Three Tips for Successfully Growing Tomatoes in Your Own Garden

These hints can help you maximize your harvest

“It’s difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.”— Lewis Grizzard

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This article contains references and affiliate links to products. The author may receive compensation when you click on links to these products at no cost to you.

Google “growing tomatoes,” and you’ll get 110 million results. You can’t go through all of them, so here are three of the tips I gleaned online that worked for me.

1. Drip water below ground level

(Source: birdsandblooms.comm)

Start saving those plastic milk jugs! The principle is simple. Wet leaves promote the growth of fungal diseases in tomatoes, so you should water them at the root. This method also lessens water loss from evaporation and makes applying liquid fertilizer easy.

There are several variations on this technique, but the one I use is to punch a small hole in the bottom corner of a clean, half-gallon milk jug. I then dig a hole next to the plant, big enough and deep enough to bury the jug halfway…