Homegrown tomatoes are rich in both texture and flavour and come in an assortment of shapes and sizes. You’ll be hard pressed to find more than three or four types in a conventional supermarket, but in California at ‘Love Apple Farms’ they grow over 1 000 distinctly different heirloom varieties every year with names like tigerella, yellow pear, black plum, beefsteak and hillbilly.

I’m personally aiming to grow 16 different types this season, all heirlooms, handed down from farmer to farmer, grower to grower.

If you are limited for space—and trust me you’ll need it—grow one of the smaller cherry varieties. A perennial favourite is ‘sweetie’, though heirloom varieties like ‘black cherry’ or ‘yellow pear’ are welcome additions to any food garden. Cherry tomatoes offer the benefits of having higher and faster yields over the growing season.

Buying seedlings at a nursery can be misleading as what they don’t tell you is that the small 10cm plant will invariably need a 1m diameter of space. And it will need to be staked to attain heights of over 1,5m.

When planting out tomato seedlings, leave 50cm from centre to centre all round and provide a stake for each one. I like using a 1,8m bamboo stake, available from most garden centres. It’s best to do this at time of planting as driving a stake into the ground when the tomato is established can damage the roots.

If you have a sunny balcony with over 6+ hours of sun a day they can be grown in large pots, preferably one plant to a pot, with good drainage.

Make sure you don’t over water. Water at the base of the plant as watering the leaves, especially at night, in warmer regions can lead to leaf spot and mildew. It’s always best to water all your plants in the early morning.

A great companion plant to tomatoes is basil, and probably why a Caprese salad tastes as good as it does.

Matt Allison is a Cape Town based eco-advocate and urban farmer who's rethinking food one meal at a time. Find out more from him at www.imnojamieoliver.com