by Mark Levisay

Without a doubt tomatoes are the most commonly grown garden plants. Nothing beats the flavor of a home grown tomato picked fresh from the garden—especially after eating the ones offered at the grocery store. Seed catalogs give you lots of options for starting your own plants and garden centers usually have dozens of varieties ready to go right into your garden. With all of these choices available, how can you choose the right ones for you?

How much room do you have?

Tomatoes come in all sizes. They are usually classed in three groups 1. midget, patio or dwarf, 2. determinate and 3. indeterminate. These descriptions refer to their growth habit and may affect your varietal choice depending on how much room you have for tomatoes in your garden. The smallest tomatoes are designed for pots or containers and probably won’t need much if any support. Determinate plants will only grow to a set height (usually 3-4’) and then stop. They usually need some type of caging or staking, but not as much as the indeterminate types. Indeterminate tomatoes are the ones that get big—continuing to grow through the season until killed by frost or disease. They’ll need tall stakes or heavy duty cages for support.

How are you going to use them?

Choosing the varieties of tomato for your garden is hard because there are so many choices available! It seems like tomatoes come in every size and color, so deciding what you want to use the fruit for will help with your decision. Cherry and “grape” tomatoes are great in salads. Most slicers and beefsteaks are great for general eating or putting on your BLT at lunch! Paste tomatoes are often used for canning or sauce production, though I make salsa and spaghetti sauce out of slicers.

Heirloom varieties

If you’ve never grown tomatoes in your garden before, consider trying an “heirloom” variety. These are usually older varieties passed down through the generations and prized for their flavor. Many are not disease resistant, so if you’ve grown tomatoes before you may have trouble with them as the disease fungal spores can survive in garden soil for up to five years.

Disease resistance is critical

In my garden, where I’ve grown tomatoes for 30 years, I look for the most disease resistant varieties I can find. Many seed catalogs will list the disease resistance (using the abbreviations from the list of diseases below) in the description of each variety. Generally the more letters listed in the description the better! For example, in my Park Seed catalog the Better Boy Hybrid is listed as V/F1/N/A/St, giving you an idea of its general disease resistance.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of diseases that affect tomatoes. Eight of them are fungal in nature and will persist in your soil from year to year. Early Blight (As), Late Blight (LB), Anthracnose (An), Fusarium Wilt (races 1,2,3 F1 F2 F3), Verticillium Wilt (V), Alternaria stem canker/crown wilt (A), Stemphylium gray leaf spot (St) and Septoria leaf spot (L). You also have Tobacco Mosaic virus (T), Spotted Wilt virus (Swv), Bacterial Wilt (B) and Bacterial Speck (Pst).

In addition to choosing the right variety, there are some tricks in how you grow the plants in your garden that help a lot, and we’ll explore that at length next time.

And remember, regardless of size, all tomatoes are tender annuals that require full sun and won’t tolerate frost at all.

Lemon Boy tomatoes ripening in late summer.

My tomato choices

This year in my garden I’m going to grow four different tomatoes. I’m growing Sweet Million Hybrids, a red cherry variety that is indeterminate with F/N/L/T resistance. This variety is very vigorous and usually grows taller than the poles I use (8’ 2x2” posts). Next is a red grape tomato we’ve come to love, called Juliet Hybrid which is a resistant, indeterminate type that will climb the pole and then climb back to the ground and look for the next pole down the row to climb back up on! I grow Lemon Boy Hybrid yellow tomatoes which seem to have good disease resistance, maybe a little less acid than the red tomatoes and are indeterminate. They make really good yellow salsa! My main red slicer is the Big Beef Hybrid, a former AAS winner. These indeterminate plants have excellent disease resistance and produce loads of baseball to softball size fruits.

Next time I’ll review growing methods to get the most out of your tomato patch.

Have a garden question? Send me an email at marklevisay@gmail.com.

Provide great support

The first thing is to give the plants good support to keep them off the ground and growing vertically. I use 8’ 2x2” poles to support my plants, though cages can work as well. Using strips of old sheets or pillowcases I tie the growing leaders to the poles at least every week. An interval of 4-8” is probably good-more supports will help hold up heavy sets of fruit. I usually tie just under a node, which is where a leaf comes off the plant’s stem. Don’t tie them too tight, as the stems will get bigger over the summer and you don’t want to prevent the flow of nutrients up the stems to the leaves and fruit.

Continue tying all summer long, at least until the plant gets to the top of the poles! The goal here is to keep the plants away from soil splash during heavy rains, as that can infect the plant with fungal spores present in the soil. The ties and supports also prevent damage from summer storms.

Prune regularly

Secondly we want to prune the plant and train it to grow with two or three main “leaders,” which get tied up to the support. Tomatoes want to produce many growing shoots and will produce “suckers” at almost every node. These shoots will produce flowers and fruit if allowed to grow, but the root system will have trouble supporting all of these stems and the plant will be very thick with foliage.

We also want to encourage air movement within the tomato patch and help more sunlight reach the fruit so it can ripen. When the plant is 12-18” tall you will notice one or two of the suckers will be really big and robust. I let one or two grow in addition to the main leader and remove all other suckers that emerge.

A good rule of thumb is to pinch off any suckers on the plant each time you tie the new growth up or roughly once a week. You’ll even notice suckers that appear where you’ve already pinched one off but remove it again if it appears. This pruning actually stimulates the plant’s vertical growth which will aid with air movement and sun exposure.

Fertilize strategically

Fertilizing your plants is really important as tomatoes are classed as heavy feeders. I use Plant Tone organic fertilizer when I plant the seedlings. Once the first fruit has set, about 2 weeks before your first ripe fruit is expected, fertilize each plant with a fertilizer relatively high in nitrogen (N). After that, at one month intervals, feed the plant a fertilizer that is higher in Phosphorus (P) as that will help support the flowering and fruit production. Remember, if you are growing indeterminate plants they will continue to grow, flower and produce fruit until killed by frost or disease.

Keep it clean

To prevent the spread of disease it’s also important to practice good hygiene in your tomato patch. I generally consider any yellow or brown leaves I see to be diseased and remove them as soon as I can. Not only remove them from the plant, but from the garden as well. I don’t even put them in my compost pile, as the fungal spores can survive for up to 5 years in compost or soil, unless your compost pile is really achieving the high temperature needed to kill them (131F for 3 days).

When in doubt, throw them out! Your plants will start to look bare at the bottom, but that won’t affect the fruit production if they’re actively growing at the top. At the end of the season, when your tomato plants are dead, remove all of the old leaves and stems from the garden, and try to plan for having your tomatoes in a different area next year. Most farmers practice crop rotation, and you should too.

Good luck!

Have a garden question? Send me an email at marklevisay@gmail.com.