Dave Truman our expert of the day, writes:

For many people, growing big juicy tomatoes is part of what makes vegetable gardening so enjoyable. Whether purchasing plants from your local nursery or starting tomatoes from seed, there are a few basic steps to follow to ensure that you harvest an abundant crop at the end of the growing season. There are many different varieties of tomatoes to choose from, depending on whether you will be cooking, canning, slicing, or eating miniature or grape-like varieties right off the vine. Sweet 100ís are very abundant, and are good for salads as well as eating fresh from the garden. Roma tomatoes are good for making salsa, because the peels are not as tough as others so you donít need to peel the skins off. Romas are also known as the classic paste and sauce tomato. There are Early Girls, Early Boys, Big Boys, Big Mamas, Sweet Baby Girls, Beefsteaks, French Rose hybrids, Big Rainbow, specialty tomatoes and many more. So start by choosing the kind of tomato you would like to grow.

Planting Tomatoes from Seeds

Hal Lewis our expert of the day, writes:

Heirloom tomatoes are a variety of tomatoes grown from seeds that are usually over 50 to 100 years old. They are non-hybrid, open-pollinated cultivar tomatoes.

The use of the word heirloom can mean that the seeds have been passed down through generations, from farmer to farmer or parent to child and they are still growing today. Or it could mean any seed older than 50 or 100 years old; the jury is still out on this definition with many debates raging on for the use of heirloom to describe the wide variety of tomatoes.

What everyone does agree on is that an heirloom tomato needs to be an open-pollinated plant. This means it is pollinated by the wind, insects or birds, not man. And cultivar means that it is a plant species is being cultivated and given a specific name and that it can repopulate itself again in the same manor and retain all its characteristics.

There are several names of heirloom tomatoes available today which recently as ten years ago became available. There are over a hundred heirloom tomatoes and list grows every year as long as the tomatoes adhere to the standards put forth by the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP) or the cultivated plant code.

Bare Bones Gardener our expert of the day, writes:

It does not matter whether you put your kitchen scraps in the compost or the bin, did you know that you could grow many of your favourite fruit or vegetables from those scraps. Indeed, unless your compost is very well matured you will find stray veggie seedlings may appear wherever you deposit the compost.

Take for instance those potato peelings, if it is a fairly thick section of peel with an eye (shoot), then you can often get these to grow into full potato plants. Another indication that a potato is only good for planting or throwing out is the colour. If the potato is starting to look fairly green on the skin then *DO NOT EAT*, as it is an indication that it is producing a poisonous substance common in the nightshade family to which it as well as the tomatoes, chillies and capsicums belong. You can also get sweet potatoes and taros to grow from sections of the tubers.