Learn all the Secrets from a World Renowned Plant Disease and Nutritionist who Advises the Professional Growers

If you’re sick of the thick skinned, tasteless balls, covered in chemicals, that they charge a small fortune for in supermarkets, the answer is easy.  Grow your own.  It’s a very enjoyable and rewarding past time, as millions of people around the world know. However you do need to follow a set of well tested guidelines to ensure your plants stay healthy so they produce masses of juicy fruit.   You don’t want disease or pests or soil problems destroying all your hard work.

Let me tell you though, surfing the internet, trying to find answers to all your tomato growing problems and then trying to sort out the facts from the anecdotal drivel is tough work.

I was fed up with reading conflicting advice, planting lots of varieties, experimenting with fertilizer and watering, losing too many tomatoes to disease and only getting a couple of kilos each harvest.  I was at my wits end. Then I had a stroke of good luck! I ran into a former colleague who I hadn’t seen for some time. She has a Masters Degree in Plant Disease and works as a Plant Nutrition Advisor for a global company in the horticultural industry. I begged her to tell me what I was doing wrong!  She came around and had a look at my plants and in 5 minutes flat she had diagnosed four simple problems! All those months of frustration ended right there. She saved me heaps of time and money with her advice. While we were talking a neighbour popped in and soon she began telling my friend about the problems she was having with her crop.   So we went next door and had a look at her plants and sure enough she had a few of the same problems as well, plus a couple of extra ones. The Mistakes We Were Making . . .

We were both guilty of incorrect pruning – so our plants were covered with lots of small fruit and not too many big ones

Neither of us had a clue really when it came to watering, particularly during the severe drought we’d just lived through.

Within minutes Lucia (my former colleague) had told us how to fix these problems and what we needed to do when we planted our next crop to minimise the chances of these issues happening again. Sure enough – my next crop was a lot healthier than I had ever been able to achieve before, and so was my neighbour’s. Needless to say our surrounding neighbours and visiting friends were amazed (and a little envious I suspect) to see the transformation. They wanted to know what we had done, if they too could meet my friend. I contacted Lucia and told here she’d caused a bit of stir among tomato growers in my area!  Lots of people wanted her help. However she is in great demand professionally and travels extensively with her job, training university researchers, professional growers, horticulturists and garden produce store owners. When she’s not traveling she’s writing technical articles about plant nutrition and disease control and conducting crop trials.

We had a dilemma. How could Lucia’s valuable knowledge be made available to all home growers, instead of just the professional growers? I’ll tell you how . . . We decided to put it all into a book. A book which is focused totally on tomatoes. Lucia sifted through her reams and reams of technical articles and presentations and I gave her a hand putting it all together into simple language that…