(upbeat percussive music) >>We're here at the Bridgewater Church of the Brethren Community Garden, and one of the best things that you can have from your garden straight to your table is a fresh tomato.

There's just nothing like having a tomato picked hot off the vine to bring in to have with your meal, and tomatoes need a few things in order to be happy to grow.

They need good soil that's well drained.

Now, that could be in your garden or in a pot, and oftentimes you need a cage or a stake, some sort of trellis to support them, because tomatoes do like to get tall and leggy and they can flop over.

There are a few things though that a gardener cannot control in terms of making their tomatoes happy and that is the heat.

Tomatoes are a summer plant.

You want them to go in the ground when it's nice and warm, but sometimes our summers just get too hot, and days over 90, nighttimes in the 70s, and high humidity can really change the productivity of your tomatoes.

So if you look at a tomato's flower, it is a perfect flower.

That means it has both male and female parts and it does not require an insect pollinator.

Wind will do.

However, when we have those hot, sticky days and hot, sticky nights, just like humans getting hot and sticky, tomato pollen gets hot and sticky and it won't move, and the flower closes unfertilized and drops off and no fruit is set.

One of the things you can try to do is give your tomatoes some shade.

You could take an old sheet that you have.

You could use some of this row cloth.

You could go to the garden center and buy shade cloth, whatever suits you, and you're just going to kinda drape it over your tomatoes, using maybe the cage or the trellis to help provide some afternoon shade.

Another thing you can do to make your tomatoes happy is to water deeply and thoroughly in the mornings and make sure your soil is mulched.

You want to have something to help keep that moisture in.

I use a lot of grass clippings in my garden because that's what I've got when I'm doing some bagging in some areas of my lawn, and that provides a nice organic mulch that will let the water through and then prevent the evaporation.

Sometimes, I'm lucky enough to have some leaves left over from last fall, where I bag them and ground them up to put them in other places, and I've used that successfully as mulch again, and then one other thing you can use if you can get it are arborist chips.

This is when someone has an entire tree taken down.

So the bark, the tree, the leaves, the needles, everything's all in there together.

It's a nice, coarse mulch that's, again, going to let the water through when you water it, but then prevent the evaporation when it gets hot during the day.

So there are a few things you can do to make your tomatoes happy.

You want that good soil and then you want to water thoroughly in the mornings, keeping the water off the leaves, and having that soil mulched so the moisture stays in, and then using shade if you need to to try to keep your tomatoes from scalding.

I know, this season, I've had a few tomatoes scald.

It's like a sunburn on the tomato, and I'll just put these in the compost and then wait for some other ones to ripen up.

Enjoy your tomatoes and happy gardening.