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Growing Tomatoes by Chris Robert

1. When planting, first get them accustomed to the weather...if you bring plants home from the store in March or April, chances are they came from a greenhouse.  You'll put them out, it will hail on them and they'll turn yellow and bronze and never recover.  Instead, wait to plant them...put the pots out during the day, and bring them indoors at night until they either adjust, or things warm up.  Another option is planting them and then covering them with a cut off and inverted large clear soda bottle...it works like a mini greenhouse.  Just cut the spout off so that the bottle is like a bell-jar.

2. Use a tomato cage to hold the plant up as it grows...best to install it at the same time you plant.

3. Always plant on the south side of the house in full sun...no shade at all.  Tomatoes need to be in the absolute brightest warmest place possible.

4. If possible, plant on the south side of the house under an eve or overhang so that the leaves stay dryer.  If that is not possible, consider rigging up some kind of awning that stops the rain but not the light.  Why? you may ask...tomatoes are susceptible to a disease called late blight which thrives on damp leaves.

5. Prevent late blight.  Late blight first shows up as moldy looking leaves, which spreads to the fruit and turns the tomatoes into gray / yellow balls of mush.  Gross!  One way to prevent late blight is to remove leaves from the plants when it's getting to be mid to late September...that's when the disease strikes.  I have actually pulled all the leaves from vines and gotten huge harvests...one smaller vine yielded 73 ripe Roma tomatoes!!!!  By pulling the leaves, no moisture can hang around and feed the blight.  I usually do not pull all of the leaves unless we get into a period of unrelenting rain during the fall. 

6. Be careful with the watering.  Not too much and not too little.  Soaking wet soil at night is not good...best to water in the morning.  If you let the soil completely dry out the tomatoes will live, but come the first heavy rain or watering, a lot of the fruit will split open with nasty cracks that let in the fruit flies.  What happens is that the skins are fitting relatively dry fruit, and when the plant fills with water, the skins don't "fit" any more and split open like Jackie Gleason bending over and ripping his trousers.

7. I've found that the Roma variety is the absolute best for the Maple Leaf area.  Cherry tomatoes also do well.  I don't even try to grow the big Beefsteak varieties...they are just too susceptible to blight.  (If you have a success story with larger varieties please write in and we will post your story!)

8. Green tomatoes do ripen indoors, but also can dry out or get moldy before they ripen.

9. What do you do with all those red ripe tomatoes????  Click HERE to see on the recipe page!

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