Tasty, Beautiful, and Healthful: Homegrown Tomatoes

For the past two months, I haven’t bought a single tomato, yet every day we have tomatoes in salads and/or other dishes. Where do these tomatoes come from? From my garden!
The homegrown tomatoes are so much tastier then the store-bought ones. Picking these sun-warmed, rich in color, and shiny tomatoes from the vines in my garden is much more fun then choosing those hard-as-stone clones in the store.
To grow their best, tomatoes need three things – heat (we have plenty of that in California), water (unfortunately, it is not as abundant here as heat, yet the sprinklers turn on three times a week), and fertile soil (unfortunately, the soil in my garden is very poor).



Being an inexperienced gardener, I made some mistakes with my tomatoes. I didn’t pinch the suckers (side branches that form in the joints where the leaves meet the stems). As the result, my tomato bushes became too big and soon outgrew the two-foot sticks that I used for support. The branches began to fall and some of them broke; it was a lot of pain tying them to each other, to the fence, to the near growing tree… Next year, my tomato bushes will definitely have nice and tall wire rings to support them.
Despite all these hardships, all of my six tomato plants (one “Beef”, two “Early Girl Hybrid”, and four “Grape”) produce wonderful fruits.