[MichaelRo]

>> They are not demanding

I have to disagree on this one. They are prone to a myriad of diseases, mainly fungus: Phytophthora infenstans, Fulvia fulva, Botrytis cinerea, Mosaic Virus, Stolbur disease, and if you don't spray them with the right substances you'll lose a substantial part if not the whole crop, oftentimes lose it even if you spray them.

Other than that I agree that home grown tomatoes are better. Of course you mustn't be stupid and buy some supermarket seeds, those are awful. Use local varieties, several of them as there are subtle differences in taste and flavor. Like "oxheart" for instance: https://gomagcdn.ro/domains2/planteieftine.ro/files/product/...

Although I can buy local varieties from the grocery market and I do, they might not be just as good as a fresh one from the garden. Part of the reason is the difficulty in storing them, if you stack them one over another they will get crushed and you won't sell crushed tomatoes to the customers. So farmers tend to pick them when they aren't fully ripe and I freaking hate unripe tomatoes. Still they tend to be way better than supermarket "plastic tomatoes" offering.

One tip, pick the smaller tomatoes, they tend to be sweeter. Or at least that's what I noticed.

[swiftcoder]

I think maybe this is only a big problem in climates that are on the cold side for tomatoes. The only problem I've had the last few years is tomato blight during one particularly rainy spring, and growing the tomatoes up a trellis and cutting away the excess lower leaves has been sufficient to control it.

Companion planting aromatics may help control pests as well - I usually plant as many of basil, rosemary, parsley, and cilantro as will take in the vicinity of the tomatoes.

[positr0n]

How hot does it get where you live?

In Texas no one I know has ever had their tomatoes survive into August. Blight and the heat kill the plants usually by mid July. You can plant new ones around this time for a fall harvest if you want, but most home gardeners I talk to are pretty burnt out by this time of the season. The heat contributes to that too I'm sure :-)

[swiftcoder]

Probably not as hot as Texas. Rarely goes above 105 F in summer here. Tomatoes seem to do ok at that temperature as long as I irrigate (drip irrigation at ground level specifically - tomato plants don't like getting their leaves wet)

[rini17]

I lost some crops myself but tomatoes still fared better than other vegetables. It's not like some enormous investment? Having homegrown tomatoes every other year is better than nothing. If you have kids, it's a good lesson about difficulty of obtaining food from nature.

I had success with mycorrhizal "good" fungi (brand Symbivit), they were keeping bad fungi away with visible difference between treated and untreated plants.

[jowdones]

Well it's depressing. My mother has a fairly large garden (some 1500 sqare meters) and takes quite some amount of labor to tend to it. So you work all spring and early summer only to see the crops wither away... makes you go on depression pills or just abandon the whole darn thing and buy Duch imported plastic vegetables.

A bit unrelated, nowadays my mother was telling me a memory from her teenage years in the 60s. In early summer she'd come home for the weekend from boarding school in the city and her mother (my grandma) would greet her with lunch and a salad made from fresh cucumber and onion (add salt, oil and vinegar). It would be too early for tomatoes but she still remembers the taste of that early salad.

[stevekemp]

This year I grew cucumbers on my balcony for the first time, and they were surprisingly low-effort. You do need to pollinate them, if you're too high for bees, or other insects. That aside I just watered them twice a day, except on days I forgot, and hoped for the best.

Tomatoes are a bit hit and miss for me, hence trying something new this year. Usually I just grow strawberries and tomatoes at home. Other stuff gets grown on a 10m x 10mx patch of land nearby.

[MichaelRo]

I recall cucumbers are also prone to diseases but perhaps not as sensitive as tomatoes. One thing, if you don't water them diligently, they will grow bitter. Like quinine-level bitterness, enjoy eating them like that! :)

[rini17]

1500sqm is absolutely not needed for occasional nutritional enrichment. That's why I mentioned pot on balcony. But yes, being forced as kid to help tending big garden does leave some scars.

[MichaelRo]

>> being forced as kid to help tending big garden does leave some scars

Heh, brings back trauma memories :) But I guess it's countryside vs city life. I see my city-boy kid and his friends, bored, staring at screens whenever they can and generally having a hard time figuring out what to do with their free time. Having grown in the countryside, the answer to that was easy "tend to the crops". It's not backbreaking work but can take huge chunks of your time and it's not exactly enjoyable, I mean I'd definitely have done something else, even staring at a wall but that wasn't an option. And it wasn't just me of course, everyone I knew was doing that. I recall with some amusement a friend of mine, in the context of summer vacation (hence lots of crop tending to do), exclaiming at some point "man, I can't wait for the school to start so I can get some relaxation".