A gardening expert’s guide to growing tomatoes

Tomatoes freeze brilliantly, losing none of their sharp flavour in the process. Having learnt this, I now grow a lot. The best tomato tip I have been given is not to peel them before you freeze them. If you do, they all stick together in the bag in a lumpy frozen mass. Leave them in their skins and they still roll around together in the bag like marbles. If your recipe needs skinned tomatoes, just hook out a few frozen ones and run them briefly under a cold tap. The skins slip off like silk.

The second tip I picked up was to get a vegetable mill, like a Moulinex. Then you can start a soup with several pounds of frozen tomatoes, skins on, and sieve out both skins and seeds at the end of the cooking. It’s a quick way to make a rich passata too.

You don’t need a greenhouse to grow a decent crop of tomatoes, but you do need sun. You can fit a couple of plants on a balcony, on a patio, or squeeze them in beside sunflowers in a sunny border. I’ve seen them growing in hanging baskets too, but you’d need to work hard at the watering. If you want to try, choose a bush variety such as ‘Tumbler’.

It’s only since coming to our present place that I’ve had a greenhouse and it certainly increases the options. It gives you an earlier crop and, to a great extent, it protects tomato plants from blight — the biggest problem I had when I grew all my plants outside. But at that stage, I was growing potatoes as well and that’s where the blight started.

Tomatoes grow in two different ways, either as tall, single-stem cordons or as low, sprawling bushes. If you are planting in a grow bag, a bush type will be easier to manage. I mostly grow cordon types and prefer planting in big plastic pots (15-16in across). The roots can go deeper than in a grow bag and the plant is easier to stake.

Bush tomatoes tend to fruit earlier than cordon types and often bear their fruit all in a rush over a period of four to six weeks. Cordon tomatoes can easily get to more than 8ft tall and keep producing new trusses of fruit as they grow, so they crop over a longer period. These tall, single-stem varieties produce sprouts of new growth from the angle that each leaf makes with the main stem and you need to pinch these out as soon as you see them. You also need to tie the main stem to a cane as it grows.

Tomatoes are not hardy and if you are planning to grow them outside, you need to keep plants under cover until the weather warms up. That’s usually around late May. It’s getting a bit late to be starting off tomato seeds, but it’s certainly the cheapest way to get plants. And it’s a good way of experimenting with varieties you don’t know. Why not give it a try? Scatter seeds on top of a small pot of compost and cover them with more compost or vermiculite. Water the pot, keep it in a warm place (kitchen windowsills are good for this) and expect them to germinate in one or two weeks. When the seedlings look sturdy enough, transplant each one into a 3in pot and water them well. Grow them on with plenty of light until they are ready to plant out in their final homes.

• No garden? Get yourself a tiny fruit tree

Each season, I grow one or two new tomato varieties from seed, but I also buy ready-grown plants. For these I go to Simpson’s Seeds, who list nearly a hundred different kinds of tomato, all available as seed and many also as young plants. Those who know the nursery will already have ordered plants for delivery, but it’s still worth seeing what they have available to send. You need to order in packs of six, which can be plants of the same variety or mixed. The website is simpsonsseeds.co.uk.

The other option is to visit the nursery (it has a great collection of chillies as well as tomatoes) and buy your plants direct. It is on the Longleat Estate at Keepers Yard, Chapel Street, Horningsham, Warminster BA12 7LU. You can call on 01985 845004, and it will be open during May from Tuesday to Friday (10am-4pm) and on Saturday (10am-1pm).

Five favourite tomatoes

‘Pannovy’ A cordon tomato that produces medium-sized, smooth red fruit of excellent flavour. I’ve only grown this in the greenhouse, where it produced terrific crops through till late September.

‘Sungold’ A yellow cherry tomato of astonishing vigour, growing cordon-style with long trusses of sweet fruit. For us, it grew outside as well as in the greenhouse, its only fault a tendency to split its skin if left too long on the truss. If you’ve children around, they’ll have eaten the fruit before that happens.

‘Gardeners’ Delight’ An old favourite and a reliable one, which in a reasonable summer does as well outside as in. A cordon variety producing small to medium red fruit over a long season.

‘Black Krim’ A slightly weird-looking plant as it sometimes produces leaves that look as though they belong to a potato plant, not a tomato. Medium-sized, dark-skinned fruit on a cordon variety.

‘Marmande’ A well-known French tomato that produces big, ribbed fruit, excellent for making sauces. This is a bush variety, best grown outside.

Varieties with strong resistance to blight

If you have had problems with blight, which in a wet summer can quickly ruin a crop of outdoor tomatoes, the specialist growers Simpson’s Seeds recommends the following:

‘Crimson Crush’ Large red fruit on a cordon plant.

‘Lizzano’ Grows as a low, trailing, bushy plant producing smallish red fruit. Good in a pot.

‘Nagina’ Small to medium plum tomatoes. Early ripening. Cordon.

‘Romello’ Hugely productive bush variety giving big crops of small, sweet cherry plum tomatoes.

‘Rose Crush’ From the same stable as ‘Crimson Crush’, producing pink fruit rather than red. Cordon.