By Michelle Fabio

Maybe you’re not thinking about next year’s growing season just yet, but there’s no reason you can’t get a start on learning some new tips—and that goes for your favorite tomato gardener as well.

Here are 5 books that can help you get started, and they make great gifts for the holiday season to boot!

• Giant Tomatoes by Marvin H. Meisner

Published just a few months ago, this is reportedly the first book to deal specifically with growing, you guessed it, giant tomatoes. Don Langevin, author of How-to-Grow World Class Giant Pumpkins I, II, & III, says, “This is the most comprehensive treatment ever written on giant tomatoes.”

• How to Grow World Record Tomatoes: A Guinness Champion Reveals His All-Organic Secrets by Charles Wilber

Wilber is in the Guinness Book of World Records because he harvested 1,368 pounds of tomatoes from just four plants; if you’re interested in Read the rest of this entry »

By Michelle Fabio

How do you grow an 18-foot tomato plant?

Would you believe the answer just might be prayer?

Thrien Evans, 50, says that the oversized tomato plant outside his window begins to sway when he says his nightly prayers in its direction. He asks, of course, for “the Lord to keep it green.”

But it’s not prayer alone that has made this tomato plant so spectacular. Enter 90-year-old Ojetta Azalee Parker Smith, who shares the Georgetown, South Carolina garden space with Evans. In addition to tomatoes, the two also grow eggplant, cabbage, and collard greens.
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By Michelle Fabio

If you’re ready to pull up your tomato plants, but you don’t want to lose the tomatoes already on there, you have a few options:

(1) Pick off the green tomatoes, wrap them individually in newspaper, and line them up on the bottom of a wooden crate or basket;

(2) If you’re looking for something less labor-intensive, depending on the type of tomato, you could try just putting them on a window sill to ripen; be aware, though, that some may rot instead of ripening so watch them carefully.
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By Michelle Fabio

The first frost has come and gone and you’re guessing that your tomato plants aren’t going to do anything else this year.

It’s time to throw in the tomato towel.

You could try to let your plants live a little longer by pulling them up and hanging them right-side up in a garage or basement, clipping the ends to a clothesline for example.

You don’t need a lot of sunlight and a temperature between 60 and 72 degrees is recommended. You can continue to harvest tomatoes even after the vine is dead, so you might want to try this.
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By Amelia Tucker

It is a busy time of year on our farm.

Not only are we working on putting the gardens to rest, saving seeds and updating the gardening notes, we are buying a farm three states away!

Our current farm is a great place to experiment with different stresses and varieties of tomato plants but we are outgrowing our hopes and dreams for future greenhouses and markets.

We just signed the papers on a farm in Nebraska and it feels good!
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By Amelia Tucker

Now that you are putting your garden to rest for the winter, the question of what to do with the spent plants comes up.
Should you just add them to your compost pile and forget about them?

There is no one answer to this. Many gardeners have strong opinions on either side of this debate.

Those who compost them say that you should return the nutrients that the plant took up by returning the plant to the soil in the form of compost. They are also pretty adamant that compost is more important than any negatives those who don’t compost tomato plants may come up with.

Just what would a drawback to composting a tomato plant be?
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