6 Tips for Growing the Best Tomatoes for Sauce - Get Started Now!
By Clifford A. Wright
The best tomato sauce is the one you make from scratch. You start with seedlings. And it's relatively easy to do this, from seedling to sauce, with even minimal experience because tomatoes are great for beginners. You don't have to be a master gardener to produce enough fresh tomatoes to make your own tomato sauce.
Related: Make the perfect quick tomato sauce with an olive oil emulsion.
Tip 1 -- Pick a sunny spot for the tomato garden: Your first task is to pick a spot in your garden or a container that gets at least six hours of sunlight, and preferably more than that. Next you will have to prepare a tomato patch.
If you are living in the Northern Hemisphere, try to choose a southern exposure on land that drains away. For success, you only really need soil, sun and water. You can grow tomatoes in a pot with just a little extra care.
Related: How to turn a bumper crop of cherry tomatoes into a great pasta sauce.
Tip 2 -- Use nutrient-rich dirt: The best soil has lots of nutrients that can be found in natural organic material, the best being manure or compost. When I had a full-fledged garden, I used several hundred pounds of compost for the entire garden where I grew more than just tomatoes. It was a mixture of horse and cow manure and ground crab shells, among other things. The mixture was very rich, so it didn't smell. I piled the compost to one side and dug my vegetable garden.
I dug down 6 inches and removed that earth to a tarpaulin. Then I turned the next 6 inches using a pitchfork and shovel, and mixed in a 3-inch layer of compost then mixed the rest of the compost with the dug earth and layered that back into the hole that was to be the garden.
Related: How to dish up the perfect quick sauce from tomatoes fresh from the garden.
Making a workout out of it
This all sounded so easy but once I started I realized what a big job it was. I decided to work furiously and nonstop as frenetically as possible. This is a work style that I believe is discouraged by real gardeners. I picture gardeners working in a languid style, not like construction workers pouring concrete. But I wanted to think of this as a workout. It was, too. I finished in five hours and felt great. Your more modest and realistic tomato patch should take about one and a half hours at a rapid clip.
Tip 3 -- For a shortcut, use pots instead of a garden plot: Tomatoes in a pot require about a hundredth of this time. Buy a large bag of potting soil and dump it in the pot. The pot should be large, at least 16 inches diameter at the rim.
Planting your plum tomato seedlings
Once your soil is prepared with compost or manure, you need some tomato plants. So ...
Tip 4 -- Don't worry about seeds, you can use seedling plants: You could grow from seed of course, but buying little seedlings is easy and doesn't make you less of a purist. Your garden supply store will sell many varieties of tomatoes including hybrids and heirlooms.
Tip 5 -- Use tomato varieties that work well in sauce: You will want to buy the best tomatoes for making sauces, which are known as plum tomatoes. They also are called Roma or San Marzano tomatoes. Now you need to find out when the last frost date is in your area. Don't buy the tomato plants until this date.
Related: How to preserve homegrown tomatoes for winter.
When I lived in Massachusetts, I planted my tomatoes on May 13. Now that I live in Southern California, I plant my tomatoes as early as March 15. Tomato seedling plants can be bought for $2 to $5. They should be healthy looking, and have straight stalks that spring back when bent slightly.
Remove them from their containers to plant them, pack the soil down around the stalks and water them immediately.
Set the tomatoes about 2 feet apart. If you are planting more than three and will be using rows, make the rows 3 feet apart. There are a number of special problems associated with growing tomatoes, such as cutworms.
Tip 6 -- Don't sweat it if you lose some plants. Generally, tomatoes are easy to grow, and you can usually expect few difficulties. The best piece of advice I ever received from a real gardener was "your plant's not a baby; it's a plant, and if it dies you buy another one."
Clifford A. Wright won the James Beard / KitchenAid Cookbook of the Year award and the James Beard Award for the Best Writing on Food in 2000 for "A Mediterranean Feast."
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