Grow Your Own Tomatoes

Tomatoes are the crown jewel of any kitchen garden.

During my warm season, I grow various varieties of tomato plants up my two arch trellises. (Learn how to grow tomatoes up an arch trellis like I do.)

If you love garden-fresh tomatoes as much as I do, one of your pressing concerns in the garden is probably how you can harvest as many tomatoes as possible from a couple plants. Before we get into tomato yields and tips to maximize your production, let's look at some of my favorite tomato varieties to grow.

My three favorite tomato varieties to grow in the kitchen garden

sungold tomatoes

This super popular variety of cherry tomatoes is probably the most prolific that I grow. Sungold are so named because they ripen to a beautiful golden orange. Once they start producing fruit, you can harvest from them twice a week.

juliet tomatoes

Incredibly tasty, Juliets produce small red grape tomatoes in abundance.

black cherry tomatoes

This heirloom variety produces gorgeous dark purple cherry tomatoes in clusters.

All three varieties are indeterminate tomatoes, meaning they grow as a vine and will produce fruit in clusters over a longer period of time, instead of all at once, as bush varieties do.

Tomatoes are what we call a long and lengthy plant, meaning they take up a lot of space in the garden and they grow for a long time—but the results are so sweet and worth the space and time commitment!

I start my tomatoes by seed indoors. After about a month, I plant them outside in my raised garden beds at the end of May. I harvest regularly from my tomatoes throughout the summer, before their production begins to slow down at the beginning of September.

A lot of information on the internet about fruit production for a tomato plant will pertain to large tomatoes, rather than the cherry and grape varieties. I personally prefer to grow smaller tomatoes because I get to harvest them more often and pop out to the garden for juicy snacks. I'm not much one for making my own tomato sauces or salsas, nor am I into jarring and canning. For those reasons, I stick to smaller varieties.

When I googled how many tomatoes you can expect to harvest from one plant, I found articles that gave answers ranging from 20 to 200 tomatoes. That's a pretty significant margin!

For simplicity's sake, I'll say that you can expect to enjoy between 20 and 30 tomatoes from a strong and healthy indeterminate tomato plant that's a larger variety.

Now, if we're looking at smaller varieties like the ones I prefer to grow, then we're talking about several hundred tomatoes off of one vine in a given season.

For those of you skeptics out there, let me say that I harvest around 60 or so tomatoes from four plants about every five days during their production window. At six harvests per month, I'm pulling in 360 tomatoes. That means a conservative estimate for the total number of tomatoes harvested during the season would be over 400 tomatoes, or roughly 100 tomatoes per plant.

If you grow tomatoes the way I do, it's safe to bet on getting at least 100 tomatoes off your plants within four to five weeks during your peak season. And believe me, each one of those 100 tomatoes tastes so good.

Let's now look at ways you can maximize your tomato production to ensure you get as many juicy little fruits as possible.

Four tips to maximize your tomato production

These plants love to grow in warm to hot temperatures and receive loads of sunshine. They prefer a lot of space for their roots to dig down deep, they need support, and they'll take whatever nutrients the soil gives them and still want some more.

Follow these four tips to keep your hungry tomatoes happy and, in turn, get tons of fruit from each plant that you're growing. 

Start with a good setup

The first thing you want to do is have a really healthy home for your plants, and that means raised beds filled with great soil. A general rule about plants is that however much growth you see above the ground, that same kind of growth is happening below the ground, as well. So when you have a plant that needs a ton of space above the dirt, then that means it needs a lot of space below the dirt, too. Raised beds give the large root systems of your tomato plants room to spread out and dig down deep.

Dig a really deep hole for your tomato plant

When you put your tomato plant in the garden (this would be either a plant you started from seed indoors or a healthy plant you bought from a local farmer or grower), you're going to bury it deeper than what might feel normal. You bury most plants up to their neck, or where the stem grows above the roots, but you'll actually plant your tomatoes much lower under the soil line. You can even bury some leaves. Tomatoes will produce roots on whatever plant parts nestle below the ground, and this helps form a strong structure for the plant, which you'll need later when it's bearing lots of fruit for you.

Feed your tomato plants often

Plants in the Nightshade family (i.e., your tomatoes) are heavy feeders, which means the plants take up a lot of nutrients from the soil often. But how often is too often to fertilize tomatoes?

I learned from another gardener that every time your plant is doing something new, you should feed it. When I see my plants starting to flower, setting fruit, or growing new vines, I know it's time for me to come in and give it a little bit of extra food.

The food that you'll give your plants depends on what they're growing. When your plant is just getting started in the garden, you'll want to add nitrogen to strengthen the plant's main stalk and help it form green leaves. If your plant is fruiting or flowering, you'll want to give it a phosphorus-rich fertilizer to help it form fruit. You could also add more compost to the base of the plant. Make sure to water deeply after fertilizing.

Prune your tomato plant weekly

Pruning is a way of talking to your plants. You can speak their plant language and tell them, “I want less of this and more of that, please.” If your plant is producing too many non-fruiting branches, you can say, "Hey there, I actually want more fruit and fewer leaves," to your plant. About once a week during the growing period of your tomato plant, prune from the bottom up and take the oldest leaves away to help your plant focus on fruit production. This is essential for getting more tomato fruits from your plant.

Help your tomato plants grow in optimal conditions

As I like to say, plants growing in optimal conditions love to thrive. Tomatoes growing in optimal conditions will literally take over your garden space. The caveat here is that their lush growth may not be the kind you actually want. I've had years where I got tons of growth and my tomato plants were huge, yet there was little to no fruit forming on the vines. It wasn't until the year I started pruning them that I got way more fruit than leaves from my tomato plants.

Get growing

Keep these four tips in mind to get impressive results from your tomato plants. You'll soon be picking tomatoes for weeks on end and popping them into your mouth for a light snack right there in the garden.

Thanks for bringing back the kitchen garden with me!