Jason's Garden Guides - Volume 2 Tomatoes

It's the hose. It's always the hose.

In Volume One, Jason told you to buy four transplants, skip the seed-starting, and not let anybody grade you. He also said you'd talk about tomatoes later.

It's later.

Tomatoes is the one plant that gets a whole book, because it's the one everybody starts with and the one everybody has trouble with. It's a tropical vine pretending to be a shrub, that we ask to live in a backyard and hold up fruit heavier than its own stem. Of course it gets weird.

Almost everything that goes wrong traces back to three things: you crowded it, you watered it unevenly, or you panicked and bought a product. The other twenty pages are Jason explaining why.

Inside:

The only word that matters — determinate or indeterminate, printed on the tag, read by nobody

The cherry cheat code — the most forgiving tomato there is, and why it should be your first

Plant it deep. Deeper. — bury two-thirds of the plant you just paid for. It's the highest-return move in the book

The lie of the tomato cage — that wire cone is a marigold cage, and your vine will wear it like jewelry

Suckers, and whether to bother — prune the vine, never the bush

Blossom end rot — it's not a disease, it's not calcium, and the spray won't help

Follow the frass — how to find a four-inch hornworm you cannot see, and the UV flashlight trick that makes it glow

Flowers but no fruit — four of the five causes are patience; the fifth is an electric toothbrush

Pick at first blush, never the fridge — and what to do when forty pounds arrive on one Saturday

Plus a full-page Tomato Triage table for the moment something looks wrong and you're about to buy something you don't need.

22 pages. Original watercolor illustration on every page. Ember included, unfortunately.

Grow. Learn. Share.