How to grow tomatoes

Tomato is the vegetable garden's centerpiece crop for most home gardeners, grown for fruit ranging from small and sweet to large and meaty depending on habit rather than any single trait. Determinate plants grow to a set size, then flower and ripen most of their fruit within a few weeks, suiting gardeners who want one heavy harvest for canning. Indeterminate plants keep growing and setting fruit all season, climbing ten feet or more up a stake or cage before frost, so a single plant can supply a kitchen in a slow trickle from midsummer through fall.

The hardest part of growing tomatoes well is keeping water even enough to prevent blossom-end rot. Alabama Cooperative Extension System explains the disorder comes from a calcium shortage in the fruit, triggered less by how much calcium is in the soil than by swings in how much water the plant is getting, since calcium only moves through a plant actively pulling in water. A second-year gardener who lets the soil dry out during a hot stretch, then floods it to catch up, creates exactly that swing. The first fruit of the season develops a flat, sunken, leathery patch at the blossom end well before it ripens, and by the time the damage shows, the uptake that would have prevented it is already missed.