Tomatoes are my desert island plant. Were I forced to grow only one plant for the rest of my life, they’d be my choice. The evidence is clear as there are a lot of posts on this site that mention tomatoes. I’ve pulled out those with the best how-to information, but there are many more to be found in the archives.
My books You Grow Girl and Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces contain sections on growing, cooking, and preserving this delicious summertime favourite.
The Basics
- Touch your tomato seedlings to help them grow stockier.
- Tomato Pruning 101.
- Start healthy tomatoes.
- Black bottomed tomatoes: coping with blossom end rot.
- Tomatoes like milk: an amazing preventative against fungal diseases that I swear by.
- How to Save your own tomato seeds.
- Pesky squirrels and other tomato thieves.
- Hanging Tomato Plants to Ripen Indoors
Growing Tomatoes in Containers
- Tips for growing in containers.
- Varieties to grow in containers (or anywhere else for that matter)
- Thrifty containers for tomatoes
- Thrifty ways to camouflage your ugly thrifty containers!
- Growing tomatoes indoors: The tale of the Office Tomato.
- ‘Hahms Gelbe Topftomate’: Prolific, yellow cherry dwarf variety that does well in containers.
- ‘Whippersnapper’: Early cascading variety for pots.
- Dwarf tomato varieties that are great for pots.
Varieties to Grow
Determinate and Dwarf
- ‘Black Seaman’: A black slicer. One of my favourites.
- ‘Constoluto Genovese’
- ‘Ditmarsher’
- ‘Giallo a Grappoli’: an Italian winter keeping
- ‘Hahms Gelbe Topftomate’
- ‘Lime Green Salad’
- ‘Whippersnapper’
- ‘Yellow Pygmy’ and ‘Koralik’: two dwarf varieties.
Indeterminate
- ‘Black Pear’
- ‘Gezahnte’
- ‘Mennonite Orange’
- ‘OSU Blue’: a blue tomato.
- ‘Pink San Marzano’
- ‘Purple Calabash’
- ‘Red Currant’
- ‘Rose Quartz Multiflora’
- ‘Snow White’
- ‘Sunsugar’
- ‘White Currant’
- Five gorgeous ruffled varieties.
Make and Eat
- 3 recipes for canning tomatoes: Green tomato chutney, Superior heirloom tomatoes, Old-fashioned tomato ketchup.
- Preserving Green Tomatoes
- Oven roasted heirloom tomato soup.
- Make Tomato Skin Powder
- Oven dried tomatoes (and plums, too).
- Roasted green tomatoes.
- Tomato and sage bread soup.