Tomatoes From Farm to Fork

Welcome to my page all about tomatoes! Here you will find information taking you from the farm all the way to your fork. This will include tried and true recipes, planting, and harvesting tips for all things tomaters. (That’s southern for tomatoes!)

Quick Links to Topics on this Page:

• Favorite Tomato Recipes
• Tomatoes in the Vegetable Garden
• Planting Tomatoes
• Starting Tomato Seeds Indoors
• Maintenance for Tomato Plants
• To Prune or Not to Prune?
• Harvesting Tomatoes
• Preserving Tomatoes

Heads up, this post contains affiliate links which means if you purchase something through the links provided I earn a small commission at no extra charge to you. The best part of raising your own farm fresh tomatoes is the taste! It really doesn’t compare to the store-bought variety, and with that, we will move straight to the best part of raising a vegetable garden…the food!

Favorite Tomato Recipes

There is nothing like the fresh taste of sun-ripened tomatoes, if you haven’t experienced this get your garden on or head over to the nearest farmer’s market. A grocery store tomato seems tasteless after experience a fresh tomato.

That being said we eat them fresh all by themselves, maybe with a little salt, and add them to salads. 

The main tomato recipe we make year after year is salsa! We use this salsa on many items like eggs, added to our hamburger patties, added to chicken in a Mexican crock-pot meal, or simply as a topping. I hope you enjoy it and feel free to share your favorite tomato recipes with me!

Tomatoes in the Vegetable Garden

One of the first things people tend to grow in their backyard vegetable gardens are tomatoes, which is funny because they are botanically considered fruit. I consider tomatoes a vegetable because of how they are used in the culinary setting. Tomatoes are simple to grow and tend to flourish in a well-kept garden. I share most of our extra produce, but I don’t tend to give away many tomatoes as they are easy to store for eating all year long.

Planting Tomatoes

If this is your first garden consider reading Gardening 101 to get off to a good start. Tomato seeds can be planted straight in the ground, but we typically buy plants to transplant them into the garden.

Tomatoes grow well in the warm season and should be planted well after the threat of frost has passed. They need some type of support like a circular wire cage, or trained up a wooden stake, to keep the plant off the ground. The tomato plants in wire cages should be planted about 3 feet apart to allow for good air circulations and access to plants come picking time.

I have found that the wire cages you buy at your local garden or home improvement store don’t offer enough airflow and I am currently trying an experiment with trellising my tomato plants and training them up a string of twine.

Besides looking way cooler, I’m hoping this offers a way for the tomato plant to grow off the ground and spread to its natural height without being suffocated. I’ll update this as we see our results from the garden!

Starting Tomato Seeds Indoors

This year I started some seeds inside for the first time, so here’s hoping for some transplant success! I found a new mail-order seed provider called Vegetable Seed Warehouse that has excellent customer service, quality seeds, and speedy delivery. If you want to try to start your own seeds indoors they should be planted in a light soil mix 6-8 weeks before transplanting time and need to be hardened off a week before. This just means you expose them to an increasing number of hours outdoors each day and decrease the watering without letting them wilt.

Maintenance for Tomato Plants

Tomatoes, like most garden crops, require frequent watering. Keeping the weeds down will also promote growth and not choke the new plants out. The plant can grow naturally in a wire cage, if staked there is a bit more pruning involved in pinching off the suckers as it grows. Keep the plants watered and weeded and they will produce tomatoes many times over.

Two or three plants will produce enough for most families. Not our family, but most families 🙂 It’s important to remove any dried or damaged fruit to let the plant know to grow more. We like to throw rotten tomatoes to the chickens! They love them!

To Prune or Not to Prune?

We don’t tend to prune the suckers off our tomato plants but rather let the tomato plant grow naturally where it wants to grow. Tomato suckers are the side shoots that appear in the junction between the stem and the branch of a tomato plant.

If you leave them to grow they will become another main stem of the tomato plant that will produce branches, flowers, fruit, and even more suckers. It does tend to get a jumbled mess of tomato plants and some gardens don’t have the real estate to host such a tangle.

So some choose to prune off the suckers as the tomato plant grows for a neat and tidy tomato plant. If you remove all of the suckers, the plant will be more compact and yield fewer tomatoes throughout the season, but they may be bigger fruits. Pruning tomatoes allows more space for extra plants in the garden. So do what’s best for your needs and your garden.

Harvesting Tomatoes

Pick tomatoes when vine-ripened for the best taste. Most varieties when fully ripe will be dark red, but still firm. If you need to pick green or partially green tomatoes they can be left out on your kitchen counter to ripen.

Preserving Tomatoes

No need to reinvent the wheel, the canning process for tomatoes is well documented on this site. We mostly eat fresh tomatoes when they are ripe, and make salsa, but when you have a counter full of tomatoes canning is a great option. I have canned diced tomatoes, whole tomatoes, and also tomato sauce with great success. This is a great way to spread the great flavor of fresh tomatoes throughout the year.

Blog Posts about Hobby Farming

Check out the blog for more information about what’s new at Barton Craft & Barn including the following post about our hobby farming experiences.

Just Getting Started Gardening?

I put together a list of my top garden tools to help the newbie get the needed gardening essentials. If you are getting started gardening, or want to be more prepared this season, check out the printable in my free resource library for my favorite garden tools to get your gardening on. Hope you enjoy!