It’s never been easier to grow your own tomatoes
Even a single tomato plant in a pot on the patio can be worthwhile to a non-gardener. Determinate tomatoes are bush tomatoes that produce all their fruit at once so are a good choice if you have a short summer or want them for bottling. Indeterminate tomatoes produce fruit over a long period and need staking for support.
I always buy a grafted early tomato plant to get some fresh fruit as soon as possible and then grow a range of indeterminate heritage tomato seedlings for eating, a red and a yellow cherry tomato (just one plant of each is enough) and a bed full of saucing determinate tomatoes to freeze. There are literally hundreds of varieties to choose from.
Tomatoes are heat lovers. Choose your hottest spot and wait for the soil to warm up before planting out.
You can wait to plant until as late as mid-November further south, though I find after Labour Weekend warm enough in the Waikato.
Weekly thin layers of grass clippings around the plants will warm the soil as it decomposes and provide a moist mulch, and a cloche of an old plastic bottle will make a mini hothouse for new seedlings.
To produce well, a tomato plant needs lots of food. Place good compost in the garden bed and ensure you have ample supplies of calcium and magnesium in the soil.
You can achieve this by adding lime, gypsum, dolomite or even a teaspoon of milk powder and Epsom salts to the hole before planting.
Place plants quite deep or on an angle as the stem will grow more roots.
Give regular waterings of compost tea while growing, one high in potassium. Add a light sprinkle of wood ash if you have it once the fruit start forming.
As they grow, the leaves are prone to fungus, powdery mildew and blight, all of which are more likely when conditions are humid and moist. Prevent this by watering the roots, but not the leaves.
Varieties for short summers
If your climate thwarts your tomato crop – if it’s too cold in spring or summers are short – seek out varieties with ‘‘early’’ in their name. Try ‘Baxter’s Early Bush’, ‘Early Doll’ (both Kings
Seeds), ‘Early Girl’ or improved ‘New Girl’ (Egmont Seeds).
Choice cherries
For a fail-safe cherry tomato, you can’t go past ‘Sweet 100’. It’s a great variety for beginners. Lynda Hallinan scored it 8/10 in her 2017 tomato trial for NZ Gardener, and also gave the same score to ‘Gardener’s Delight’ (Kings Seeds). Want to mix up your cherry tomato colours? Go for golden ‘Sungold’ or dramatic ‘Black Cherry’.
Medium-size munchers
‘Juliet’ (look on Trade Me) scored 8/10 in Lynda’s tomato trial. She says, ‘‘This F1 hybrid took 20 weeks until harvest, but once she started fruiting, there was no stopping her, with a very long fruiting period of 21 weeks.’’ ‘Early Money’ also received 8/10 and had the heaviest yield.
Tomatoes for pots
Choose varieties bred for this purpose. Aim for non-permeable pots at least as big as a 10-litre plastic bucket (for a single plant) or cut holes in a 40-litre bag of potting mix and slip seedlings straight into it.
Tomatoes in hanging baskets need a good soak twice a day. Never water the foliage. Use a potting mix that includes a wetting agent. Take your pick from ‘Tumbling Tom Red’ or its cousin ‘Tumbling Tom Yellow’; ‘Tiny Tim’; ‘Balcony’ (Egmont Seeds), ‘Container Choice Red F1’ (Kings Seeds) or ‘Patio F1’ (Egmont Seeds).
Large & gutsy
Go for ‘Big Beef’, ‘Country Taste’ (Egmont Seeds) and dark Russian heirloom ‘Black Krim’.
Heirlooms
Heirlooms are open-pollinated varieties (the birds and bees have done the pollination work, not hybridisation). Favourite heirlooms, as voted by NZ Gardener, are ‘Brandywine Red’, ‘Purple Calabash’, ‘Bloody Butcher’ and ‘German Red Strawberry’.
Go for gold
As well as the prolific ‘Sungold’, try heritage variety ‘Sunshine Cherry’.
Striped & strange
Plant stripy tomatoes like ‘Tigerella’, and tasty ‘Eclipse Fireball’ for interest. Or try a true oddity such as ‘Tom-Pom’ (Kings Seeds) which is like an atom cluster of atoms.