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Gardening Tips: Homegrown Tomatoes

By Lisa Hilgenberg

There's hardly a gardening pleasure more popular than planting and harvesting homegrown tomatoes. Tomatoes are a warm season crop and should be planted outdoors early in June when the danger of frost has past and soils have begun to warm.

Garden centers offer disease resistant tomato plants that are ready to transplant directly into your garden. Transplanting rather than direct sowing helps to jump start growing this longer seasoned vegetable.

Decide on a location and whether you'll be planting in a container or directly into the ground. This will help determine the type of tomato that is best for you. Bush or determinate tomatoes produce flowers and set fruit providing their harvest all at once making them easy to process into sauce or soup.

These are smaller statured plants and can easily be grown in deep containers and they won't need staking or pruning. Most heirloom tomatoes with interesting histories are the vining type.

Vining or indeterminate tomatoes set flowers as they grow, successively producing fruit all the way through summer until frost. By pruning out side-shoots and supporting vining tomatoes with cages, stakes or trellises, a more productive harvest occurs.

Plant tomatoes deeply into fertile well drained soil, 24" apart which allows air to circulate around plants and sunshine in to ripen fruit. Keep the leaves dry while delivering 1" of water per week directly to the root zone. Providing regular moisture alleviates blossom end rot, cracked fruit and the spread of septoria and blight.

Mulching with compost or straw underneath plants prevents water from splashing on the leaves while keeping the root zone evenly moist. Homegrown tomatoes provide nutritious, high quality, better tasting tomatoes while providing satisfaction and relief for your grocery bill.

Two tomato plants for each adult provide plenty of vine ripened deliciousness for summer. Indulge your inner epicure by growing and harvesting homegrown tomatoes!


Lisa Hilgenberg is the Regenstein Fruit & Vegetable Garden Horticulturist. She teaches classes for the Joseph Regenstein, Jr. School of the Chicago Botanic Garden and mentors interns from the Garden's urban agriculture programs in the summer. Lisa draws on a rich family farming tradition, having spent many summers on her grandparents' farms in Iowa and Minnesota. You can follow Lisa on Twitter @hilgenberg8.

Want more gardening tips?  You can read other online articles or listen to previous podcast episodes from WBBM Newsradio's Gardening Tips segment.
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