I've learned a lot since I started taking an interest in gardening, and thought I'd share some tips I've learned about tomatoes:

1. If you want it to produce little by little through the season, buy an indeterminate variety (rather than determinate, which sets its fruit all at the same time for one big harvest).
2. Put cages around your seedlings to support them as they grow, before they get too big to place a cage! I broke one pretty good when I placed the cage too late!
3. Add lime (crushed rock) or bone meal to your soil, or at least just put some crushed-up eggshells in the base of your planting hole. These will provide the calcium tomatoes need... Otherwise, the bottoms of the fruit will turn black (called blossom-end rot) and your harvest will be worthless.
4. For container planting, tomatoes need at least a 5-gallon container.
5. When you plant or pot up to a bigger container, pinch off all of the lower shoots and plant the stem underground to about 2/3 of the way up. In other words, only the very top of your plant should be showing after you plant it. Notice all the little "hairs" on the tomato stems? These will actually turn into roots when under the soil, to strengthen and stabilize your plants.

Anyone have any other tomato tips? I'm always reading and trying to learn more... I'll post more if I discover any other advice!

Happy planting!

Lowe's has an organic bone meal that I add to the garden each spring - as well as organic blood meal.

Tomatoes LOVE the soil in NJ - mostly sandy - so if you have tomato trouble try adding some sand - they go nuts in it up here!

This is great advice.  Thank you!

Thanks, Jess! We have nothing but sand, so maybe I can plant in the ground after all!! Do you find that they require more water since the sand drains so readily?

At first, yes. I found though that once they are about 2 feet high I can back off on the water and they do just fine. I also installed this year a watering system from Lowe's for our veggie garden and I LOVE it - it was only about $25 - you run the hose around the garden then these little sprinklers plug into it - we then installed a timer and now the garden waters itself. Best thing we did to the garden this year!!

Greatm, quick video from Organic gardening magazine on planting tomatoes - something I did not know was to bury a good amount of the stem in the soil to get a better root system!

http://www.organicgardening.com/video/0,8712,,00.html

I'll have to watch that one... I planted all my tomatoes to 2/3 depth this season, and they're all doing really well. They seem more stable and grow faster.

I found this link for troubleshooting tomatoes yesterday - some really great info about pests and diseases and what to do about them (though I won't use any chemicals, so I just ignore the pesticide recos ;) ): http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/archives/parsons/vegetables/tomato.html

We just bought a small tomato plant.  I'm going to use your advice.  We have it staked now... but I need to get some caging and start fertilizing.