Grandma didn’t need gizmos for her delicious tomatoes

I once asked my grandmother, who came from a family of farmers and food growers, how they staked tomatoes when they grew by the dozens, if not the hundreds, in fields. Her answer was simple — they didn’t. They just left the naturally vining crop sprawl on the ground.

And they certainly didn’t feed them with a specially blended fertilizer with a tomato on the bag. My guess is that the tomato plants got a dose of the composted manure that was plentiful and spread on the rest of the fields and nothing more.

In other words, tomatoes used to be grown without any of the fuss that we make over them now, and to hear my grandmother describe how tomatoes “used to taste,” you would have assumed they were much better for the lack of coddling.

Gardeners who go looking for advice on growing tomatoes will quickly be bombarded with often contrary advice. From debunked myths — planting with Tums, eggshells and coffee grounds — to various contraptions meant to help grow the “perfect” fruit, tomato growing can become a complicated affair.

And the hottest tomato topic these days relates to staking. Most gardeners quickly learn that the round metal supports sold as “tomato cages” are worthless for tomatoes but work well for peppers, eggplant and sometimes peonies, so they resort to other methods of helping tomatoes grow up.

You can buy any number of tomato staking devices that claim to be the solution, but it seems that many gardeners have discovered a time-tested method of growing single-cordon tomatoes up a string. It’s a clever and inexpensive method, but it only works for indeterminate tomatoes and it requires almost daily attention and strict pruning practices, nipping out any suckers immediately.

One market gardener on Instagram uses a double cordon method in which she hard prunes young tomato plants to produce two main stems, both of which are led up a string.

I’ve tried most staking methods and devices. My favorite continues to be the unexplainably named Florida weave, in which sturdy stakes are placed between each plant and twine is used to sandwich growing plants between them.

It suits my rather haphazard tomato care regimen, which has me completely forget about them for several days at a time. When things get out of control, I simply add in another row of twine to tuck in errant branches.

Some years I make more of a fuss over my tomatoes than other years, and after years of growing them, I think the single biggest factor in growing great tomatoes is plenty of sun and good weather.

Although growing in fields is different than growing in a home garden, the tomatoes my grandmother’s family grew surely relied on both sun and good weather, and I have no doubt that the fabulous tomato taste she recalled was part nostalgia and part good luck.

No fancy gizmos required.