Tomatoes need plenty of sunshine and a good rule of thumb for ensuring they get enough, is to find a spot in your garden that sees a minimum of 6 hours of sunshine a day. Some will argue that tomatoes need as much as 10 hours of sunshine a day and if you have a spot that can deliver that amount of sunshine then it certainly wouldn’t do any harm; assuming of course you don’t allow the plants to dry out.

The reason for this level of sunshine is of course the ripening process, without the required amount of sunshine it will prove quite difficult to get your tomato fruit to a fully ripened condition.

Other considerations to take into account when selecting a location include the need for watering, somewhere that is relatively sheltered and ultimately the type of tomatoes you want to grow given the space you have available.

So watering first, this is a practical consideration of how often and how much you need to water the plants. It is just common sense to have your tomatoes near a source of water, whether that is a garden tap or a kitchen sink. You will find that life is much easier for you if you can locate the plants closer to your water source and you will also be more likely to provide an adequate amount of water the easier it is. This is no reflection on the individual, many people have a busy lifestyle and find it difficult to assign enough time to tomato care. But watering is another essential aspect of tomato growing and the plants in full sunshine will need plenty of water to ensure they do not dry out.

You can of course opt for automatic watering systems to help manage your watering program if you simply do not have the time to do it manually or have to spend some days away from your garden.

Shelter is another aspect worth thinking about, tomato plants are not known for their robustness and the vine varieties need to be tied to stakes with a soft garden string to avoid bruising of the plants. Even this will not help however if the plants are being buffeted by wind or are exposed too much to the changing elements of extremes of  weather. Placing your plants close to a wall, fence or garden hedge will help provide some shelter.  If the need exists you may want to consider growing  tomatoes in a greenhouse. Certainly in places that have a UK type climate, this could actually prove to be essential.

The final aspect of selecting a suitable location is with regard to available space. So actually it is the other way around, it is not so much choosing the right location as selecting the right kind of tomato variety to suit the space you have available. If you are limited to a patio or a very small garden you may be better placed selecting one of the many dwarf varieties. They still produce lots of lovely tomato fruit but can flourish in small spaces. Or if you fancy going a little more radical you could adopt the topsy turvy tomato planting method; this is where you hang a plant upside down from a stand or rafter. Vine tomatoes are more suited to this approach as they hang down vertically and with a little bit of clever tomato pruning can be constrained into very small spaces.

At the end of the day whatever tomato variety you choose to grow and whatever method you select, to be successful you will need to ensure sufficient sunshine and water. It is worth considering exactly where the best place in your garden is for tomatoes, because the rewards really are worth the effort of getting it right.

It seems as though sometimes when working in the garden that there are a lot of tasks that we do that one might sometimes consider as being unnecessary. After all if a plant was growing wild as nature intended they would not get lavish care and attention would they?

Clearly the answer to that question is ‘no of course not’, so why then do we do it. Its a pretty straight forward answer or set of answers really and probably best put in bullet statements:

• We want to increase and optimise the amount of yield we get from our plants
• we want to increase and optimise the best tasting fruit in terms of flavour
• We want our fruit to look great when served
• We want our plants to last as long as possible in the growing season and continue to produce fruit.

So in order to meet these objectives we take actions that would not necessarily occur in nature, after all what is nature’s prime objective, I think it is survival of the fittest and strongest but that does not always meet our objectives and it is why we develop plant strains that do, so the price we pay occasionally is to increase the level of care required to ensure we meet our objectives.

This has never been truer than when growing tomatoes, so when asked the question is it really necessary to prune tomato plants the answer has to be a resounding yes, as long as we are clear that we are discussing the tomato vine option and not the tomato bush option. The reasons are also fairly clear when listed:

• Keeping the vine clear of the ground by clipping off the lower stems will help ensure that they remain disease free.
• Taking out the excess stems that are not doing so well will mean that the remaining healthy stems get their full quota of nutrients and produce lots of wonderful fruit
• Keeping the plant down in size with only healthy thriving stems will mean you can utilise available space for more plants but still allow the plants to receive the optimum amounts of sunshine and nutrients they need to flourish.

So yes there is a price to pay for producing great tomatoes, but that price is very small in comparison to the rewards. If you haven’t already experienced the satisfaction of picking your own fresh fruits from your garden then when you do you will fully understand what I mean.

Visit Home Grown Tomatoes for more tips and advice on tomato growing and to get access to expert advice that could double or triple the size of your crop of tomatoes.

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