Tomatoes for your table

Tomatoes are a welcome staple of many Canadian gardens. They are especially good plants to grow with children. By learning a few simple tricks with staking and harvesting, you can have the sweet taste of home-grown tomatoes from your garden well into the fall.

The easiest way to grow tomato plants is to let the vines sprawl. They are more prolific this way, but the fruit will be smaller and slower to ripen. The plants also take up more space in the garden and, because it touches the soil, the fruit is more vulnerable to rot and insect pests such as slugs. To keep fruit off the ground, train the plants to some form of support. The most common devices are stakes and cages.

Stakes are the cheapest and require the least amount of space. Simply pound sturdy 6-foot (180-cm) wooden stakes about a foot (30 cm) deep into the ground just before transplanting your tomato seedlings. It requires some perseverance, however, to train vines to the stakes; and as they grow, you have to tie them to their stakes several times with strips of cloth or nylon mesh, and prune out suckers (new growth in the axil of the leaf and stem) to keep plants to a single stalk.