Here's a quick list of five tips for growing great tomatoes. Almost anyone can grow tomatoes in their garden, which helps explain why it's the most popular crop in most gardens today. Anyone who has sliced a fresh tomato for a sandwich, or sneaked a Sweet 100 tomato from the garden knows that fresh garden tomatoes are the best. Here's a list of tips for getting the best tomatoes you can from your garden.

What are some tips to improve the tomatoes in your garden?

Start with where you plant your tomatoes. Are you planning on growing the tomatoes in the garden or in a container. In either setting, a well drained, loamy soil is preferred, with a pH of somewhere between 6 and 7, which is slightly on the acidic side. Work in some well rotted compost, if it is not thoroughly decomposed it will rob nitrogen from the soil, and the tomatoes will suffer. If you going to use the garden, it may be preferable to use a raised bed garden to ensure proper drainage. It will also allow you to create the soil that your tomatoes want.

If you are looking at container grown tomatoes, there are several choices. A large self watering container, like the commercially available Earthbox is a great choice, as it solves one of the biggest problems with container grown plants, which is the tendency for them to quickly dry out.

Watering your tomato pants is critical as well. If the top inch or so of the soil dries out, be sure to add water by thoroughly soaking the soil. Take care to not keep it soaked, though, as tomatoes will not do well with their feet wet all the time.

Supporting your tomatoes is critical to their optimum production. This can be done with tomato stakes or cages. But one other approach is to use hanging planters. By letting the tomato vines hang down from the planter, they are supported on the top end, and the need to stake or cage is eliminated. This is true for the upside down tomato planters as well, which also relieve the stress on the vine as it drapes over the edge of a traditional hanging planter.

Hanging tomato planters have other advantages like eliminating the need for bending or stooping to work on them. And all the container approaches let you put tomatoes in places that normally can't hold a garden, like and apartment or condo, or just the back patio or deck.

There are many other tips to great tomato gardening, like the proper selection of tomato varieties, the type of fertilizer to use, proper pruning, and plant spacing, when it's best to plant, and more…

See our complete list of the top ten best tomato growing tips and more information on growing tomatoes like the varieties best suited to container grown plants and upside down tomato planter reviews at http://howtogardenguide.com