Your ultimate guide to growing

Sow and grow your own tomatoes for tastier fruit at a fraction of the supermarket price. Camilla Phelps recommends new varieties for guaranteed success

- Camilla Phelps

FOR anyone who wants to grow their own produce, tomatoes are a must-try. Not only are the fruits among the most versatile of culinary ingredients but there are also so many different, colourful varieties available – many that you rarely see in shops. And there’s nothing more satisfying than biting into a homegrown, juicy tomato from the garden.

If you’re a novice veg grower, it’s hard to go wrong with classics such as ‘Gardener’s Delight’ and ‘Sungold’. But if you want to try something a little more challenging, look for heirloom varieties like ‘Brandywine’.

Unusual colour variations are great for making salads anything but boring – the stripy ‘Green Zebra’, for instance, or ‘Noire de Crimée’, a dark-skinned Russian-bred tomato. Options with black colouring offer the added bonus of having superfood properties, thanks to the higher levels of antioxidants present in the pigment.

Varieties that produce smaller-sized fruits have become increasingly popular – understandably so, as they are easy to grow, and usually have a longer season and plentiful fruits. What’s more, there are many to choose from, with a huge variety of colours, shapes, sizes and flavours on offer.

Blight busters

Being a Mediterranean staple, tomatoes love sunshine. However, many introductions have been bred to suit the UK’s cooler, shorter summers, and to have good disease resistance – so there’s less chance of having your crop wiped out by blight. And, perhaps best of all, with modern tomato varieties you don’t necessarily need lots of space or a greenhouse. There are tomatoes to suit all sizes of garden, veg plot, patio or even windowsill.