I absolutely loved growing and eating cherry tomatoes last year, and for 2024 my main gardening goal was to improve my tomato-growing skills. Living in Canada, the growing season is short, so I have to make the most of it before we’re back to snow! But the more you discover about gardening, the more you realise how much there is still to learn: so many varieties of tomato, so many different ways to grow them, and so much conflicting advice… How do you decide who to believe and which advice to follow?

Thanks to my science background, my answer is always to do my own experiments and see what actually works best for me! So I decided to try a lot of different things in my 2024 garden, and build what I learn into a solid plan for my future tomatoes. I filled my garden with 22 tomato plants of 12 different varieties (plus 2 more plants kept indoors).

A selection of the cherry tomatoes I grew in 2024

And here’s a small part of my tomato jungle!

Of course, I’m not saying my results are the definitive answers – I’m not an expert, and with only one plant to compare in each experiment, my results aren’t statistically significant. But I wanted to document everything for myself, and who knows? Maybe you’ll find some of it interesting or even helpful if you want to try growing cherry tomatoes like these!

For each of my experiments, I used the same type of tomato for both cases and tried to only change the variable I was testing for to give a fair comparison. There are too many other factors at play to make this a scientifically valid test, but I’ve still learnt a lot from trying so many things this season! Read on to find out what I discovered…