Let's Talk Tomatoes

Check out what's trending in the tasty tomato world. Enjoy a homegrown harvest right from your own yard. Tomatoes are one of the easiest & tastiest foods to grow, and, best of all homegrown tomatoes are much tastier than store bought varieties. Simply choose a few of your favorite varieties. We offer more than 40 different types including slicing, cherry, grape and old fashioned heirlooms. Here's five of our favorites...

1. Sun Gold - With explosively sweet flavor, this is one of the garden’s sweetest. Sun Gold ripens in long clusters of 10 to 15 fruits. The sweet flavor is ready about a week before full coloring. Wait to pick fruits at their deepest hue and you’ll experience a richly sweet, fruity flavor.
2. Sweet 'n' Neat Cherry Red - A McDonald favorite, this super sweet, cherry-sized tomato continuously produces all through summer. It's compact size makes it ideal in containers, on decks or in small spaces.
3. Super Sweet 100 - You'll love these cherry tomatoes bursting with sugary flavor. The scarlet, cherry-sized fruits are produced in long pendulous clusters right up to frost.
4. Better Boy - With 8 to16 oz round fruit, it has a classic tomato taste and is a great for slicing. The fruit has just the right balance of acid and sugar. This one is a climber and requires a cage for best results.
5. TomTato - The newest and coolest 'mato on the block dubbed Ketchup ‘n’ Fries™. This tomato plant is grafted onto a potato plant yielding up to 100 cherry tomatoes and 2-5 pounds of potatoes in a year. Yes, tomatoes AND potatoes in one plant! Grow it in a veggie garden or patio container. (available in stores, May 15)

After you select the tomatoes that are best for you, you'll want to purchase a tomato cage to keep them upright. For best results and to ensure a bountiful harvest, a cage will support and ensure maximum growth. The cage will give your tomatoes something to grow through and keep the fruit off the ground and help support the stalks and keep them from bending and breaking. We especially love using colorful cages in red, yellow, orange, green and even purple.

Finally, to make your tomato plants’ roots strong and your fruit plumper, we recommend using Espoma Tomato Tone Fertilizer. This organic fertilizer feeds your plants naturally and will not force rapid growth at the expense of blooms and tomato yield. We suggest applying Tomato Tone after plants are well established (10 - 14 days) and then twice a month during the growing season (May through August).

TOMATO TIP: When planting tomatoes, we suggest adding lime to the soil to fortify the calcium in the soil thus helping to eliminate a common tomato problem, Blossom End Rot.