Tomato Source

Grow your own because they’ll always taste better. David Overend advocates cultivating tomatoes

Even those unfortunate souls with little or no garden to grow and enjoy can still look forward to sowing a few seeds and raising a small, home-grown harvest for the plate.

There are peppers, lettuce, radish, herbs and, of course, the tomato. Many people won’t sow their own but buy ready-germinated plants from garden centres, but they are seriously missing the point – nothing tastes quite as good as tomatoes you grow yourself from seeds you sow yourself.

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The modern tom, bought ready-packaged from the supermarket, is a pale imitation of its home-raised cousin. Mass-produced crops may look appealing but the majority taste of nothing other than water. All ‘fur coat and no knickers’ as they might say in Barnsley.

Their arrival, in 1596, changed the world of the kitchen; nowadays, there are hundreds if not thousands of recipes which demand the inclusion of the humble tomato. It is part of our staple diet and we buy them in their billions and, thankfully, grow them in their millions.

To the true believer, the choosing of the seed, the sowing, the germinating, potting on the seedlings, feeding, watering, supporting and, finally, harvesting, is an important of the gardening calendar. Without the tomato, many a greenhouse would be nothing more than a receptacle for dirty plant pots and spider webs.

Tomatoes are relatively easy to grow and even the most amateur of amateur gardeners should be able to produce a decent fruit or two.

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Today, the old favourites like ‘Moneymaker’ and ‘Alicante’ are still there, but they have been joined by numerous more modern varieties, from tiny, sweet-tasting mouthfuls right up to giant beefsteaks, one of which would just about fill a decent-sized fryingpan. In between are scores of F1 hybrids all with their own shape and taste.

So, what is there to lose? You can sow the seed over a period of weeks, from as early as February, through till the end of April; when you do and how you do depends on what you’re growing and how.

The methods of growing are almost as numerous as the varieties of tomatoes – in beds of soil in a greenhouse, in bottomless pots standing on beds of gravel, in large buckets, in open ground and, probably now the favourite, in growing bags.

I favour the latter, turning the bag on its end and then cutting it in the middle to produce two long, deep growing containers capable of accommodating a tomato plant’s big root system.

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I sow the seed, two to a three-inch pot, the last week in February, covering the pots in clingfilm and leaving them on the kitchen windowsill. When the seeds germinate and have produced a decent pair of leaves, carefully pot them on, one plant to one three-inch pot. Keep the compost moist but not waterlogged and shade the youngsters from hot sun.

If they get too big for their pots, move them on to bigger ones; come May, they are happy to go out into the growing bags in the greenhouse; if you haven’t got such a luxury, keep them indoors until the threat of a late frost has passed, then put them outside to grow up a sheltered south-facing wall.

Support the growing plants with bamboo canes, water regularly, remove side-shoots, and start to feed with a liquid fertiliser when the flowers appear (some gardeners start to feed when the fruits have set; it’s a matter of personal choice). To help the fruit to set, spray the flowers with tepid water.

Watch out for the enemies of the tomato – aphids – shade the plants when the sun is very hot, keep watering regularly (irregular watering is the biggest cause of problems with tomatoes) and when the plants have set their fifth or sixth truss, pinch out the tops because the English summer is rarely hot or long enough to ripen all the fruit.

Happy eating.

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