Fruit vegetables
Tomato
Solanum lycopersicum
Timings for your region
Suggested: Moderate · Explained in the glossary
Start indoorsearly March – early April
Plantingmid May – early June
Harvestmid July – early October
Practical tip
Never water over the leaves, and give them a roof if you can — blight almost always arrives with splashing water.
Origin & history
The tomato comes from the Andes and reached Europe in the 16th century, where it was first grown as an ornamental — as a nightshade it was suspected of being poisonous. It only became a vegetable in Germany in the 19th century. The foliage genuinely is mildly toxic; the ripe fruit is not.
Varieties
Cordon tomatoes grow upward on a single stem and need a cane; bush types stay low and manage without. For an unroofed outdoor spot it is worth looking for explicitly robust varieties; cocktail and cherry types ripen faster and split less than large beefsteaks. Open-pollinated varieties can be saved and re-sown true to type, F1 hybrids cannot.
Care
Cordon types get side-shooted: pinch out the shoots in the leaf axils weekly while they are small. Water evenly and generously, always at the base — swinging between dry and wet splits the fruit. From mid-August cut out the growing tip so the plant ripens the fruit it has instead of setting more.
What can go wrong
Blight is the main problem: brown patches on leaves and rotting fruit after wet weeks. It almost always arrives with soil splashing up, so a roof helps more than anything else, along with generous spacing, watering at the base and removing the lowest leaves. Blossom end rot — a sunken black patch underneath the fruit — is not an infection but the result of uneven watering.
Harvest, storage & kitchen
Best picked fully ripe and then kept out of the fridge — below about 12 °C a tomato loses its aroma irreversibly. Fruit still green will ripen indoors next to an apple. The simplest way to deal with a glut is to cook it down into sauce and preserve it.
All timings are guide values for the given climate, not a guarantee. Weather, aspect and variety all have a say.