Growing tomatoes does not take a green thumb. Anyone can grow them with just a little bit of care and water. I have been growing tomatoes for years and have tried many different techniques. Some of them have worked better than others. But for today, I am going to show you how easy it is to plant tomato plants.
- Choosing your variety
There are different tomatoes for different uses. Are you looking for a sandwich and slicing tomato? Maybe you want those sweet little cherry tomatoes that produce profusely or maybe you want a tomato for making tomato sauce and salsa. Choosing your variety is an important part of growing your tomatoes. I personally grow the majority of Roma tomatoes since I like to make a ton of oven-roasted tomato sauce and no-cook garden salsa. The flavor of a Roma is rather bland so I would not suggest just growing this variety. I also have a few slicing tomato plants for salads and eating plain. In past years, I have put in a few cherry tomato plants, but they produce so fast and go bad quickly, we can never keep up with them so I no longer grow those. Usually I can find people who want to trade my tomato varieties for some cherry tomatoes.
- Seeds versus plants
When thinking about your garden, after deciding what kind of tomatoes you want, you need to decide whether or not you want to start your own plants from seeds or if you want to buy them. Local nurseries and greenhouses tend not to have a large selection of tomatoes other than the basics. If you are looking for heirloom tomatoes or odd varieties, you are better off starting your plants from seeds yourself.
- Choosing your planting site
Planting tomatoes can be as simple as using a large bucket filled with soil or as complex as planting them in a garden bed with the rest of your vegetable plants. Wherever you decide to plant your tomatoes, make sure that there is plenty of sunshine every day. 
When I first moved into our home, I decided that the best place to “hide” my garden was behind my barn. My garden is the smaller one, directly behind the barn with my neighbor’s raised bed garden right next to mine. The problem with my location is that there are woods directly behind my garden, so from around 3pm my garden is in the shade and in the morning it has the shade of the barn. Let me assure you that that is NOT enough sunshine to produce great tomatoes! So about four years ago, I got the crazy idea to put in two long gardens right beside the south side of our house. It gets a LOT of sunshine and it is close to the house. Little did I know that when I started to have my husband dig up the two narrow beds, they were the exact location of some sort of stone foundation from ages ago. My husband and neighbor worked two days pulling out thousands of pounds of rocks. But when they finished I had two beautiful garden beds in a full sun location. When I compared my tomatoes from the back garden to my full sun plots next to the house, I was shocked at how well the plants grew and how profusely they produced.
- Preparing the soil
Tomatoes are heavy feeders and they like lots of organic matter and compost. Every year, I turn into the garden a lot of compost from my compost pile a few weeks before planting. My tomatoes seem to love it and it helps eliminate me having to constantly fertilize the plants during the summer. If you are going to plant your tomatoes in buckets, use a good quality potting mix from your local hardware store. If you dig soil out of your garden to use in your buckets, the dirt will pack down too much and the plants won’t thrive.
- Planting your tomato plants
When you plant your tomatoes, you don’t just dig a hole and drop the plants in. First look at your plants. Are they leggy and look like they should have been planted weeks ago? Or are these super tiny baby plants that are near invisible? I have planted both kinds of plants since some times when you start your own plants from seeds, you can’t always control how well the plant is going to grow. If I had to choose one over an other, I would rather have the leggy plant than the super tiny plant. After deciding what size and kind of plant that you have you need to lay them out on the ground to get an idea for proper spacing. I usually do around a foot between each of my plants since I stake my tomatoes and they tend to grow taller rather than fat. The more room you have between your plants, the better ventilation you will have and less chance of picking up some sort of tomato wilt on your plants. Once all of the plants are laid out on the ground, dig a trench long enough to lay the plant and most of the stem sideways in the trench. Tomatoes will develop a root structure all along the entire stem making the plants stronger and produce more tomatoes. You’ll need to be careful not to break the stem when you lay the plant down and firm the soil around it while having the stem bend up through the soil. If your plants are very small, you will want to take some 1-2″ strips of newspaper and loosely wrap it around the stem of the tomato plant before planting it. Cutworms in the soil can be devastating to new plants and they come out at nighttime. Before you know it, you can loose your entire tomato plant crop due to cut worms. Don’t worry about the paper strangling the tomato plants, once the paper gets wet enough times, it just easily tears and disintegrates into the soil.
- Staking
Once you have planted your tomato plant, you need to put some sort of support next to it for it to grow on. I have used large 6-7 foot sticks from the woods behind us and trained the plant up that, but I have also used just your standard tomato cage. Both seem to work fine until towards the end of the season when my plants get so big and heavy that they just fall over. I’m still working on perfecting my process of staking plants. I will say that if you go out and purchase tomato cages, make sure that you get the larger ones instead of the smaller ones. You can also ask friends and neighbors if they have any old tomato cages laying around that they would like to get rid of. Frequently you can get all that you need without ever having to buy them from your local hardware store. It doesn’t matter if they are shiny or rusty, they just need to offer support to your tomato plants. What kind of tomato staking you choose will largely depend on whether you have determinate or indeterminate plants. Determinate plants will only grow to a certain height and produce only so much fruit. Indeterminate plants will continue to grow and grow and grow until frost kills them off. Most of my plants are indeterminate vines and can grow well over 12 feet.
- Watering
After you have planted your tomato plants, you will more than likely need to water them at some time during the summer. I have found that placing in the ground, up-side-down milk jugs with the bottoms cut open, works very well. Tomatoes are very susceptible to viruses and wilt and having leaves that are wet from watering only tends to spread the problems faster. So by only putting water in the milk jugs and not on the leaves, it helps to reduce your tomato wilt and viruses.
You may think that tomatoes are difficult to grow after reading this blog post. However, tomatoes are really very easy to grow. What I have written are things that I have learned over many years of gardening and pure trial and error. There will be years when the conditions aren’t that good and you won’t have that good of a crop of tomatoes. Don’t give up!!! Every year is different and that is what makes gardening fun!!!
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