Cultivating tomatoes: An art as individual as the gardener

Community garden illustrates many ways to keep tomatoes upright and squeeze more into small spaces

By Kathy Morrison

This gardener built sturdy raised beds. The cages are made
from concrete reinforcing mesh. (Photos: Kathy Morrison)

Pretty much everyone at my community garden grows tomatoes. Why bother with a vegetable garden in the Sacramento area if you’re not going to put in at least one tomato plant, right?

But I’ve been amazed and sometimes amused at how many different ways there are to approach a tomato garden. No matter the gardening style, the plants all seem to grow. Some folks’ gardens produce more than others, sure. Others are beset by bad luck. (Like the time a band of thug chickens invaded the community garden. Little vacuums with beaks, they are.) But most people do pretty well. We just take varied paths to that big summer harvest.

Some of the gardeners have built big raised beds for their ‘maters, while others have elaborate wooden superstructures over their plots. Some people create skinny berms, with posts and string to hold up the plants. Drip lines are used here and there. I think tomatoes don’t do as well on drip but, OK, whatever. Other gardeners just slap the plants in the ground and flood the plot when it’s time to water.

Cages are all sizes and colors -- or missing entirely. Distance between plants varies, as does the layout and number. (Easily three dozen tomato plants grow in some of the more densely planted plots.) The favored mulch is straw, which is as close as we get to a consensus.

Part of my tomato bed. Those are squash plants at lower right.

I prefer a faux raised-bed style for my garden. I loosen the soil, amend it and then bank it up in wide berms,  about 6 inches high, then dig holes in those to create watering basins. I used to put down landscape cloth, but hated pulling it up every year, and I got tired of the bits of plastic cloth showing up all over. So now I just use straw, too. (Some newspaper underneath is nice but not necessary.) This method lets me move my tomatoes around each year, freshening the soil and adjusting the orientation.

I have grown tomatoes in pots, too, though usually dwarf varieties. But I remember years ago, when Windmill Nursery was still open in Carmichael, the proprietor talking about his personal tomato garden. He pointed to the area next to his office, where there was a big stack of 2-cubic-foot bags of super-premium potting soil. That was going to fill several large pots, he said, holding his hand about 3 feet off the floor. And all his tomato plants, even the beefsteaks, would be grown in the pots.

After hearing that, I stopped worrying about the “best” way to grow tomatoes and just refined my own way. I have 18 plants in my plot this year, most of them tested favorites like Juliet, Carbon and Big Beef, but some experiments, too, from the Wild Boar varieties. I should get enough tomatoes to share with friends and the community food closet. Let’s hope the chickens stay far away.

These photos show some of the other ways tomatoes are
planted at a Sacramento-area community garden.