Are you tired of paying $5 a pound for bland tasting tomatoes at the grocery store? If so, maybe you should consider growing your own tomatoes...

Growing tomatoes can be a uniquely rewarding experience providing a wealth of rewards. Fresh homegrown tomatoes are easy and fun to grow, and are more flavorful and higher in nutrients than their store-bought counterparts. Tomato gardening requires very little effort, provides the gardener with a sense of accomplishment and, also supplies enough fresh tomatoes to feed multiple families. Every tomato lover knows that there is no substitute for a fresh tomato picked at its pinnacle of ripeness. So, if you are a tomato lover, why not reward yourself with a nice tomato producing garden?

There are a great number of advantages to starting your own tomato garden. One such advantage is the ability to grow certain varieties of tomatoes that just can't be found in grocery stores or farmer's markets. There are lots of different tomato varieties with the colors of the tomatoes ranging from white to almost black and almost every other color in between. Another cool benefit to growing your own is the ability to grow your tomatoes in an organic fashion. When growing your own vegetables, you always know what pesticides and chemicals were or weren't used in the rearing of the plants. This can be reassuring if you are concerned with the safety of the food that you and your family eats.

If you've decided that you are, indeed, going to reward yourself with that fresh food factory, otherwise known as a tomato garden, then you need to decide whether you are going to grow your tomatoes in containers or in the soil of the ground. Container gardening is ideal for people who live in apartments, and for people who have extremely poor soil in their yards. When choosing a container for your tomato plant, make sure that it is big enough to support the tomato plant. The container needs to be at least five gallons in size, but 10 to 15 gallon pots are ideal for tomatoes. Preferably, it is best to just plant your tomatoes in the ground since tomato plants have lots of roots, and the ground will give these roots plenty of room to grow.

Personally, I have found tomatoes to be one of the easiest plants grow. As long as the plants are receiving the correct amounts of water and sunlight, they seem to be very healthy and resilient. I have also found that fertilizing the plants with some sort of nitrogen based fertilizer (fertilizers can come from organic or inorganic sources) seems to increase the quantity of tomatoes coming off of each plant. So, if your tomato plants are getting at least 5 hours of direct sunlight, and you water them sufficiently and apply fertilizer on a weekly basis, than your plants should be healthy and fruitful throughout the tomato growing season.

I really hope that this article has urged you to start your very own tomato garden. Growing your own tomatoes is beneficial in a variety of different ways, and it requires very little effort on your behalf. Tomatoes are actually fun to grow, especially when you start seeing all of the fruits of your labor, and all of these wonderful fruits are more nutritious, and even more delicious than those commercially grown tomatoes that you find at the store. Good luck to you, and may you grow many big and tasty tomatoes!