When I was a teenager growing up in Vietnam, I watched this Korean soap opera. I can’t remember the name or much of the plot, but it’s probably a tragic love story. ( It almost always was with Korean dramas of the 90s.)

Korean producers have the knack of romanticising small little things, and in that series, it was a tomato plant. So, it became my teenager’s fantasy to grow tomatoes.

 As I grew older and moved away, I forgot about the idea until the day I was given a little box at the supermarket counter. In the Netherlands, supermarkets like AH give out boxes with seeds in some compost when spring comes. You might not know this, but the Netherlands is really into growing food. This little tiny country is feeding the world.

I humbly try to feed the two of us with my balcony garden 😀

When I took the tomato box home that day, I thought of a fun experiment. The next morning, I brought it to work and started a tomato pot on my desk. It’s a shame to admit that I neglected it. No, I didn’t come to work during the weekend to water the tomatoes. Even on work days, I didn’t always pay much attention to the plants. Somehow, the pot kept going for a couple of months.

 That summer, I left that office. The plants went home with me and were repotted into a container three times the size. I used a broken chair to support the skinny arms as the branches grew out.

To my amazement, I had some cherry tomatoes later that year. There weren’t many fruits, but considering the lack of care, I was happy to see any. I have grown more cherry tomatoes with better results ever since.

Care for Cherry Tomatoes

Sowing time

Do it early in spring if you live somewhere that doesn’t have a long, hot summer, like Northern Europe. This year, I sowed my first seeds in early April and had the first fruits in early August. Some of my fruits didn’t become ripe by late September, and with much less sunlight, they never did. Next year, I plan to start in March, maybe sowing indoors first to give them a head start.

If you live in the sunny South, it’s a different story. My Dad even sows tomato seeds in August in Hanoi, and they still have fruits before the dark days come.

Sunlight

The more sunlight the plants have, the sweeter the fruits are. That means putting tomato plants in the spot with sunlight for most hours of the day. That also means trimming off leaves that cover young fruits.

Water

Give tomatoes plenty of water. It makes sense as the fruits are full of water, right? Seeing nasty cracks on the beautiful, shiny, round surface indicates that you either watered too little or too irregularly.

Support

Support your plants as they grow, especially during fruiting. Depending on your space, there are many ways to design your supporting system. A fan-training trellis is a good option if your balcony doesn’t have a lot of sunlight. The term might sound intimidating, but it simply means to fan all the branches evenly against the wall so the sun can easily reach and ripen the fruits.

I didn’t do this but here’s a photo I found on Pinterest:

This year, I opted for dwarf tomatoes and didn’t have to prop them up, which made life quite a bit easier. It’s hard to see how tall these plants were but they were about 30cm and hardly needed any support despite being super laden with fruits.

Use of Cherry Tomatoes

Tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables. So I like to eat the little ones like fruits, raw and fresh. One of my favourite salads is made with cherry tomatoes, cucumber, and red onion in a dressing of lime and fish sauce. I save my precious home-grown for this salad (if I haven’t eaten them raw first).

Tomatoes are versatile, though. You can do many things with them from pickling whole or sun-dried to making a sauce. When the summer’s hot sun has gone, and you still have many green tomatoes on the vines, they can still be used in delicious recipes like this mixed tomato chutney.

And a trivial thing

Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. It’s also the name of time management method that I use every day, twelve months a year, unlike the fresh tomatoes, which are only available in my garden for a couple of months in the summer.