Is it a fruit or is it a vegetable. Botanically, it’s a fruit. It forms from a flower and contains seeds. However, in 1893 the US Supreme Court ruled it a vegetable on the basis of its culinary applications.

Call it what you want—a fruit or a vegetable—but one thing is for sure. A garden isn’t a garden until the tomatoes are in the ground.

We always start our tomato crop indoors, using a grow light when the sun refuses to shine. Looking at my greenhouse now, I have 96 of the 120 planted tomatoes moved to peat pots and nearly ready for the garden.

Tomatoes like 50 degree nights; any colder and you should be prepared to cover and protect them from the cold. When the moderate temperatures are here to stay and the roots are coming through the bottom of the peat pots, it’s garden time.

Tomatoes prefer full sun and lots of air circulation. When preparing to plant in the garden, give them a good soak. If the peat pot is dry, it will steal all the moisture from the tomato plant, and tomatoes need plenty of moisture to thrive.

For the ground where the tomatoes will be planted, dig your holes then fill them with water. When the water recedes, the plants can be placed.

Tip: Prepare a one-gallon mixture of Miracle-Gro and water in a bucket. Tomatoes are voracious feeders, so when you plant your tomatoes, add 1 cup of the Miracle-Gro solution in each hole. This will spur the root growth on your tomato plants.

Plant tomatoes up to their neck. Only the top leaves need to be sticking out and everything under the dirt will form roots, creating strong, fruit-bearing plants.

Tip: We plant our tomatoes near onions. The pungent odor from the onions will deter pests and the tomatoes will have an added boost in production.

Tip: Planting tomatoes near asparagus wards off nematodes and the tomatoes help protect the asparagus from the asparagus beetles. (Our tomatoes are near our onions, and that bed is also near our asparagus.)

While we love all varieties of tomatoes, we do have some favorites.

1. 4th of July: This is the first tomato we pick from our garden each year. It is smaller in size, but produces a lot of tomatoes. True to its name, we typically have tomatoes on or before the 4th of July.

2. SuperSauce Hybrid: This is a huge Roma tomato with very few seeds. One slice from the two-pound tomato covers a slice of bread and makes the best BLT sandwich.

3. Sweet Hearts Grape Tomato: This produces mounds of grape tomatoes, and they are super sweet. We now plant these where the Italian Greyhounds can’t reach them because these girl babies will help themselves to even the unripe fruit.

Others we are fond of include Better Boy, Big Daddy and Rutgers.

This year we started 120 tomato plants, but we certainly don’t have room for all of them. Why so many, you ask? We love variety and by planting extras, we are ensured we have exactly what we need. We have daughters and granddaughters planting gardens, and the balance will go to neighbors and friends who drop by to look in our greenhouse.

Tip: Tomatoes are great when grown in containers, too, so forego the inedible flowers and plant a tomato instead.

Tomatoes are also resilient. One year we had a hail storm that took all the leaves off 50 newly-planted tomatoes. The only thing left were the stems, and not very many stems were standing. In dismay and shock, we didn’t tend to the garden for a few days. The next thing we knew, the tomatoes revived themselves and we had the biggest tomato crop ever. Moral of the story? You can beat a tomato plant with a stick, but you can’t keep it down.

When growing tomatoes, be sure you have plenty of tomato wires. We put two plants under our extra-large tomato wires and one plant under each of our large wires. We also prefer the square wires over the round wires as they are much sturdier and they fit better in our beds side by side.

One of the most important things to know about growing tomatoes is when to water them. Always water first thing in the morning, and never water in the heat of the day. If you sprinkle water on hot tomatoes, they will crack. There is no hard and fast rule to how often you should water your tomatoes. It depends on how hot it is during the day and how active your plants are in producing fruit.

Fresh tomatoes are always wonderful, but having a freezer full of tomatoes or a pantry full of canned tomatoes that last through the winter is priceless. I have a granddaughter who is allergic to fresh tomatoes, but she can eat them if they’re cooked, so spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, vegetable soup and salsa made with cooked tomatoes are her jam. Whatever the occasion, our family always enjoys tomatoes.

Tip: Freeze your tomatoes with the skin on. When you remove them from the freezer, hold them under hot tap water and the skin will peel off with ease.

Who knew such a simple fruit would have such a big impact? In fact, tomatoes poisoned wealthy Europeans in the 1500s because they were using flatware made of lead. The acid in the tomato leeched lead from the plate and bam! Lead poisoning! Even more interesting is the poorer people also ate tomatoes but never fell ill. Why? Wooden plates. #historylesson

“God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.  ” — Francis Bacon, English Philosopher and Statesman

•••

Do you have gardening questions? Ask our experts in the comments section below. They’d love to share their knowledge with you!