This is SO funny!

➡ Tomatoes, loved globally for their versatility and taste, have a rich history that began with the Aztecs and spread worldwide through Europe. Despite their popularity, growing tomatoes can be challenging. This article shares insights from three expert gardeners on how to successfully grow tomatoes, from choosing the right soil and location to the importance of regular feeding and proper drainage. The experts also share their personal experiences and love for gardening, emphasizing that the best tomatoes are those grown yourself.
➡ This text discusses various gardening techniques, focusing on feeding plants and the dangers of using certain manures. It emphasizes the importance of balanced food for plants and the use of compost and organic fertilizers. The text warns about the harmful effects of herbicides found in cow, horse, and goat manure, which can damage plants. It also discusses the benefits of starting plants from seeds or transplants, depending on the gardener’s location and conditions.
➡ Growing tomatoes can be done either by using seeds or transplants. Seeds are great for heirloom varieties, while transplants offer instant gratification. The ideal tomato varies for each person, but factors like climate, color, and flavor are important. For instance, in warmer climates, there are more tomato varieties to choose from. In cooler or rainy climates, quicker maturing, short season tomatoes are preferred. Experimenting with different colors can lead to discovering new flavors. A method for planting a lot of tomatoes in a small space involves planting multiple seeds in a cell, then transplanting them into larger pots. It’s important to space out the plants to avoid competition for resources. Watering should be done carefully to avoid diseases, and it’s advisable to keep the foliage as dry as possible.
➡ Tomato growers are using transparent cloth tunnels to grow their plants, which helps prevent disease and increase yield. They water the plants at the base to keep the leaves dry and use a PVC pipe with holes to water the whole row at once. Tomatoes need support as they grow, so growers use stakes, cages, or trellises to keep them upright. They also use organic methods like diatomaceous earth and spinosad to keep pests away. Regularly checking the plants and removing any diseased leaves can help prevent the spread of fungus. If a plant gets a serious disease like Fusarium wilt, it’s best to remove it to prevent the disease from spreading to other plants.
➡ This text discusses various diseases and pests that can affect tomato plants and how to manage them. Fusarium, tomato spotted wilt virus, and late blight are some diseases that can harm your plants. To prevent these, you can use methods like soil solarization, removing infected plants, and monitoring your garden regularly. The text also mentions pests like thrips, hornworms, aphids, and stink bugs, which can be controlled by handpicking, using organic controls, or encouraging natural predators like ladybugs and parasitic wasps. Lastly, maintaining healthy soil and avoiding chemicals can help keep your plants disease-free.
➡ The article discusses the challenges and solutions of growing tomatoes. The author shares personal experiences of gardening mishaps, such as losing plants to deer or freezing temperatures. They emphasize the importance of choosing tomato varieties suitable for your climate, tending to the garden regularly, and maintaining good soil health. The author also suggests picking tomatoes when they’re half to three-quarters ripe to avoid cracking and attracting pests, and letting them fully ripen indoors.
➡ This text discusses various methods of preserving tomatoes, such as slow roasting, dehydrating, and canning. It also explains that the color of a tomato doesn’t affect its taste, and that the skin contains a lot of nutrition. The author shares a recipe for a simple tomato sauce, which can be spiced up later according to preference. Lastly, the text provides a method for saving tomato seeds by fermenting the pulp of crushed ripe tomatoes.
➡ To save tomato seeds, let a ripe tomato’s seeds and pulp ferment for about three days. After fermentation, rinse the seeds and let them dry for one to two weeks. Store the dry seeds in a cool, dry place where they can last for many years. This process helps remove a germination inhibitor present in the gel surrounding the seeds, making them ready for future planting.

The tomato is the holy grail of gardening. Round, red, succulent and versatile, juicy and delicious. Perfect to eat from the vine, ripe and sun warmed, or for making into spicy salsa, spaghetti sauce, home fermented ketchup and even cocktails. After the Spanish came to the New World and discovered the Aztecs growing tomatoes, they took the plant home to Spain and it spread onwards through Europe. From there, the tomatoes spread across the globe, becoming an integral part of cuisine, holidays, art and film. Gardeners consistently rank the tomato as their favorite garden crop. There are tiny sugar sweet cherry tomatoes and massive beef steaks with slices too big for a hamburger bun.

Roma tomatoes, bred for thick flesh that’s perfect for sauces. And green, yellow and even zebra striped tomatoes bred for their zany looks and unique flavors. Yet despite its history and the universal love showered on this fantastic fruit, fruit, the tomato is not the easiest plant to grow. I’m David the Good and you’re about to learn everything you need to know to grow a good tomato right here. As we cover tomatoes from seed to sauce, Along the meandering tributaries of the Amazon river basin grows one of the most important trees known to man, the tomato tree. Over bazillions of years, it has evolved a unique method of propagation.

When the fruit is ripe, it falls from the tree into the many creeks and rivers of the jungle, which then carry the tomatoes out to sea. The fruit then spends months floating in the surf until making landfall again, sometimes many thousands of miles from its jungle home. During the summer months, tomatoes wash up on the shore by the billions to be gathered enthusiastically by the many fans of this fruity king of the vegetables. I wish getting tomatoes were that easy, but it’s not. If you want good tomatoes, if you want really great tomatoes, not those watery things that they have in the grocery store, you have to grow them yourself.

Even though I’m a gardening author, I wouldn’t call myself an expert on tomatoes. That’s why I’ve got three of the best gardeners you’re ever going to meet joining me for this presentation. And I’m glad you’re joining me as well. Also known as NC Tomato Man, Craig Lahollier is the author of Epic Tomatoes and Growing Vegetables in Straw Bales. He’s also the guy who named the Cherokee Purple Tomato and is the co leader of the Dwarf Tomato Breeding project, all while maintaining a massive collection of heirloom eggplant, pepper and tomato varieties. The first tomato that I ate and enjoyed was one that my grandfather Walter grew and Walter Gibbs lived in Pawtucket as Did we Pawtucket, Rhode island, and had a beautiful garden behind his house.

And he would take me through his garden when I was 2, 3, 4 years old and show me everything that he grew there. And that really inspired my love of gardening. For 30 years, Lynne Gillespie has been the powerhouse behind the incredible greenhouses and gardens on the Living farm. She is the author of three books, how to grow all the vegetables your family can eat, Cinderblock gardens, and High Performance gardening. She is also the creator of the Leafy Greens, Container Garden and Abundance garden courses. My father and my mother had organic gardens when I was growing up.

So probably the first tomato plant that I participated in, I was probably about 3 or 4 years old. My favorite was a large red cherry, and my dad said I would go out and pick and eat them before anybody else in the family could get to them. Jier Gettle is the founder of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, which offers nearly 2,000 varieties of vegetables, flowers, and herbs in their catalog. Along with his work in plant breeding and seed saving, Jeer and his wife, Emily, have also published two books featuring heirloom crops, the Heirloom Life Gardener and the Baker Creek Vegan Cookbook.

I grew my first tomato. It was a yellow pear tomato when I was about three years old, I believe. I think I was three. And I can still remember being out in the garden and looking at those beautiful little yellow tomatoes and snacking on them. It was really, you know, a really cool experience. And I’ve, you know, been in love with tomatoes and gardening ever since. No matter when you grew your first tomato or if you’ve never grown a tomato, in the following presentation, we’re going to cover what you need for success. First, I think I need to get these weeds out of here, though.

Now that the weeds are out of here, I’m going to go ahead and loosen the soil. I have a meadow creature broadfork, but you can use a regular spade or spading fork. Or maybe you’re one of those super lucky people that has really nice loose soil all the time. In that case, you can just skip watching me do all this hard work. That’s how I like to prepare my beds for planting. Just loosen them up, rake them over, and they’re all ready for seeds or transplants or whatever I want to do. There’s a lot of different ways to prepare, so I’m going to take a break right now and we’re going to see what our expert guests like to do with their tomato beds.

Just pardon me for a minute. I like to grow in raised beds, we have a system called the high performance garden system. And this is one of my beds that I grow in. And to prepare the soil, basically this is what it looks like coming out of the winter. We have our mulch that we put on last fall. And to prepare the soil, I basically just push the mulch back like this. I add a couple cups of organic compost that I make and a little bit of organic fruit and flower fertilizer and I just dig a hole in the soil and plant.

It’s really fast, really easy. And in just a three by three section here, I can put in about nine tomato plants. In our garden, we actually till each year. So we till and then lay down a layer of manure, composted turkey manure, and also any compost that we can make and we put that on the garden. Perfect location for your garden would be either a well drained garden with rich soil that is well balanced and has all of the nutrients available. If you don’t have that situation, if the sun in your yard doesn’t hit best, where you have the best space for a hand dug garden or a raised bed, I’ve found, and this is a situation that I’m in right now, you can have equal success using containers and using straw bales.

As far as planting a traditional garden in the ground, I’ve used many different methods. I’ve rototilled, I’ve turned the soil over, I’ve just dug a hole and planted. The key thing really is drainage because tomatoes do not like wet feet. So if you dig some holes in your garden and it rains and those holes filled with water and the next day the water is still there, I would suggest you do something to amend that soil. Either dig the hole deeper and amend it with something that drains well, or what I had to do was go down the rows and remove the soil and create a mound that I dug the holes in.

Down the rows. By raising those mounds about a foot over the elevation of the rest of the garden, I could plant the tomatoes deeply into those mounds. Excess water from the rain would then drain out the sides and my tomatoes would not be living in wet feet. Well, for us, you know, the biggest concern is the moisture we receive. So oftentimes we will add sand. We also add straw, something like compost, composted straw, anything to loosen up the soil. But also, you know, it’s the location, trying to find a location where it drains well and then adding anything to help it drain.

In our case, simply because we have a lot of water. So sand, anything that helps the water go away quicker is our biggest concern. But we also add. We’ll use fish emulsion for fertilizer sometimes throughout the season and add, you know, compost and, you know, any kind of composted manure or whatever we have on hand basically to loosen the soil and add nutrients. And that’s about it. I mean, we pretty simple just adding stuff to loosen the soil and add some nutrients. So when it comes to things like what to amend soil with or what to feed tomatoes with, my experience is that tomatoes like something, but I’m not a stickler for exactly what to use.

So I’m not strictly organic, although I tend in that direction. My view is that tomatoes like to be fed regularly in the ground less often because you have the deep soil to be a reservoir for the nutrition that you add. And the roots can reach to that in containers of straw bales where you’re watering frequently to keep those tomatoes healthy. When you feed, every time you water, you’re going to be leaching some of those nutrients at the bottom of the pot or the bale. So for regular garden, a balanced food, something in the 5, 10, 5 or October, 10-10-10 range.

And there is just infinite amount of choices, traditional or organic agents for containers and straw bales. I actually go to using that balanced food weekly to make sure that the plants are getting the nutrition that they need. When I prepare my bed, basically I just push the mulch back and all I’m going to add to my soil is compost and some fruit and flower, organic fertilizer. That’s it. Then we’re just ready to go. We mulch our gardens each year. It depends on what mulch we have, but we’ve used straw mulch, which helps keep the moisture in.

We’ve also used plastic mulch, and then we’ve used no mulch at all. We’ve also done a method of letting the grass grow, you know, almost right up to the plants and mowing the grass. So basically a living mulch. And that’s one of the most common things we do is mulch that’s mowed a living actually from wheat grass or different grasses that we use each year. And we’ll mow them back or mow them into the soil and then till them in the following year. So it helps build the soil as well. But it’s a variety of different things.

And our biggest thing here in Missouri is a lot of times we have too much water. So sometimes we’ll actually use the plastic mulch to help Keep water out of the soil where they’re going in or grow them in who passes where we can keep the water away from the plants. Composted turkey manure. Balanced organic fertilizers. Compost. There’s a lot of ways to feed tomatoes in this bed. I’m just going to go ahead and use some dried cow manure. I’m going to stick with the classics. If I had any of those other things, I would throw them in here too.

But I know that the soil is pretty rich and this cow manure here, good stuff. I know that because I saw the cow. There’s actually a reason that I wanted to use cow manure. Not just because I had it locally available, but I wanted to talk to you guys about the danger of cow manure, horse manure, goat manure, and other ruminant manures. They’ve long been considered one of the very best amendments that you could put in your garden. That is, until just about a little over a decade ago when new herbicides entered the market. If you look up aminopyrulates and garden damage, you’ll see what I mean.

Some years ago, I got a big load of cow manure because I was doing the good organic gardener thing and I knew that cow manure was one of the best things you could ever put in your garden beds. So I got a big double load from a farmer and I planted my tomato transplants and I put it all around my blackberries and some of my fruit trees and other things. And within a couple of weeks, everything was starting to twist up. All the new growth was destroyed, distorted, messed up. Well, turns out aminopyrlides are being approved to and recommended to be sprayed on hay fields.

And one of the main products it’s in is called Grazon from Dow AgroSciences. Well, Grazon, it’s just like the name. They spray it and the animals can go ahead and graze on it. And apparently it doesn’t hurt the animals, but it kills broadleaf weeds. It doesn’t affect grasses, but it kills your broadleaf weeds. So what does that mean? Well, when an animal eats it, this molecule is so persistent, it actually goes through the animal’s digestive tract. In the case of a cow, that’s four stomachs. It can go through four stomachs into the manure. You could turn around and compost the manure six months later, put it on your garden and it will kill most of the plants in your garden.

Won’t kill grass family, but it certainly does a terrible number on tomatoes and a Lot of people still don’t know what’s going on here. So they go and they get a load of manure from a local farm. And even if they say, farmer, did you spray this field with anything? And he says, no, that doesn’t mean it’s safe. You know why? A lot of farmers buy in hay through the winter, a lot of hay fields are being sprayed with this stuff. It goes right through that dead, dead hay, right into the animal, right out into the manure, right through the composting process and into your garden, and it still kills your plants.

So you might be better off buying amendments like a mixed organic fertilizer or fish emulsion or, you know, chicken or turkey manure is less likely to have hay in it than you are to go ahead and use cow manure, which is one of the very best amendments you could possibly use. But I wanted to warn you guys about that. A lot of times, I think new gardeners, it happened to me, too. I didn’t know what happened, and I was not a new gardener by any stretch. A lot of time, gardeners don’t know what’s going on with this stuff.

And you think, well, I don’t know what happened. Maybe my tomatoes had a virus. Maybe they just got twisted up and damaged because of something I did wrong. Maybe I gave them too much nitrogen, maybe it was too much manure, and instead they actually got hit with a persistent herbicide like this nasty amino pyrrolid stuff. I know this is safe because I don’t actually live in the States and people just tie their animals up in the jungle here and they don’t spray. So I just can follow around where a cow was a month before, pick up the dried stuff and throw it in the gardens or in my compost.

But for those of you in the US if you’re getting manure that comes from any animal that is eating hay, I would consider it highly suspect, and I would probably find something else to feed your tomatoes. I hate to say that, but until things change, that’s the situation we’re dealing with. When it comes to tomatoes, you have two main seeds or transplants. There are benefits and drawbacks to both. The good news about gardening now is that with the popularity of heirlooms over the last few decades, you can find a much higher diversity of varieties as transplants at farmers markets and at garden centers.

But for gardeners that really want to grow and choose from the widest selection available, go with seeds. And there are advantages of starting with seeds. You can even grow varieties that Are fairly obscure. You have control over your timing and the quality of the transplants. And it’s really easy and enjoyable to start tomatoes from seed. In fact, it gives you something to look forward to every day in the gardening season from the time you plant those first seeds. As far as starting tomatoes from seed or setting them out from transplants, you can direct seed right in the garden, which works really well, or you can start transplants.

If you don’t have an ideal place to start transplants, I recommend just direct seeding into the garden. Because if you have big, leggy, unhealthy transplants, the seedlings that you actually start direct in the garden will do better than the ones that started in the house anyway. Unless you have a great location with bright lights, if you have a light set up, or you have some bright windows that are south facing. Oftentimes people do really well with transplants. For our location, we’re at about 5,600ft above sea level, and our growing season is pretty short. We definitely go with transplants.

We can put transplants in sometime in May, and we’ll start seeing tomatoes about August. We see our first frost in September. So if we go from seed, there’s no way that we can have a tomato. So transplants are king for us here in the high country. Don’t give up. If you fail with transplants, you’ll only be about two or three weeks behind direct seeding. And you can do the same thing like you would in the house, Actually start a small bed early and then divide them up and put them where you want them. Later on, you can kind of warm location, buy a brick wall or somewhere to get them a little bit of a head start a little earlier in the season, if you understand what your last frost date is.

In other words, what date could you start to plant seedlings outside and then work back two months from that? That is a really good time to start your seeds. So I could start in Raleigh, North Carolina, these days, planting my garden on April 15. Frequently I’ll wait till May 1, but that doesn’t matter. I can still use April 15. I’ll be transplanting the groups of seedlings, separating them out, and putting them into individual containers a month prior to that, on March 15, which means I’ll be planting those seeds in the flats on February 15. That is a really good rule of thumb, and you can use that wherever you live.

Just work back two months from your last frost date and get your seedlings going. You’ll be fine though. I’ve started tomatoes from both seeds transplants. There is something very satisfying in simply taking the transplants and popping them in and saying, I have an instant garden. That’s a lot of fun, you know, because you can just get, look at all those little tomatoes. It’s right away, it’s instant gratification. But on the other hand, it’s so easy to start them from seeds. I have literally taken slices of tomato and stuck them into potting soil and had tomato plants come up.

So take it or leave it, you’ve got both options. Seeds are great for starting heirlooms. It’s wonderful to save your own varieties, but then if you need that instant gratification, always got transplants. We can pop right in and have a garden bed in minutes. When I think of the ideal tomatoes I want, a tomato that produces well in my climate, is really interesting in terms of its color, is delicious in terms of its flavor. Preferably it’s not a hybrid, so it’s an heirloom or an open pollinated variety that I can save seeds from and share them with people.

But you could put a hundred people in a room that are avid gardeners and tomato growers, and they’ll come up with a hundred different answers. For me, in North Carolina, we’re very lucky. We have lots of degree days here, meaning the sun is shining quite often and it gets warm. Tomatoes are heat loving. We have sufficient rain. In fact, we often have too much rain. But in terms of choosing varieties, I’m not limited by the size of the tomato or the maturity date. Anyone who lives from, say, the midwest down to the very southern regions, where you’re not dealing with frost, the sky is the limit in terms of varieties.

And there’s only people who are in far northern climates or like those who live in the Pacific Northwest, where you get a lot of cloudy or rainy or cool days that you have to think about tomatoes that are a little bit quicker maturing. Short season. So here in the Rockies, at our high elevation, we have a very short growing season. So the tomato varieties that we’re looking for are the short season ones, 70 days, maybe 80 days. But anything that they say it’s 90 days or longer, we cannot crop out here. So we’re looking for the really short season.

I have seen some down in the 50 and 60 day range, and they’re pretty fun for us to grow as well. I think the biggest thing people need to try is experiment with the different colors. Even more than the different varieties, each color has its own flavor and flavor profile and sweetness. And there’s so much that goes into the different colors. And even within the colors there’s some variation. But try the different types. You know, I was surprised when I first started trying green tomatoes. They’re actually among the most flavorful and best tasting of tomatoes. But my absolute favorite types of tomatoes, not a single variety, but it’s the multicolors.

When you get the multicolors, you get the green and the yellow and the red or the purple all going. The more colors you can get into one tomato, the more flavors you get. So when you bite into it, you get the purple plum type taste. You get the traditional red tomato taste. You get the citrusy yellow or, you know, taste from the citrusy orange and yellow tomatoes, as well as the kind of deep, sweet, earthy taste in the greens and then the dark like black and brown tomatoes, you get kind of a smoky taste. So the more colors you get, whether it’s in a mixed salad where you chop the individual colors or you find varieties like the Atomic Grape that has three or four colors going on on a single tomato, when you bite in, it’s just so much more rich tasting.

It’s like you never realize a tomato could taste like that is when you have the multiple colors going on in one tomato. In Craig Lahollier’s book Epic Tomatoes, he shares his unique method of starting as many as 2000 tomato seedlings in a single 50 cell. Planting flat to plant tomato seeds the epic way, first fill your planting flat with nice loose potting mix, then water well with hot water. Hot water soaks into dry potting mix much better than cold water. Now it’s time to plant seeds. You can plant as many as 40 seeds in each cell.

Just sprinkle them on the surface of the soil, then sprinkle more potting mix on top to cover. Now wet them with a spray bottle, cover the flat with plastic wrap, and place the seedling tray by a sunny window on a heat mat. After your tomatoes germinate and grow a little, you could transplant them into into larger pots. Craig fills his pots with dry potting soil, separates the seedlings, then lays them on top of the soil filled pots and presses them right into the soil with his thumb. After planting, water well, then place the tomatoes in filtered sunshine to start the process of hardening off.

This method is perfect for people with large gardens or who wish to sell tomato transplants at the local farmers market. In fact, that’s why Craig first came up with this method. He needed to start a lot of tomatoes in a small space for those of us who only need a dozen or so plants, just plant your trays with a couple of seeds per cell. Then once they germinate, keep your seedlings under bright grow lights. After they grow for a couple of weeks and are looking nice and healthy, harden them off by exposing the transplants to a slowly increasing level of outdoor conditions over the course of a week or so until they are ready to plant in your garden.

I’ve got my little transplants and now we need to put them in the bed. The thing is, I think, lot of us think if you put more into a space, you’re actually going to get more yield out of it, right? If you put a whole bunch of stuff, if you plant 20 tomatoes, you’re gonna get a lot more than if you plant 10 tomatoes, right? Not really. It actually makes more sense to space them farther apart so the plants can feed themselves better, so they get more access to water and nutrition so they don’t compete and fight, fight with each other.

Because when they get all jammed together, they’re going to be fighting for resources. You’re going to have to give them more water, more fertilizer, more care. The air is not going to get through the middle, so they’re more. They’re going to be more prone to diseases and other problems. So you want to actually space them a little farther. So what I have here is I have a measuring tape for tomatoes, you want two to three feet apart. That seems like a lot of space for something so small, doesn’t it? But if you think about it, some, these tomatoes can get up to 6 foot tall.

So it makes sense. Give them the space and just watch them grow to fill it up. You’ve probably heard that you should plant transplants at the same depth they were growing in the cell. However, with tomatoes, the plants grow extra roots out of the stems, so go ahead and bury them deep. We’re talking two thirds of the plant. It will make for stronger tomatoes that are more drought tolerant with better root systems. Since I just have a small bed, I can get away with a garden hose. Back when I lived in Florida, I had some overhead standpipes with rain birds on them, and I could go out there and make it rain by turning a crank.

That’s all well and good, but it may not be the best way to water tomatoes. So I asked our experts about how they like to irrigate in our climate. We may be very, very high in the Rockies, but we do not get enough rainfall. We average nine inches a year. That’s it. So we have to irrigate. My favorite way with these little gardens that I grow is just to water with the hose and the wand. It gives me a chance to see my garden and be with my garden every day. I really enjoy watering it. So we just water by hand.

We irrigate our tomatoes mostly from the rain, but we do have drip lines in place. Simple, cheap, easy to find drip lines that we put in place. And I use them a few times each summer because we will emit all of our grain. We have dry spells almost every summer, which we supplement almost every summer. Supplement, water at least two or three times each, and especially when you first transplant them. My rule of thumb is to keep the foliage as dry as possible. So overhead watering is just not something that’s advisable to do. The reason is that when tomato foliage gets wet, it acts like a magnet for any of the disease spores.

Often they’re fungal floating around in the atmosphere to adhere to those leaves and start problems happening. In fact, one of the things that’s been happening here near me in North Carolina is farmers that are growing for CSAs and such are building these tunnels using lightweight transparent cloth, maybe 10ft tall, planting the tomatoes underneath, then watering the tomatoes at the base of the plant to keep the foliage dry. And by doing that, they’re minimizing the spread of disease, slowing the onset of disease, and getting much higher yields and healthier plants. In our production houses for our tomatoes, we actually have a.

A 1 inch PVC pipe that has holes in it, 8th inch holes drilled in it, and we just turn the water on at one end, it runs down the pipe and out the holes, and it just waters the whole row all at once. And we do that once a day in the summertime when it’s really hot. Tomatoes are not very well behaved plants. You can’t just plant them in the ground and assume that they’re going to do fine, they’re going to grow tall, they’re going to bury lots of tomatoes like a nice little tree. No, they don’t support themselves very well.

They sprawl all over the place, they fall into each other, they drop their tomatoes on the ground, they rot, they have all kinds of issues. I. Unless you stake them up. I like to use rebar, which you can use year after year. And I got this idea from my friend Theresa. Stick a rebar piece next to each one of your little transplants and hammer it in and tie them up. But there’s more than one way to stake tomato plants. Most tomatoes, maybe greater than 90 to 95% are called indeterminate. And these are tomatoes that grow very tall and very wide.

They’re the ones that produce suckers. Every time a stem and leaves come out at that node at a 45 degree angle, an additional growing stem or a sucker will emerge. Those tomatoes really benefit from either being caged and we’re talking 6ft tall, minimum, 3ft wide. Let the tomato essentially just fill up that cage and you’ll have enormous yields. Or if you want to grow more types of tomatoes and plant them more closely using very tall stakes, I like to use an eight foot stake, pound it into the lawn at the edge of my driveway, and then limiting the number of growing stems or suckers to maybe two to three to four per plant, and then using twine to secure that plant and all of those side shoots and suckers that you let grow up the plant that gives the best compromise between yield and ability to maintain that plant without it just becoming a completely chaotic bush that starts falling over and causing issues with just foliage shading and disease onset.

Because you don’t have good air circulation for dwarf or determinant varieties, and these are varieties that stay 2 or 3 or 4ft tall, the cone shaped 4 foot tall tomato cage is actually perfect for those. Neither the dwarfs or determinate types need to be pruned. So you can just put a sturdy three to four foot stake into the ground, secure it to the cone shaped cage, and then let the tomato plant fill that up and just let those go. Probably our preferred method is using cattle panels or horse panels. The long metal fencing panels that you can find at a feed store or sometimes a home improvement store.

Any kind of long like 12 or 16 foot panel of metal grid. And then you just tie the tomatoes up with either string or you know, you can use old pieces of fabric are great, like old cut up pieces of cloth and just tie them up as they go. So that’s really a great support. You can use the metal T post, metal stake, T post, pound them into the ground and they’ll hold your tomatoes up. As long as you do it properly, they’ll hold your tomatoes up even in a quite a bit of wind. Unlike a lot of the flimsy tomato cages that blow over every time you have wind, the cattle panels do really well for us.

Okay. My favorite staking method is actually a trellising method. This is what we called our easy trellis. This is super easy to build. We have directions on our website for this. And basically in this little section here, I can grow nine tomato Plants, we do what we call a single stem stem, where we just grow one stem and cut all the suckers up. And what that does is that gives us more tomatoes per plant, and I can put more plants per section. So the way this works is we just take our string and we’re going to pop it up over the trellis, we’re going to clip it with the tomato clips, and then this would come down and we would clip this to the tomato plant, and we grow the tomato up the string.

In our production house, where we have big, long rows of tomatoes, we actually have a wire at the top and we can keep that tomato plant going. It’ll end up being about 17ft long by the time we’re done with the end of our growing season. And we just keep leaning and lowering the tomato plants as we go. And it’s a fantastic system. Super easy, great way to train your tomatoes and get a lot of production. Tomato growers know the pain of seeing our hard work destroyed by pests and disease. If you’re like me, you’ve battled splitting fruit, blossom end rot, stink bugs, mildew, and the terrifying hornworm.

When it comes to tomato pests and diseases, what can we do to fight back? It seems like as you’re growing tomatoes, almost everything likes to nibble out either the leaves or the fruit. The tomato hornworms, which turn into beautiful moths later on. As far as pest control, we do as minimal as possible, and everything’s organic. So in general, when we set the plants out, we will sprinkle some kind of like diatomaceous earth on them. We also sometimes use spinosad, which is a white powder or white liquid, which is a bacteria, and it will have medium. It’s fairly effective as far as keeping pests away.

And then sometimes in extreme situations, you can use pyrethrins or organic pyrethrins, and that will be more broad spectrum. But in general, between the spinosad and the diatomaceous earth, that will keep away almost all of our tomato pests and issues. Every disease and critter seems to want to go after tomatoes. So in a way, they’re the vegetable or strictly fruit version of the rose, where they’re frequent disease and insect maggots. So the diseases to keep an eye on. And I’ll start with the ones that are widespread but not so destructive and maintainable, and work up to the ones that are quite destructive.

If you grow tomatoes and look at your lower foliage, you will certainly have seen where you get spotting, and it could be brown lesions it could be small brown circles. There could be yellow zones, invariably that is one of two or both. Fungus early blight, which causes irregularly shaped lesions, or maybe little targets with rings, and septoria leaf spot, which are smaller, little brown or dark brownish black dots. Those are from fungus that exist in the soil and around us. So if you don’t mulch your plants after planting and it rains and the soil splashes up, you will get impacted on the bottoms of your leaves by septory and or early blight.

And if you water your plants from above and the foliage gets wet, often those fungi, as they blow in, will attach themselves and attack. And if you look at your plants in the middle of the summer, you’ll notice it’s the inside of the plant where the sun doesn’t reach and the air doesn’t blow through, and the back of the plants, which may be shaded from the sun, that often show the worst of the impact, because sun is a really good disinfectant. So rather than use any kind of antifungals or chemicals, I mulch well to keep the soil off the leaves.

And then starting quite early on, I examine my plants daily. And anytime I see the beginnings of those lesions, remove that foliage. What happens is the underside of the leaves is where the spores are and they will float and infect other plants and the rest of the plant upward. Now, early blight and septoria, if you can keep on top of it in this way, rarely kills a plant. You’ll just end up with plants that you will defoliate as the plants grow. But that’s fine because you’ll have additional foliage that is fresh and new above that plant to keep that plant healthy.

Now, if you notice one day that your formerly healthy plant starts turning bright yellow, maybe one branch of it will turn yellow and the leaves start wilting, you’ve got something more serious, and that’s either verticillium or more than likely Fusarium wilt. That’s a fungus that actually exists in the soil. It can be seed borne, it attacks the plants through the roots, and it essentially shuts off the water transportation system within the plant. Sometimes a plant with Fusarium will partially be okay, but that plant is not going to do its best, so you may as well remove it.

But you also need to know that the soil that that plant is in is infested with Fusarium. So the following season you have to either avoid that area or maybe use a container or a straw bale on top of that area, put a barrier so the Roots don’t get into the fusarium and infected soil. Or you could choose to cover it with plastic and solarize that soil and essentially bake the fusarium out. One other that I’ll mention is tomato spotted wilt virus. That is a disease that comes in on tiny little insects called thrips that are attracted to the yellow tomato flowers.

So if you have a garden near a field where the breeze can blow through the the weeds and these little light thrips will get blown in, it could be that a few of the thrips have tomato spotted wilt virus. If they chew on the flower of that plant, that plant may then catch the virus. How you spot it is if you look at the plant and it looks like somebody has sprayed a little bit of almost a copper spray paint to the top of the leaves and they’re starting to wilt and fold down, that’s likely got tomato spotted wilt.

If the plant is infected later on after it’s got fruit on it, the fruits will have faint halos of white and they will look very unappetizing. And often at the farmer’s market, you will see where farmers have been infected by tomato spotted wilt. And some of the tomatoes that are selling have the issue. I would go ahead and remove that plant because although it won’t immediately die, it will not thrive. It won’t spread plant to plant, but you’re just taking up the space. I won’t say a ton about late blight, except that it’s devastating. It always has its origin with infected potatoes somewhere, and the spores can blow in and it is triggered after you have a rain and it’s humid and it may be kind of cool.

Spores have come in and then your plants just start going downhill very quickly. Those plants need to be removed, and late blight can spread quickly through a garden. One of the biggest outbreaks came from infected seeds, seedlings. So with something like late blight, which is a complex disease that’s devastating, that’s something worth googling and finding some of the many excellent websites on late blight control. If you have concerns that you’ve had it in the past, the good news about it is that it only thrives on living tissue. So you have garden debris that would have frozen over the winter.

Late blight will not be on that. However, if someone is growing infected potatoes or you have weeds that are in the potato family that are near your house that are infected with late blight, it can blow in onto your garden. Okay, so for pest control, we do a Couple things. One is we keep the plants very, very healthy, and that’s by protecting our microbes and growing our plants in really, really good sandy loam soil. Number two is we monitor the garden. Every single week we are looking at the plants, plants, seeing what’s going on, learning what’s normal, so that if something is out of the normal, we can spot it and then get it taken care of.

If we see an infestation as something we will use some organic control, some pyrethium, some safer soap, we’ll hand pick. And if something gets really out of control, I will take that crop out and put in something else. So growing your garden organically is just a skill set that you learn so you can grow it chemically, organically, it’s just a different set of skills, so you can totally grow organic. And I know of organic growers that grow in every single climate. So no matter where you climb it, you can do it. I find that for the most part, from my experience, pests are visible.

And if you’re observing your tomato patch daily, you, you can see the onset of the attack of these pests to the point where you can actually hand remove them and destroy them without having to resort to different types of sprays. I don’t like to spray my tomato plants, so I will look for the tomato hornworms that are chomping on my plant, the big green worms. And they can decimate a plant quite quickly. If you find hornworms that have what look like rice grass strains attached to their body, leave them. Those have been parasitized by a parasitic wasp.

And when those little pupae hatch, they will go into the worm and eat it from the inside out for their nourishment, which will lead to more wasps to go and parasitize more hornworms. But if they’re just large green worms, just pick them off and destroy them. Put them in your bird feeder for bluebirds and other types of birds. Another type of insect that can be really destructive to tomatoes is tomato fruit worm. And anybody will know what they look like if you go and buy an ear of corn and pull down the top and find the little squirmy looking brownish worm or greenish worm at the tip.

That is the same as the tomato fruit worm. On tomatoes, what they do is they start very small little green worms and then they’ll bore into the tomatoes and eat and then get larger. So examine your plants and you can often find those tomato fruit worms on the underside of leaves. Or you can look for green tomatoes that have holes in them. If you remove, sacrifice that tomato and destroy it and you’re killing the worm. Frequently they don’t come in very great numbers. Other pests for tomatoes. Early on in the season, aphids can get quite a foothold.

And if you look at the tops of your plants and you see the leaves starting to curl down, it’s usually indicative of a sucking insect. In the underside of leaves you can find an assortment of colors of these small flesh bodied aphids. You can take a strong spray of water and just wash them off and then wash the leaves off and get rid of them that way. Or if you’ve got a very heavy infestation, just sacrifice that part of the plant and clip it off the plane. The plant will grow and fill in. But I’ve not found a need to do anything about aphids.

Infestations can get very heavy if the weather is such that the aphids come out and start attacking your plants prior to the ladybugs emerging. Because ladybugs take care of aphids quite nicely. Other pests that you may be bothered by, whitefly. If you brush your plants and a cloud of little white insects fly up, those can be quite difficult. Washing them off with water regularly will help, but often they’ll pick a part of the plant and they’ll attack it and I’ll just clip that part off and carefully remove it so the flies don’t get away and then just destroy that, drown them, and then stink bugs, which are small octagonal or triangular shaped brown beetles and they will go and land on the tomatoes and put their little pointy nose in and suck some of the juice out.

And the tomatoes will have little white spots on it. So remove them and destroy them, but don’t squish them with your fingers because they call them stink bugs for a reason. So just drown them or otherwise destroy or remove them. Here in the Rocky Mountains, with our really dry climate in a very short season and a lot of frost in the wintertime, we see very little diseases in our garden, which is is really nice for us. I think the way to control the diseases is again, number one, have really good soil. So your plants can be very healthy.

You want to have the microbial base that is actually in the soil with the roots and it’s also up on the plants. Don’t spray any chemicals. And then you want your plants to go to bed dry at night. You want them dry so you’re not getting molds and funguses that are growing on the. Every year I try to get that really big. I’d love to grow a 4 pound or 5 pound tomato, but I just can’t do it. We’ve gotten about three pound tomatoes, but that’s our most frustrating thing with growing tomatoes is, you know, reading about people growing 4 and 5 and 6 pound 7 pound tomatoes and not being able to do it here in our conditions.

It seems like every time we get a big tomato going, something eats into it or we get too much rain or something happens. But that’s the thing I’d like to do maybe that I haven’t been able to do is grow a really big tomato here at our location. My friend in Australia had created this cross that she called Dottie and she sent me the seeds. But she said that I’m not sure if any of these seeds are going to germinate. The cross didn’t go all that well. And the tomato rind blossom end rot. I received these really shriveled looking, sad looking seeds and I planted them and they got one to germinate.

So I put this out in a container and had a nice healthy plant about 2ft tall and then we went on vacation. This is before I was using a water scarecrow to keep the deer out of the garden. And just as a little aside, what that is. And you can google the term water scarecrow on sites like Amazon, you can find examples. It’s a motion detection sprinkler that works whenever you turn on meaning day and night and it will scare away and keep the deer out of the garden. It’s the only thing that I’ve found that has actually worked very well.

But anyway, tried this plant Dottie growing. We went to the beach. I came back and found the garden was in great shape except that the deer ate down to the soil line my Dottie. So we never did get to growing. That’s probably, I mean each year there are different frustrations with gardening. You’ll have more blossom and drought that you want on it or more cracking or disease will take this or that. But to lose the only seedling I had of that plant was a little bit devastating. And only gardeners know how much a gardening disaster can actually impact your life temporarily.

So my most frustrating tomato story happened to us old my gosh, many, many years ago, probably 15, 20 years ago, we were growing tomatoes in one of our production houses through the wintertime. And the only way to do that is to run the propane heaters. It was very, very expensive. We didn’t get very many tomatoes. And one night the heater went out. And every plant There was over 200 plants that were about 5ft tall. They froze completely stiff. When I went in there in the morning, everything was dark green, and all the water droplets on the ends of the leaves were all frozen.

They were little balls of ice. And I cried and I cried and I cried. I was so frustrated to lose all my tomato plants and my income stream and everything. But it was probably the best thing that ever happened to us because we took the tomatoes out, I put in a crop of greens, lettuce, and spinach and kale. And we actually didn’t need the heater, so we didn’t have that huge expense. And we were able to sell all the greens, make more money than we would with the tomatoes. And that changed the course of how we grow our entire operation from that day forward.

As far as any secrets with growing tomatoes, I think our biggest thing is trying to keep the water away from them and, you know, just making sure you have a good, rich soil, making sure they get plenty of sunlight, and making sure, you know, that you take care of them regularly. Check for just all your basic gardening. Tomatoes, for us, are just a basic, average garden crop. So it’s one of the things you just got to make sure that the tomato hornworms aren’t completely eating your crop. Just daily care, making sure that they’re fed, making sure that they’re healthy, and making sure that they’re dry enough.

That’s really all we do. And if they’re warm and dry and have enough moisture but not too much, they tend to grow like crazy. The secret to growing great tomatoes is, number one, the soil that you grow in. 99% of us don’t have the right soil, and our plants suffer because of that. So I like to grow in sandy loam, which is the soil that we manufacture here. And to that, I add the organic compost and the fruit and flower fertilizer. The other secret to that is to feed your plant every four weeks. Don’t make them go months and months and months without food.

And the last secret is to grow completely organically, because what’s happening is you have this beautiful microbial base here that is providing food for your plants and helping your plant to live. And when you start adding chemicals to your garden, you destroy that entire ecosystem. And then your tomatoes start having problems. So you want good soil, you want organic feed, you want to feed them often, and you want to protect your microbes. What is the number one thing standing between a gardener and perfect tomatoes? Probably the biggest thing is finding Tomatoes that fit your climate. Here in our climate, it’s finding tomatoes that do well even in the rain.

Unless you can modify your climate with a greenhouse or some other modification. If you can’t change your climate and can’t move, the best thing is look for tomatoes that thrive in heat and humidity. Look for varieties from like Southeast Asia or tropical parts of Central America, or tomatoes that came from, you know, the south, somewhere in the south in the US or smaller tomatoes. Almost all the smaller tomatoes thrive here. And also wild tomatoes, like some of the current tomatoes, which are semi wild, will do very well in the conditions we have here. Now, if you’re in the north, you’re looking for an early tomato.

So I think the number one thing is selecting the right tomato or tomatoes for your climate and making sure you have several backups. Because sometimes that big beefsteak just doesn’t turn out. But you know, the plum tomatoes do amazing. So having a couple backups and making sure that you’re getting varieties, if you can’t do a lot, at least have a few that you can know are going to be reliable for your area. The set of factors or the set of instances that usually stand in the way of the perfect tomato garden for gardeners are several things.

One of which is having sufficient time during the growing season to tend your crop. Meaning observe, care for, react to issues. So a non ideal situation would be you plant those tomatoes, then you have lots of vacation planned or trips, and you only look at them once every week or two weeks. That’s when your tomatoes can get covered by weeds or decimated by pests, or eaten by critters, or just wither and die from drought. So a successful tomato garden is one that is tended daily, it’s enjoyable, it’s fascinating, and it repays dividends. Other factors that can really get in the way of the perfect tomato garden are weather issues, any particular season, an excess in heat, an excess humidity, insufficient direct sun for the variety that you choose.

And what I mean by that is really large tomatoes will benefit greatly from having six to eight hours more of sun per day. If you’ve only got two to three hours of direct sun, you will have your greatest success with cherry and small sized tomatoes. Okay, so I think the number one thing that stands between a gardener having a perfect crop of tomatoes is their soil. I really believe in the soil. When a tomato is grown in poor soil, all kinds of things are happening. You’re not, you don’t have the microbes feeding it. The roots might be drowning or they might Be too dry.

So I think starting with your soil is the key piece. For a tomato to have its full flavor, full, full nutrients and vitamins. You want to pick it when it’s vine ripened. So you want to wait until that tomato has really ripened on the vine. So leave it, leave it, leave it, pick it the day you want to eat it. Color can be a really confusing attribute because I remember back in the, in the mid-1980s when I first joined the Seed Savers Exchange. Prior to that, all of my tomatoes were red tomatoes. We’re talking Better Boy and Whopper and Roma, that scarlety, orangey red color.

But all of a sudden, now I’ve got persimmon and Brandywine and Ruby Gold and tomatoes that stay green where they’re ripe. So there’s a bit of an education period as you’re finding out when those fruits are soft enough to pick, or just reading the catalog description or finding out from your friend who shared the seeds. What does that tomato look like when it’s ripe? I would then this is something that I’ve done more recently, not let that tomato get vine ripe on the plant. That can invite cracking, because what happens when tomatoes are ripened? They’re fully sized, but if you get heavy rain or you have to water a lot, the flesh of that tomato will absorb the water and expand, but the skin’s not expanding anymore.

So you can get the pop or the crack to form. The other issue is that when a tomato is sitting on the plant fully ripe, it smells really good. So critters, birds, squirrels, rabbits, deer will be drawn to it. Now, I found that if you pick a tomato at about a half to three quarters ripe, just bring it into the house and put it in your kitchen counter. Within a few days, it will fully ripen and it will taste completely equivalent to if you let that tomato sit on the vine. Well, let’s say you did it and, and I know you will do it.

Let’s say you grew tons of tomatoes this year. Best tomato year ever. What are you going to do with all those extra tomatoes? Well, obviously you can use them to win friends and influence people. It’s always nice to give away some homegrown produce. Nothing says I love you like the gift of a tomato. However, you might want to put some aside, some of this distilled summer sunshine for the future. If you have an excess of tomatoes, you can always cut them up and put them in a roasting pan and just slow roast them in the oven to get the best tasting sauce you’ve ever had.

We also love to slow dehydrate them. So take tomato chunks and remove some of the seeds and just drizzle them with a little olive oil, do some salt and pepper, and put them in a maybe 250, 300 oven for a few hours until they get a little bit leathery and lose most of their juices. But then they can be frozen and used in recipes. And what you’re doing anytime you roast or slow roast or slow dry, is you’re concentrating the flavors. We also love to can our tomatoes. And this is an interesting little anecdote is some decades ago, the USDA took tomatoes, hundreds of tomatoes of different colors and tested the acidity and found that the ph range tomatoes is extremely narrow.

So when we can our tomatoes, we’re not worried about the variety or the color because the acidity is essentially the same. So we just use the recommended ball method and hot water bath. We no longer peel our tomatoes. I actually combine the act of tomato canning with seed saving. So almost all of my tomatoes have writing on the shoulders with a sharpie to indicate what tomatoes it is. And I go through with my cups and save seeds and put them in a bowl. Once you get a bowl full of tomatoes, you can either can them or you can roast them, or you can make a big batch of pico de gallo salsa and enjoy them that way.

We do preserve a lot of tomatoes here because our winters are so long. So I like to dehydrate my tomatoes. I like to roast them in the oven until they become really soft and a lot of the water’s evaporated. Then I run that through the food processor and make tomato sauce. That’s an amazing way to save tomatoes. And then if I’m in a hurry, I will just cut out any bad spots, cut out the top, cut that tomato in half, throw it in a Ziploc bag, and throw it right into the freezer. Then when it comes out in the wintertime, you can drop those tomatoes into soups and you can also go ahead and make your sauce in the wintertime if you want.

Fresh eating is, of course, always the best. And one of the things for people who grow tomatoes of lots of different colors is to understand that the color of tomato, the color of the tomato, is a combination of the skin color that’s overlaying the flesh color. And oft times, you can take tomatoes of distinctly different colors unsliced. And once you slice them, you find out that the centers of the tomatoes, tomatoes are the same color. So, for example, A red and a pink. The only difference in those two tomatoes is the skin color. So if you have a red Brandywine, which is a scarlet tomato, and a Brandywine, which is a pink tomato, they look very different from the outside.

But if you slice them and put them on a plate, they’ll look identical. Same with Cherokee Purple and Cherokee Chocolate. Cherokee Purple has clear skin, Cherokee Chocolate yellow skin. The insides are the same. So to be most creative as a cook and to show people the greatest diversity of tomato colors, make sure that you use uncooked recipes that leave significant sized chunks of those tomatoes with skin visible, and then you’ll get the greatest diversity of color. Great tomatoes need the least amount of treatment to be able to enjoy all of the different nuances and a few interesting tidbits here.

I found through all of my tomato growing and tasting that there is really no correlation between color and flavor. Each tomato has its own personality. And I can find you in the red tomato category. The pinks, the purples, the browns, there are sweet and sour, tart and mild, intense and fruity examples with every color. It’s just a case of trying them on it. You know, some people, when they’re making their sauce, they like to drop the tomatoes in hot water and take the skins off. But there’s a lot of nutrition in the skin. So the way we do it is we just cut the end out and then slice up the tomatoes into small cubes and cook them down for a long time.

That way you get to keep the nutrition in the tomato. All right, after all that chopping, here’s what we’ve got. We’ve got my big, super big pot. I’ve got a little less than 20 pounds of tomatoes, about two and a half pounds of onions, and about two pounds of bell peppers. And I’m going to put in a few pinches of organic food grade kelp meal just to add a little bit of mineral nutrients and content there. Here we go. Now, I’m not putting intentionally, not putting any seasonings or spices, especially salt or garlic, in anything. I like to have my tomato sauces be very, very plain.

So that way, later on, when I take the jars out and use them, I can add the spices and I can mix it up that way. I can have Italian or Mexican or, you know, Asian, just based on how I spice them at the very end. So what I’m going to do is put this on the stove and we’re going to let this simmer for a long, long time. So I don’t have a dishwasher so we take our brand new jars and we put them in the sink and I’m going to scrub them, clean them really thoroughly with hot water and soap.

And this is really great. Normally when I do a canning, I have a big project and I get together with neighbors and I go to a neighbor’s house and where they have one of those electric dishwashers because then you can wash them and keep the jars in there and they’re real hot and steaming when you get them out. That’s the ideal situation. But I had children so I wouldn’t have to get a dishwasher. See what happened last time I washed dishes. All right, well, it looks like our sauce is pretty much done here. It’s been simmering for about five or six hours.

That’s actually pretty short. Most Italians do this for 12 or 24 hours. But it’s starting to really become that delicious thick sauce that you hope to have. And we’re going to pack it in the jars. So I’m ladling our delicious sauce into the cups here. And I will have to say that having this funnel is super handy dandy. And we want to make sure that we don’t fill it up too much. You want to leave like that’s too much. I’m going to take some out. You want to leave a good, what we call, call a mount ahead there where you gotta.

Where the tomato sauce is really just at the shoulder of the jar. That looks good. Then we wipe off the top because we want to, especially that top rim because we need it cleaned where we’ll get a good seal to go get a top using our handy dandy magnet tool. Put a ring on there, hand tighten and do it again. All right. Well, I’ve set up the big pot of water in my grill outside. You can do it on your stove top in the house. I’m just wanting it out here. I’ve got a big pot of water here.

It’s got about 4 or 5 inches in the bottom and. And I’ve got this wire rack that is going to keep the jars off of the bottom of the pot. And all we simply do is put the jars in. And I’m going to be able to get about nine of them in here. Then I simply lower them down into the water and I’ve got it here where the water is just cut, covering the tops of my jars. I just go ahead and got the fire going. We’re going to let these stay in here for 45 minutes from the point in time which we see the water start to boil.

Can you believe it? This is a reticulated swamp tomato that the crabs buried right at the entrance. I have been looking, looking for this for so long, and I want to know how to save the seeds. How would I go about that? Tomato seeds are very easy to save. Some people just pull the seed out and put it on a paper towel and let it dry, which works. But the easiest method we’ve found is smash the fruit up whole. Unless you want to extract the seeds, you know, a little bit at a time. But we just crush the fruit whole, the overripe fruit, or at least solidly ripe fruit, and crush them up whole.

Let the pulp ferment in a bucket or barrel for a few days, depending on how many you have. You need to have at least enough to, you know, make enough in the container so it doesn’t start to dry, but, you know, at least a few cups. Better yet, a few gallons. And let the fermented tomato pulp sit there for about two to four days. You got to kind of watch. If they start sprouting, you’ve went too long. So depending on the heat and the humidity and temperatures, it can vary on how quick they’ll start sprouting, but in general, about three days, sometimes two days.

The pulp will be all fermented off. The seeds will be on the bottom. You pour everything off. The seeds sink, pour carefully, and the seeds should be 90% on the bottom and the pulp should be 98% gone, your first try, and then fill it with water a few times. Let the seeds sink and just keep pouring off until it comes out clear. And then put them on a screen or a newspaper and let them dry for about one to two weeks, depending on your humidity, and then store them in a cool, dry place. The cooler and drier in general, the better.

But most household conditions will store tomato seeds for many years. So the easiest method of seed saving is just to cut the tomato and spread those seeds. Newspaper or paper towel or Kleenex, and let them air dry. Now, what will happen is that they’ll be tough to scrape off and you’ll get bits of the paper adhering, but they’ll be fine. And tomato seeds that are stored even, I don’t know if you can see behind me, but I’ve got envelopes of seed. I’m in my office 10, 12, 15 years. They’ll germinate quite well. If you freeze them, you can even get 20, 30 years or more.

So tomato seeds last a long time. What I like to do is actually Ferment them, you’ll know that tomato seeds are slippery. They’re surrounded by gel. Painted on each seed is a germination inhibitor that’s protected by the gel. That’s why when you cut open a tomato, you don’t see a tomato full of little tomato seedlings, because that germination inhibitor is preventing them from germinating. If you take a tomato and squeeze it and all of the pulp and seeds go into a cup, and then you put it in a warm place. I like to use my front porch in the summertime, covering it with paper towel, because as it starts fermenting, it will not smell good, but the flies will love it.

Two or three days later, you’ll find there is a white fungus layer that’s formed. That means a fermentation process has taken place. The gel is no longer on the seed. So if you leave them out there for more than a few more days, you’ll start those seeds draining, germinating. So I bring them in the house and fill the cups with water, and I stir them up. That dislodges and breaks up the white fungal layer, and there’s goop in there that will float around. I let the seeds settle, and then I decant off all of that unwanted plant material, fill with water again, and stir.

And if you do that a few more times, you’ll end up with clear liquid in your seeds on the bottom. Put them through a sieve, spread them on a paper plate. Within a week or two, sitting at my dining room table, I’ve got nice, clean tomato seeds that will last me for 12 to 14 to 15 years. There is a quicker method that people can read about in my book, using things like trisodium phosphate that you can do your seed saving very, very quickly. So again, lots of different ways to save seed. But what’s really gratifying about seed saving is now you have material you can pass on to other gardeners or, or to use for future garden.

Okay. In order to save tomato seeds, I will grow a non hybrid plant, an heirloom or a open pollinated plant. I will let that tomato ripen on the vine. I will grow that plant in isolation away from other tomato plants. When that tomato is ripe, I will pick it, cut it open, peel the seeds out, and put them in a dish, shallow dish, with water in it. And I will let that sit for about three days until it grows a little bit of white scum over the top. This is the fermentation process that can kill the microbes that might be living on the tomato seeds.

Then I take the tomato seeds, I put them in a colander, and I rinse them off and rinse off all the slime. And then I lay them out on a plate to dry. And once they’re dry, then I just kind of break them apart a little bit because they stick together. And I put them in a bag, label that you want to put the name and the date on it. And then that goes in the refrigerator until I’m ready to pull those out in the spring. And if you want to do seed testing to see if your seeds are viable, you just take 10 seeds, put them between two wet paper towels, keep it wet for about seven days, and see where German is.

Thanks for joining me. Over the last hour or so, I hope that you have learned a ton about growing tomatoes, and I hope you’ve picked up some stuff you didn’t know before. And, you know, next time you screw up or you fail or you make a mistake, don’t say, I can’t do this. You know the best way to become an expert on growing tomatoes or doing just about anything else? Keep.
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