Tomatoes Ideas, Tips & Guides

Tomatoes on Steroids Does anyone else's tomato plants go wild in the garden when they are on summer vacation, or is it just me? Tomatoes gone wild

I'm A Garden Meemaw! There is a special moment in a gardener's life when your kids ask for garden advice for the first time. I’m a Garden Meemaw!

It looks as though spring might be on its way in the northern hemisphere, and gardeners’ thoughts are turning towards tomatoes and potatoes. You may have already sown your first tomato seeds; your seed potatoes may be chitting on the windowsill. But what if you could get both potatoes and tomatoes from the same plant – a TomTato?

I live within walking distance of a Wyevale garden centre, and this year they have been tempting me with some interesting plants. First, there were the framberries – strawberries with a raspberry flavour. I bought two of those, and they’re currently happily resident on the patio until their final spot in the garden is ready for them.

We don’t really eat fresh tomatoes in this house, and as a rule I don’t tend to grow them. Last year I was tempted by a trio of unusual flavoured tomatoes from Wyevale, but they were tall and needy things that wanted constant watering. I didn’t notice any significant difference between the flavours of the ones we did eat; I gave most of the fruit away. When I had a juicer I would grow cherry tomatoes and make tomato juice; the chickens loved the leftover pulp. (And yes, if you juice yellow tomatoes you get yellow tomato juice.)

At New Year, the AeroGarden blasted off on a new mission – to grow fruiting veg. It started with a crew of three – two peppers and a tomato. The seeds germinated quickly, and the start of the mission went according to plan.

Monty Don was recently explaining how to save tomato seeds on Gardeners’ World. I know this not because I watch it, but because his method (sticking seeds to paper towel) was roundly slated on Twitter. I’m fairly sure I tried that once, and that it worked just fine, but it was a long time ago and to be honest I just can’t remember.

Welcome interplanetary gardeners! This week’s Gardeners off World starts with a little video Boeing has put together of the inside of the crew cabin on the recent Starliner test flight (the one that took tree seeds into space). You can see Rosie the instrumented mannequin, but the highlight is watching astronaut Snoopy float about as the spacecraft reaches orbit, and then plop back down into his seat during the descent!

In this NASA image from January 2020, you can see Lashelle Spencer taking measurements on ‘Red Robin’ dwarf tomato plants. Lashelle is a plant scientist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and this photo was taken inside the Plant Processing Area in the spaceport’s Space Station Processing Facility.

Header image: TheOldBarnDoor/Shutterstock.com

At the beginning of the year, I set up a new mission in the AeroGarden, growing two peppers (Popti and Redskin) and a tomato (Veranda Red). Ten days later, I had two tomato seedlings, which I had to thin to one. The peppers were a bit slower, but by 19th January they had germinated (and been thinned) too.

I am making transcripts for The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, a fascinating series starring Ruth Mott and Peter Dodson, with a voiceover by Peter Thoday. This is episode five (of eight). [You’ll find the other transcripts, and other relevant posts, under the Home Front tag.]

What did you get for Christmas? Hopefully something good, something seedy and something spacey! 

Join Emma the Space Gardener in the Gardeners of the Galaxy time machine to learn about the time that NASA encouraged schoolchildren all over the world to grow killer mutant space tomatoes. That can’t be right, can it?

Back in 2014, I bought some seeds that had been into space. They are cinnamon basil (Ocimum basilicum Cinnamon), still sealed into their space packet. 

When I was a kid, I really didn’t like soup. I especially didn’t like soup that came out of a can (I still don’t, really), but I did like Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup. Not obsessively or anything, but it was quite nice. But as an adult I developed a cow’s milk intolerance and so cream of tomato soup was off the menu.

If you look at the lists of crops that researchers suggest for space gardens and Martian farms, tomatoes are always on there. However, the first fruit NASA is aiming to grow on the ISS is a chilli pepper. I thought it would be fun to see how dwarf tomatoes and sweet peppers grow in my little space garden.

When NASA is selecting crops to grow in space, it looks for varieties that can produce a lot of food in a small space, on compact plants that are healthy and easy-to-grow. It turns out that they suitable tomato plants already exist on Earth, as there are plenty of windowsill and small-space gardeners who love tiny tomatoes!

Later this year, when the XROOTS experiment comes to an end, NASA’s Veggie growing system will be starting a new challenge. VEG-05 is a long-awaited trial of whether we can grow tomatoes in space – in this case, the dwarf variety Red Robin.

In November 2021, Heinz announced to the world that they had successfully created a high-quality ketchup made from tomatoes grown in Martian conditions.

Artemis I may be getting all of the attention right now, but on the International Space Station, the crew has grown a crop of radishes in XROOTS, and sowed tomatoes!

Header image: the launch of NASA SpaceX Crew-5 to the International Space Station. Image credit: NASA

At the end of last year, NASA published a round-up of its Best Space Station Science Imagery of 2022. All of the images are worth a look, but of course I am particularly interested in the ones that involve space plants:

In 2018, the German Space Agency launched a particularly ambitious project on a year-long space mission – a satellite equipped with two greenhouses designed to grow tiny tomatoes at gravity levels equivalent to those found on the Moon and Mars. But it was more than just an experiment to grow plants in space. In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener explores Eu:CROPIS, a project to develop a biological life-support system… for tomatoes.

Have you ever tried growing tomatoes? They’re a popular crop and reasonably simple to grow, although not without their challenges.

When it comes to garden gear, there is a clear divide among growers: Those who love tomato cages, and those who consider them an absolute useless eyesore. I’m controversially the latter. Aesthetics aside, there are a lot of questions I have about the invention of this particular metal torture device, and I have opinions about how it might not be the best way to grow your tomatoes. In fact, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with your crops due to cage structure—increased pests and lower fruit production to start! 

With all that in mind, I made my annual frantic call with some urgent tomato questions to today’s guest, Craig LeHoullier in North Carolina, the NC Tomato Man as he’s known on social media, author of the classic book, “Epic Tomatoes” (affiliate link). Craig knows more about these cherished fruits than almost anyone I’ve ever met. He even shares that in live sessions each week on his Instagram account where you can ask your questions and get solid answers. I asked Craig how he’s doing and what we should all be doing to bolster a bountiful harvest and also about which fruits to save next year’s seed from anyhow and other tomato questions. Read along a

Tomatoes will produce best if they are well-rooted, so bury them deep, right down to the topmost pair or two of leaves. They are able to root all along their stems if you plant them very deep or even sideways, in a trench. The latter goes like this: Dig a small trench about 6 to 8 inches deep and almost as long as the plant (including its rootball) is tall. Lay the plant horizontally in the trench, gently bending the top end upward, and bury all but that end with the upper pair or two of leaves. Because my soil is acidic, If I am feeling organized I give tomatoes a dose of lime in the planting hole, along with bone meal and an organic fertilizer labeled for vegetables. Some gardeners think tomatoes benefi

Up here in the Hudson Valley/Berkshires area, where the apples come in fast in fall, I make applesauce as fast as I can to freeze. A batch of mincemeat sounds about right, too, especially from a recipe minus the traditional beef suet. This one’s vegetarian.The recipe is from “Stocking Up II,” a Rodale cookbook of 1980s vintage that has since been reissued in athird version. The most-disfigured spread in my copy: the one with ‘Currant and Green Tomato Chutney,’ which uses loads of apples as well. If a waste-not, want-not mood seizes you in the not-too-distant future, here’s the recipe. (I fig

I’d first read of the tactic being used commercially, particularly in greenhouse growing, to improve yields from less-vigorous varieties like some heirlooms, and counter certain tough conditions or diseases. Now it’s available to the home gardener, too–and you don’t even need a razor blade or grafting clips of your own.The extensive article I wrote last January on tomato grafting explained all the steps, with help from a video from Ohio State.Our plants did fine; the grafts took easily, once the initial awkwardness of the slice-and-dice-and-reconnect motions were semi-mastered. Matching up rootstock (which you behead) with a scion (the top of another plant, the one you want the tomatoes from) was the

I’m hoping some of my 2008 progeny will start turning red, but if not, I have a stash of green-tomato recipes. (For now I’ll hold onto them, as it’s not yet time to give up…look for them in a few weeks here, and enjoy the Oven-Roasted Tomato idea down at the bottom of this post meantime.)But really, I marvel each summer-into-fall when I stock my freezer with the harvest turned to many quarts of sauce: How did I even get one ripe fruit, considering what could have happened?No fruit. Only green fruit. Fruit with spots. Fruit with black bottoms. Fruit with cracks. Fruit eaten by marauders of every taxonomic order.Tomato leaves spotted. Or dropping off. Or eaten and just plain gone (ho

The fruits of ‘Juliet’ are somewhere between a plum and a grape or cherry type of tomato— just 2 inches long or so—and borne in clusters of 12 to 18. They’re small enough that I simply halved them (above) for the skins-and-all quick tomato sauce that I freeze 40 containers of each year. I am fascinated with this rich-tasting little plum, now bubbling happily on the stove. Johnny’s Selected Seed rated indeterminate ‘Juliet’ as their most disease-resistant variety in trials (no small honor), I learned today.I have Roberto Flores, the self-proclaimed Dirtmeister at Good Dogs Farm in Ashley Falls, Massachusetts, to thank for growing the brimming bag of ‘Juliet,’ and my crafty neighbor Susan Schneider of Shandell’s, who scooped them up for me yesterday, knowing I’d been complaining about being a bag or two short. And I have the Millerton, New York, farmers’ market to thank, too—appreciation all around, friends.Have you grown ‘Juliet’ (pac

First, of course, you want to make sure the crop you’re considering saving seed from is open-pollinated, not a hybrid. Hybrids won’t “come true” from saved seed one generation to the next.“Start with the super-easy things,” said Ken, “like anything with a perfect flower and a pod—beans, and peas, for instance.” Perfect flowers contain both male and female parts, or stamens and pistils, such as lettuce, tomatoes, brassicas, beans; in imperfect ones, such as on squash and cucumbers, there are separate male and female flowers.“Before you even transplant your first seedling, you can start thinking about seed saving,” Ken said, and also wrote in a new article on the Seed Library blog.For beginning seed-

THAT OLD, DISCARDED ELECTRIC FAN that isn’t strong enough for the hot summers of global warming…hey, bring it on. It’s perfect for accomplishing one of the tricks to growing better tomato seedlings, which is (after all) the only thing you probably really care about on the run-up to another spring. To hell with winter.

Start with dark green, stout transplants equally high and wide, preferably about 4 inches in each direction.  (My step-by-step for growing your own includes many tricks; you can also shop locally for seedlings or by mail.)Plan to grow a mix of heirlooms and hybrids for a little insurance: Heirlooms are beautiful, delicious and a critical part of our genetic heritage, but sometimes they lack the disease-resistance (often labeled VFN) of hybrids. I like to mix it up.Remember that even with hybrids rated as having VFN resistance, the word “resistance” is the operative phrase.

I’m making soup this week because the hodgepodge lodge of produce on hand (above) says “soup” to me.  I’ve got a mammoth onion donated to the cause by regular visitor and commenter Blue Arrow, and a pile of summer squash that another “regular” here, Kathy of Cold Climate Gardening, left behind when she visited in person last week (and wrote a very nice story, thank you).From my own jungle I plucked beans and kale and parsley and garlic, and a few tomatoes.I’d need some corn, too, if I were going to make the exceptionally quick and easy Late Summer Vegetable Soup from Everyday Food and Dinner Tonight, but I’m saving that for next time.My first batch of soup to freeze this year will be from Sara Kate at Apartment Therapy’s thekitchn.com, who with her blogger husband, Maxwell, welcomed me to the blogosphere at my debut in spring. (They a