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 and his wife Maude-Helene Desroches are the founders of Les Jardins de la Grelinette, an internationally recognized micro-farm famous for its high productivity-profitability using low-tech, high-yield methods of production. A leading practitioner of biologically intensive cropping systems, Jean-Martin has more than a decade's worth of experience in mixed organic farming. He has written articles about his work for popular magazines such as Canadian Organic Grower, La Terre de Chez Nous and Growing for Market. He also contributes occasionally as a tool and equipment advisor for companies such as Johnny's Selected Seeds and Dubois Agrinovation. The original French language version of this book, Le Jardinier-Maraicher, released in Fall 2012, has sold more than 15,000 copies.

Jean-Martin Fortier's profile page

Pierre Nessmann has worked as a journalist and landscape gardener for over 40 years. He is assistant editor for the two popular French gardening magazines Rustica Pratique and Rustica Weekly, and covers gardening and DIY stories for French national television and radio. He is the author of several books about vegetables, gardening and landscaping. He lives in Paris, France.

Pierre Nessmann's profile page

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. She is based in Paris, France.

Flore Avram's profile page

Laurie Bennett's profile page