Garden-Dopers, give me your best tomato growing secrets, surprises, and success stories. I need encouragement after my darlings got nailed by hail!
Two words-horse poop.
Really, call your local barn and beg borrow or steal a load of horse poop.
I quit canning at 220 lbs. last year.
Yup - horse poop, mushroom compost, chicken manure, it’s all good. Luckily, we have an egg ranch about six miles away and we get all the cheap chicken poo we need.
Step 1: Choose a sunny spot, plow in a batch of doo-doo before planting, and water once in awhile. If you’re in an area where tomatoes are prone to fungi (I think that goes for just about all of us), spray with an anti-fungal spray of your choice every couple of weeks. Prop up the plants when they begin to sprawl with tomato cages - I like to hook two together to form a much bigger around cage.
Step 2: Harvest tomatoes until your arms ache.
Wow. I usually use horse poop for fertilizer. Does canned horse poop have any uses around the home? 
I’ve always heard that planting marigolds around your tomatoes helps keep various bugs away. It seems to work for me, but then again, I may not have any bugs around to begin with.
Horse poop, and compost, works for me also. Easy for me to get since we own a horse, and our barn is happy to let us have some from the middle of the pile.
Besides, that the normal stuff of snipping off the suckers. I’m happy, this has been a great year for my garden, with a perfect temperature for everything (except my jalapenos). I’ve got tomatoes, little green ones, already!
I find that briefly water-stressing the plants (by omitting watering for one hot day every few, so that the leaves wilt), when the fruits are developing, makes for tastier tomatoes (albeit a few less of them probably)
I’m in the 'buy a few 99¢ tomato plants, stick ‘em in the ground in a sunny spot, and water regularly’ school of thought.
I don’t do any produce canning, so there’s no point in growing more tomatoes than we can eat as they ripen. Four plants generally seems to do the job for us. Except for last year when it rained straight through April, May, and June, and pretty much drowned the suckers; I think we got about 3 ripe tomatoes eventually off the two plants that (just barely) hung in there.
But since April 17, when I planted my tomatoes and bell peppers, the weather’s been perfect - warm, lots of sun, just enough rain. No baby green tomatoes yet, but the tomato plants are all between 2’3" and 3’ tall, and three of them are budding, so it shouldn’t be too long.
Meanwhile, the raspberry brambles at the edge of the wood are showing signs of a bumper crop this year. My wife doesn’t like raspberries, so they’re mine, all MINE!!!