A Tomato for Every Garden

There are hundreds of tomato options for the gardener to try, including different varieties of red beefsteaks, yellow slicers, cherry tomatoes, sauce tomatoes, and heirloom tomatoes.tulinphoto/Shutterstock

Big, red, ripe, round, and juicy.

That’s the homegrown tomato paradigm, the utopian goal of almost everyone who plants a garden. John Denver popularized this idea with the Guy Clark song “Homegrown Tomatoes”:

I forget about all the sweatin’ and diggin’

Every time I go out and pick me a big one ...

You can go out to eat and that’s for sure

But there’s nothin’ a homegrown tomato won’t cure

If I’s to change this life that I lead

I’d be Johnny Tomato Seed

Cause I know what this country needs

Homegrown tomatoes in every yard you see What other vegetable has been the subject of a hit song? The tomato is the garden crop that carries the greatest aspirational heft for the American gardener. One catalog I rely on, “Territorial Seeds,” has 100 different tomatoes—page after page of red beefsteaks, yellow slicers, cherry tomatoes, sauce tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes; seeds, or plants, so you need not mess with starting your own.

There’s even a catalog devoted largely to these horticultural marvels, “Totally Tomatoes” (TotallyTomato.com), with 32 pages offering 24 categories of tomato seeds—with innumerable varieties of each. It’s a dangerous candy store for home garden chefs. You look at them and envision a summer with Guy Clark in the background: “Only two things that money can’t buy / That’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.”

“Tomatoes are robust, drought-tolerant, productive, deep-rooted plants that produce fruits with great flavor—and they come in hundreds and hundreds of varieties,” says Washington State University vegetable expert Carol Ann Miles, a horticulture professor at WSU’s Mount Vernon Research Station. “It’s no secret why they are the most popular home garden vegetable.”

The Perfect Homegrown Tomato

There is indeed hardly anything that tastes better than a fresh homegrown tomato on a warm summer eve. The good news is, even in the northern short-summer latitudes of America, it’s possible to achieve that iconic big, red slicing fruit—though sometimes with a fair amount of horticultural engineering. Start early indoors, plant sets in rich ground when it’s warm, add heat boosters such as dark mulch, and withhold water in late summer—there are many tricks, and they usually work.

I’ve done so myself, in challenging tomato territory where Pacific breezes bring cool nights and chill springs. One dare not plant until mid-May, and ripe tomatoes don’t arrive until late August. But the expansive tomato variety inventories in the seed catalogs reveal a large and colorful kaleidoscope of alternatives to the eternal Early Girl horticultural expedition. One cannot fail, for example, with Sungold, a hysterically robust yellow cherry tomato—one year, I had 8-foot plants bearing literally hundreds of fruits, so many that I cooked most down into sauce that went in the freezer.

There’s a tomato for every garden and every taste. Here are a few broad tips.

Time to Harvest

The one paramount question: How many days? To maturity, that is. Almost all seed varieties bear a number for this criterion, and, according to WSU’s Miles, it’s the most important information for home gardeners about tomatoes.

The tomato number is based on Central U.S. growing conditions, Miles explains; actual days to maturity vary from Alaska (yes, tomatoes are grown there) to Alabama. But the relative values between varieties suggest what’s good for your area—short-season gardeners do best with a low days-to-maturity figure, such as Glacier (55 days), while those in warmer climes can luxuriate in long-season types such as the famous, massive Mortgage Lifter (95 days).

Bring the Heat

Growth isn’t the issue—fruiting and ripening are. Except when exposed to deep chill, such as night-time temperatures below 45, tomato plants grow heartily. But fruits won’t set at excessively cool or hot temperatures, and ripening is highly dependent on accumulated warmth.

Water for Flavor

Drought makes ’em ripen. Withholding water in late summer does boost ripening, Miles says—though it may also mean smaller fruits. “But that also intensifies flavor,” she adds.

To ripen green tomatoes indoors, you can hang the plant upside down in the kitchen or in a heated garage, store the tomatoes wrapped in newspaper, or set the fruits on a shelf in a pantry room. JIANG HONGYAN/Shutterstock

Debunking Transplants

Beware myths—they’re, um, mythical. Most gardeners think one must set out transplants for success, but I’ve had amazing results, even in my climate, with direct seeding in early June. Transplants can help yield ripe fruits earlier, but remember that ripening depends on warmth, and plants grown from sets can pile up buckets of green fruits that won’t ripen until there’s enough accumulated warmth.

For example, last summer I had Kellogg’s Breakfast 4-week-old transplants that I set out on May 15. I also whimsically planted Kellogg’s seeds direct on June 5—theoretically, a six-week difference between the two plantings. But the transplant fruits ripened barely a week ahead of the direct-seed fruits.

How can that be? There’s just no substitute for warmth to induce ripening.

Winter Tomatoes

OK, what about all those green tomatoes? You will have green tomatoes at the end of the season. Yes, fried green tomatoes are so iconic that they made a movie about them (more tomato iconography). But garden chefs need not force themselves to this measure.

Instead, green tomatoes brought indoors will continue to ripen slowly, well into the depths of winter. Wide debate embraces how to do this: Cut the whole vine at the base and hang it upside down in the kitchen; hang the plant in a heated garage; store the tomatoes wrapped in newspaper, like apples; set the fruits on a shelf in a pantry room ... and so on. I’ve tried all these, and they all work. I lean toward hanging the entire plant in a warm, well-lit room not in direct sun. Keep checking for decay, and pitch the bad ones.

This is why my favorite tomato lately is a kind most gardeners have never heard of: storage tomatoes, such as Golden Treasure, of which this year I used my last fruits on March 1. Yes, really. I stored them to ripen on a shelf in my mud room.

Fresh homegrown tomatoes. In March.

Everybody asks: How’d you do that? It’s late winter. We live closer to the North Pole than the equator. You don’t have a greenhouse. No atrium. Is this wizardry?

The necromancy is nature’s. I’m just a happy hitchhiker.

“Try a dozen varieties,” Miles urges. “Two dozen. Try a new one each year. There’s no limit to nature’s diversity.”

And no limit to the transcendent treasure of tomatoes.