Who's behind GrowGardenTomatoes.com...

Hi, I'm Clark Hamilton, and I've grown tomatoes for many years, and in many U.S. states. I used to be in the military, so have lived and gardened in Texas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and now Washington since 1995. For the record, Ohio wins as the best of the lot for gardening. Unfortunately Seattle is not the ideal place for growing big tomatoes -- and it requires some serious planning and "tricks" to grow them here.  All the articles on seed starting indoors, cold frames, and growing early tomatoes is not just for completeness.  In Seattle you have to use all the tricks to grow the big ones.  [Aside: My wife has her own site covering lot's of things to do in Seattle if that's of interest to you.]

I wouldn't call myself a gardening expert yet, but I am hoping to become one.  But I'm definitely an avid student of gardening. I've grown tomatoes casually for years but recently it's becoming a passion. (Maybe it's the time of life??)  My regular job is computer programming. What got me started on this tomato focus was actually an affront to my male ego laid down by my beautiful bride of 30 years when she asked me why my own garden wasn't producing as many tomatoes as a friend's? Talk about laying down a challenge! After that, I began a quest to learn as much as I could about growing tomatoes.

It occurred to me that I could share all this information I was picking up on a web site, as web development is another hobby. Not only that, but I could make the site interactive and let my visitors share their knowledge and experience too, making the site all the more interesting. Thus this site was born in 2009.

My favorite hobbies are gardening, woodworking, and hiking. I plan to combine the gardening and woodworking hobbies by offering up plans for various projects that will be helpful to other gardeners. My first three efforts are the constructing raised bed gardens, the grow light stand, and the build a cold frame articles. I've got some patio planters and wooden tomato cage projects in the planning stages.

If you live in or plan to visit the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S., you might also find my site on Campgrounds in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho to be of interest.

Good luck with your own garden and I hope you find this site to be really useful.

Clark