How to grow a tomato

While growing vegetables like tomatoes may provide needed nutrition, the walking, bending, digging, watering and planting involved in gardening provides the exercise needed for good health.

Tomatoes have been around a long time, but the plant didn’t get to England until 1590s and to North America until the early 1700s.
Wikipedia on the Web tells us, “Cultured people like Thomas Jefferson, who ate tomatoes in Paris and sent some seeds home, knew the tomato was edible, but many of the less well-educated did not.”

Some interesting facts about tomatoes include:
- China is the largest producer followed by the U.S. and Turkey,
- The heaviest tomato ever was a 7-pound, 12-ounce “Delicious” grown in Oklahoma,
- Largest plant was a “Sungold” grown in England reaching 65 feet in length,
- A “tomato tree” growing in Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort is the largest single tomato plant in the world with a record harvest of more than 32,000 tomatoes and a total weight of 1,151.84 pounds. The vine’s golf-ball size tomatoes are served in the resort’s restaurant,
- At the yearly “Tomatina Festival,” tens of thousands of Spaniards gather along with tourists to throw thousands of pounds of tomatoes at each other.

No matter if you call them “tomayto” or “tomahto” or consider them a fruit or vegetable, planting the favorite and most widely grown vegetable in your home garden in July will produce fresh, red, ripe tomatoes in your fall garden for tailgating and the holidays.

The tomato is botanically a berry or fruit, but is nutritionally categorized as a vegetable. Something to remember about tomatoes is that once fully ripe, they can be refrigerated, but are best kept and eaten at room temperature. Those stored in refrigerator tend to lose flavor.

Lee County Extension Agent Dani Carroll suggested that www.tomatogrowers.com is a good site for anything related to tomatoes. Others include:
- www.johnnyseeds.com
- www.burpee.com
- www.parkseed.com
- www.totallytomato.com
- www.bonnie.com

Carroll said she likes the “Celebrity’ variety of tomato. An extension publication suggests a number of
varieties:
Cherry and Grape
- Cherry Grande
- Mountain Belle
- Santa Claus
- Saint Nick
Roma/Plum
- Puebla
- Plum Dandy
Large Fruited
- Amelia VR
- Celebrity
- Sun Leaper
- Carolina Gold
- Mountain Fresh
- Mountain Spring
- Sunbeam
- Mountain Supreme

There are a lot of other popular varieties sold as transplants in local retail stores like Atkinson, Early Girl, Big Boy, Better Boy, Park’s Whopper, BHN-444, Beefsteak, Patio, Heatwave, Sunpride, Small Fry, Sweet Million, etc.

Alabama Cooperative Extension System publication ANR-302, “Backyard Tomato Production,” tell us that among those many varieties, tomato plants will either grow to a set height, flower and bear fruit for a few weeks, called determinate, or continue to grow, flower and bear fruit all season long, called indeterminate.

The long row of letters after their name, like V, F & N, means that variety is resistant to Verticillium, Fusarium and root-knot nematodes. Tomatoes need regular disease and insect controls, and gardeners should follow recommendations from the various Extension publications as well as instructions included with the
chemicals.

For answers to your home gardening questions, call the Master Gardener Helpline toll free at 877-252-4769. Lee County is “option 2.” For more information visit www.aces.edu and select publications.