day, moving it around on a plant caddy if necessary
5. Keep the soil moist and give the plant plenty of air
6. Pinch off the suckers to prevent excessive green growth
7. Stake the plant with a stick, securing it with nylons
8. When the tomato plant is tall enough, curtail the bushy growth on top, which encourages fruit production
9. Enjoy your tomato crop

Be warned: the sound quality on this video is not fantastic.

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This is a scary little BBC cartoon video (1:08) for people who haven’t a clue about planting tomatoes. What’s more, watching this video they are unlikely to get one either. The message is this: Once indoor tomato plants have emerged, leave them outside to acclimatize. Then plant them in a growbag or a container or in the ground, about 20 inches apart. They need to be in a sunny, sheltered spot. Pinch off new growth. Stake them with a garden cane or stick. Water them well and you will get a crop. That’s it.

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Considering what an abstruse art most ordinary folk find tomato pruning to be, as evidenced by tens of thousands of viewings of this video (1:41), Mr Greenthumb aka Stan de Freitas delivers a startlingly short and simple lecture.

Standing in the St Petersburg, Florida garden center where he is the resident pruning guru, MGT says you prune for a couple of reasons, namely to get rid of suckers (that’s nursery speak for new shoots) and to cut out problem areas such as leaf mite, mildew, fungus etc.  He doesn’t say why you want to get rid of those suckers but presumably it is to limit the ranginess of the plant.

MGT makes a big deal out of making a quick, clean cut. He doesn’t say if tomato plants are sensitive to pruning speed. That seems unlikely. It could be that the retired folk in Florida fall asleep with their sheers in their hands when pruning their plants and he feels the need to warn frosty-top tomato growers that they need to guard against this real and present danger.

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This is a sweet little Australian video (6:36) without much visual interest (locked off camera showing Greg planting seeds in seed trays) but it contains some interesting information about planting tomato seeds “chemical free.”

Greg places seed raising mix in trays, but he says you can also plant them in little pots. As a horse is heard clopping by, Greg informs us that he is planting Rama tomatoes this year. At the same time he is planting some marigold seeds. These plants, along with garlic and basil, he will plant among the tomato plants to ward of nematodes (soil borne germs that are fatal to tomatoes) and also insects.

As Greg’s dog Jenny starts yapping in the background, Greg reminds us that it is best to have clean hands when working with seeds and seed raising mix. Once the seeds are nicely planted, you spray them thoroughly with water from a plastic spray bottle and place them in warm part of the house. In 5 or 6 weeks the seedlings will be ready for planting.

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Mr Greenthumb aka Stan de Freitas of Willow Tree Nursery in St Petersburg, Florida is so clever when it comes to horticulture that it’s scary. In a video just 1 minute and 34 seconds long he explains the techniques of organic tomato growing.

What is organic? asks this bon vivant and provides an instant answer: It’s growing plants without using chemicals.

Which doesn’t mean you aren’t going to use anything at all. Instead you are going to use nursery products that are friendly to the environment and not harmful. Of course these will contain chemicals, but of the natural kind and not out of the factory.

Mr Greenthumb says you should use Black Kow cow manure, which is not very high power when it comes to fertilizing, with a make-up of just .5 (N), .5 (K) and .5 (P). But it’s very good at “keeping the good stuff in the soil”. Also you should use peat moss to retain the moisture and the good stuff, and you should also use fish emulsion “because it’s organic”. Presumably none of those fish were contaminated in any way by chemicals.

Stan then puts a positive spin on organics by asserting that the Amish have wonderful gardens because they improved the soil with organic matter. So save all those grass clipping, kitchen waste, coffee grindings and feed them into your soil like a man in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, says Mr Greenthumb. He ends by adding that you should start your plants healthy with Hi-Yield Dipel Dust. What is that stuff? Hope it’s organic.

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Barbara Pierson, the nursery manager at White Flower Farm in Litchfield, Connecticut, is a true professional. This might just be the best video (5:02) out there on the subject of growing tomatoes in containers. Barbara says that White Flower Farm supplies over 100 varieties of tomato seed, so it might be worth visiting www.whiteflowerfarm.com to take a closer look.

Once you have a seedling, you need to plant it in full sun. Container gardening means you can move the plant around, which is great for tomatoes, which need 6 – 8 hours of sunlight per day. You place a potting mix in the pot in a ratio of 2:1 with compost. Make sure there are no lumps.

Remove the seedling from the seedling pot without breaking up the root ball. You plant the seedling deep, after removing the leaves that will be below the surface. These stems will produce roots where the leave were. Tamp the plant in gently.

The time to stake a tomato plant is at the time of planting, says Barbara. She likes a simple spiral stake for a container tomato. Push it right to the bottom of the pot. Now water the plant well. Check regularly for moisture by sticking your finger in the soil. When the plant starts producing fruit, don’t over water or the fruit may crack and the taste of the tomato may be insipid.

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This is advice for a very specific tomato grower: one growing tomatoes in a poly tunnel in bottomless pots over growing bags, with a drip irrigation, which is called ring culture, in a climate where the sunlight is weak. If you are that brand of tomato grower, and you can understand a deeply British provincial accent, the watch Steve Ott, editor of Kitchen Garden, in this short video (1:34) showing how he tears leaves off tomato plants.

You have to make sure that the tomato fruits are getting enough sunlight, so strip off the lower stems to let in the sunlight. Don’t tear off too many, though. The leaves are where the tomato plants manufacture their food. The plants in the video are Roma tomatoes. This plum tomato is good for soups and sauces, says Steve.

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Danny Botkin of Franklin County, Maryland is not just any organic farmer. He and his family are committed to a bigger picture: Laughing Dog Farm is “an ongoing quest for community and connection, as we have sought to incorporate some of that legacy of tribe, family, land stewardship, social activism and co-creative inter-dependence. That’s always been the ulterior goal, the idealistic Bigger Picture, per se. However, like everybody else, we’re practitioners, working, growing and learning daily — imperfectly attempting to do it better each time.” Wow.

This video is a quick, easy lesson in getting seeds from tomatoes. Have you ever wondered how? It’s easy. You cut open the tomato and squeeze out the pulp (seeds and gel) into a glass or ceramic dish. You add some pure water to create a slurry and leave this on a warm window sill.

In ten or twelve days a thick scum will have formed. The gel will have fermented away from the seeds. Now rinse the seeds in a sieve until they are clean and leave them for about two weeks in a warm place to dry. When you wrap them, or double wrap them, or place them in jars, make sure they are totally dry or they will rot. Store them in the freezer or another cool place until the planting season.

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If you are growing tomatoes at home, or even if you have access to fresh tomatoes in abundance from another source, you might want to store them for use during the winter months when tomatoes are scarce and expensive. There is a limit, after all, to how many tomatoes your family can consume each week, so why not keep them for later use?

You can make sauces and freeze those, or make chutney, ketchup or other preserves, but have you thought of freezing tomatoes? In this compact little video (3:35) Rita Heikenfeld of AboutEating.com discusses ways to freeze tomatoes.

Traditionally, says Rita, people have blanched tomatoes before chopping and freezing them. Blanching means they have placed them in hot water and then pulled off the skins. Common wisdom has it that this needs to be done so that the enzymes in the skin are removed, inhibiting the tomato from ripening further.

Without saying it in so many words, Rita says this is hogwash. You can freeze regular size tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and pear tomatoes (the canning kind) whole just as they are, skin and all. When you are ready to use them just run the frozen tomatoes under tepid water and the skins will come away easily. Chop up the tomatoes and add to soups, sauces, etc. It’s a great time and energy saving tip.

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