Tomatoes
A Grower's Guide
A complete guide to tomato cultivation from seed selection to harvest.
Nutritious, versatile, and bursting with flavor, tomatoes are a perennial favorite of both home gardeners and market farmers. Tomatoes: A Grower's Guide will help you ensure a plentiful and profitable harvest using "The Market Gardener Method," Jean-Martin Fortier's proven formula for successful, small-scale, biointensive gardening and microfarming.
This highly accessible, succinct, and beautifully illustrated full-color handbook features:
- A celebration of the humble tomato and its fascinating history—from an exotic curiosity to a dietary staple.
- An inspiring collection of truly outstanding heirloom and hybrid tomato varieties, selected for attributes such as taste, yield, appearance, and hardiness.
- Strategies for planning, preparation, and propagation, including sowing techniques suited to every grower, from amateur through professional.
- Comprehensive guidance on cultivating your tomato crop—covering soil management, transplanting, fertilizing, mulching, watering and irrigation, pruning, staking, disease prevention, and dealing with common pests—all using organic and sustainable methods.
- Tips for picking at the peak of freshness, extending the harvest, and processing ideas so you can enjoy that homegrown tomato flavor all winter long.
Tomatoes: A Grower's Guide is a keystone title in the Grower's Guides from the Market Gardener series. This curated collection of practical handbooks is designed to provide everyone from novice gardeners to seasoned horticulturalists and farmers with the information they need to grow better, using Jean-Martin Fortier's principles of biointensive, regenerative agriculture at a human scale.
Jean-Martin Fortier, a distinguished farmer, author, and educator, has been spearheading a movement in ecological agriculture for over twenty years. Since 2004, he and his wife have been operating Les Jardins de la Grelinette, an efficient and productive 2-acre microfarm. This farm is often referred to as a blueprint for effective human-scale organic farming.
In 2015, Jean-Martin established La Ferme des Quatre-Temps, a research farm dedicated to training apprentices and developing new strategies for market gardening, including year-round production. His pioneering methods are taught worldwide through the Market Gardener Institute, which is present in more than 90 countries.
Jean-Martin is the author of The Winter Market Gardener and The Market Gardener, which have sold over a quarter of a million copies in nine languages. His contributions to organic farming and regenerative agriculture have earned him the Meritorious Service Cross from the Governor General of Canada. He farms and lives in Quebec, Canada.
Pierre Nessmann was born to a family of Strasbourg market gardeners and holds a degree from the École d'Horticulture de Genève, in Switzerland. He has worked as a landscape gardener and a journalist for over 40 years. He is the assistant editor of the popular French gardening magazines Rustica Pratique and Rustica Weekly, covers gardening and DIY stories for the French television Network TF1, and currently hosts a gardening segment on the show Nous Voilà Bien, on the French radio station RTL. He is the author of several books about vegetable growing, gardening, and landscaping. Pierre lives in Paris, France.
Flore Avram is a freelance artist and graphic designer specializing in scientific and botanical illustration. She has collaborated extensively with the French language children's publisher KiloWatt Editions, and with Inserm Magazine, a quarterly journal which explores health and biomedical research. Flore has earned several professional certifications in graphic design and scientific illustration from L'Ecole Estienne, the Municipal Graduate School of the Arts and Printing Industry. She also works as a Médiatrice en botanique at Jardin des Serres d'Auteuil, a unique French natural heritage site and eco-garden. She is based in Paris, France.
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