Get It Growing: Grow your own tomatoes even if you don't have lots of room

Fresh, homegrown tomatoes are as much a symbol of summertime as pool days, ice cream and backyard barbecues. If you don’t have a lot of space for gardening, you may have resigned yourself to missing out on the refreshing flavor of a ripe, just-picked tomato you grew yourself.
But Christine Coker, LSU AgCenter vegetable specialist, said you don’t need a huge yard to successfully grow a bountiful tomato crop. In fact, tomatoes are an excellent candidate for vegetable gardening in small spaces.
Here’s what you need to know to get started.
Containers
If you’re short on space, containers are your best bet for growing tomatoes.
“You can use any kind of container as long as there’s drainage,” Coker said.
Feel free to reuse plastic nursery pots — or you can splurge on some nice decorative containers. Hanging baskets are great if you have a patio, adding visual interest and putting your tomatoes in a convenient location. Got a 5-gallon bucket sitting around in your garage? You can use that too, Coker said, as long as you drill some holes in the bottom first so excess water can run out.
Varieties
There are two general categories of tomatoes: indeterminate and determinate.
Indeterminate tomatoes have continuously growing vines that may need occasional pruning to keep them from getting unruly. Because of this growth habit, indeterminate varieties need support — whether in the form of a trellis, stakes or a cage. They yield a steady supply of fruit (yes, tomatoes are botanically considered fruit) over the entire growing season, often up until first frost.
Determinate varieties, on the other hand, stop growing when they reach a certain point, usually about 3 to 4 feet tall. These tomatoes have a bushier, more upright form but can still benefit from being staked or caged to prevent plants from toppling under the weight of fruit, which matures in a short burst rather than in dribs and drabs throughout the season.
Many people prefer to stick to determinate tomatoes for containers, but don’t discount indeterminate or semi-determinate varieties. Their vining form allows you to take advantage of vertical space, and some varieties perform especially well in hanging baskets.
One of Coker’s favorites is Celano, a grape tomato developed specifically for container production.
“It has this really nice cascading form,” she said. “This takes very little space, very little input, and you can have tomatoes on your table every afternoon.”
You’ll find transplants of plenty of other varieties at local garden centers. For small spaces, Coker recommends small-fruited varieties like grape, cherry and roma types.
Planting method
Fill your containers with a good-quality potting mix and place them in a sunny area. Tomatoes (and pretty much any other vegetable) need full sun exposure, which means six to eight hours of direct sun daily.
With most crops, it’s best to dig a hole the same depth as the transplant’s container. Not so with tomatoes.
“Tomatoes are a little different than other vegetable plants because they really want to be planted deep,” Coker said.
You can bury tomato transplants several inches into the potting media — all the way up to their tips, in fact — and they’ll be fine. It’s also OK for stems to lie sideways.
This atypical planting method helps stabilize leggy transplants. It works, Coker said, because tomato stems are covered with small, specialized roots known as adventitious roots.
Care basics
Container gardening means you need to be more intentional about watering. Containers can dry out quickly and need to be watered daily, Coker said.
A basic water-soluble fertilizer works well for tomatoes and can be applied while watering.
Tomatoes are prone to developing blossom end rot. This condition, which is not a disease, results from irregular water and insufficient calcium, Coker said. Garden centers stock several calcium-containing products that you can apply to prevent this issue.