I am picking tomatoes!
Not that many yet, it’s true: and they’re all the Latah toms which are my container-grown, bush variety planted into big roomy pots in the back garden.
They are most peculiar plants: very gawky and stalky, not at all like the bush varieties I’ve grown before which are all soft mounds of dense greenery. My Latah tomatoes send out long, awkward stalks over the side of the pot, leaving the centre bare. Frankly, they’re a bit ugly. I have taken to hoicking a stem or two back up onto the pot, curling it round a bit like you would a stray squash stem, so it can at least cover up the bare compost a little and stop being quite so dangly.
However: they are, as advertised, the earliest of early tomatoes. I have been picking a tomato for my lunchtime sandwich for a couple of weeks now which makes it (almost?) worth putting up with the tricky aesthetics.
Like all bush tomatoes, you just let them do their thing, no training required. Most of them fountain prettily over the side of a container: in fact they’re more successful in pots than in the open ground, where the branches get weighed down by the fruit and your nice ripe tomatoes are quickly soil-splashed, slug-munched, mouse-nibbled or occasionally all three.
Indeterminate, or cordon tomatoes – so that’s most varieties, with a growth habit that sends out one incredibly long main stem, plus lots of side stems if you let them – do need support and training to give of their best.
Let them grow as they will and you just end up with a jungle of foliage which is a nightmare to deal with, and worse, produces small, sparse fruits. When the plant is concentrating all its energies on producing masses and masses of greenery fruit isn’t much of a priority.
So these varieties need constant training onto supports throughout the season: nip out the side shoots weekly between finger and thumb (an easy and rather satisfying job) then keep guiding the main stem upwards, and the plant will have more energy for big fat trusses of sweet, plump fruits.
There is more than one way to train a tomato, though. You can do single or double cordons, you can use string or canes for the supports, or for a real time-saver you can just give them a wraparound support without the need to tie knots. Here’s my little rundown of the pros and cons of each.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Greenery to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.