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If you are growing tomatoes for the first time you may like to go to the
tips and FAQ page. For questions that you would like to ask by email, please email me here. For questions about diseases, a picture is very helpful.
Choosing The Right Varieties
If you grow tomatoes outside, choose varieties that cope well in cool conditions and mature early. Some resistance to tomato blight is also an advantage as blight is one of the biggest problems for the outdoor tomato grower. Ferline and Legend are both blight resistant (to a degree!).
You may also wish to choose a selection of varieties such as a cherry, a medium/salad and a large/beefsteak variety for slicing or the barbecue. Some large tomatoes can be eaten like melons they’re so juicy!
Bush varieties are great to grow in large pots and containers and can be positioned almost anywhere around the garden or patio without needing a wall to lean against.
The following varieties should do well in Northern areas of England and Scotland (and the whole of the UK if we get a poor summer!).
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Alaskan Fancy
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Plum - Bush
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Siberian
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Med/Small - Bush
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Glacier
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Med/Small - Semi-Bush
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Sub Arctic Plenty
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Med/Small - Bush
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Red Alert
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Cherry - Bush
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Oregon Spring
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Large - Bush
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New Yorker
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Medium - Bush
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Here’s a longer list of varieties that I can recommend.
Above - tomato ebook and youtube videos to explore.
Seed Sowing Times
To produce a crop of ripe tomatoes, seeds need to be sown no later than April in the UK (or two months before your last frost date). It generally takes around two months from sowing to flowering, and two months from flowering to fruiting ... depending on the variety.
For outdoor growing, a sowing (indoors) at the beginning of April will produce fruit around the beginning of August. Sowing early to produce an earlier crop is a good idea if you have the time and experience to cope with the difficulties of the cooler, less favourable conditions.
If you’ve missed the “sow by” date you can still have cherry tomatoes this season if you sow Micro Tom. This is a pot variety that can grow on a sunny windowsill in a 5 or 6 inch pot and will give you cherry toms quicker than any other variety I know. Given enough light, you could probably grow them all year round!
Tomato plants that are grown in good conditions grow very fast and can catch up with plants sown earlier that have had to struggle through colder temperatures and shorter days.
If you would like to sign up to my newsletter of hints and tips about growing tomatoes (particularly outdoors), please go here ... it’s free!
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