I have no green thumb whatsoever, but I have a message for people who think they do and want to prove it by growing tomatoes. Try buying one tomato plant instead of four or five, and watch how many tomatoes you end up with.
We used to have neighbors with multiple tomato plants and once they ripened on the vine, we got a literal bucket full of tomatoes that they were never going to eat. I appreciated their generosity, but as much as I like tomatoes, they were more than I could ever consume before they went rotten. My wife doesn’t eat them, except in pasta sauce, which we buy at the supermarket, so we sadly threw most of the gift tomatoes away.
Yet every year, they’d give us a new batch of tomatoes, which was always accompanied by their surprise at how many tomatoes their plants yielded. And we weren’t their only recipients — other neighbors got a batch, too.
I mentioned this to a friend the other day and she recalled a similar experience when she had a half-dozen plants in her garden. No one had warned her about how many tomatoes would grow on each vine, so she ended up with way more than she expected. After the first year, she cut down all but one and still had plenty of tomatoes.
It was either that or become a supplier for Ragu.