No gardener needs encouragement to grow tomatoes. They are often the reason that many of us start gardens at all, since anyone who has tasted one fresh off the vine, especially when it’s still warm from the ripening sun, knows that it’s an altogether different thing from the pale, cold, flavorless grocery store tomatoes we have to settle for during most of the year.

Indeed, the chemicals that create the tomato’s incredible flavor, that balance of acidity and sweetness and tannic depth, start fading from the fruit as soon as we pluck it from the vine. In that sense, tomatoes are the ultimate emblem of this time of the year: a ripening that will soon fade into the cold brown of a soberer season, and which needs to be enjoyed in excess if it’s going to be enjoyed at all.

Here in the Classical Roots Vegetable Garden, we grow many, many tomatoes—at least twelve different plants are tended here each year—usually of several different varieties. And though this rainy, cloudy summer has not offered ideal conditions for these sun-lovers, in September we’re still enjoying a bumper crop that seemingly cannot be picked and eaten fast enough. Often, during a lunch break, I find myself simply pulling ripe heirlooms off the vine, snatching a little fresh basil from an adjacent bed, and feasting on the thing like a barbarian right then and there, juice dribbling down my chin despite my best efforts and the occasional passing middle-schooler shooting me a well-merited glance of concern. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, though: this is summer’s ultimate harvest and, though we all love apples and squash and pumpkins and legumes, it’s arguably the garden’s highest form of deliciousness. It merits a little barbarism.

Yet some would-be gardeners who want to try out tomatoes might balk at the seemingly endless varieties of tomatoes or—more likely—at the many opinions about how they should be grown. To take away some of the mystique, we offer here some of the best advice and practices we’ve gathered about tomato growing over the last few years.

The first thing to know is that, as long as you have a very sunny spot (at least eight hours is ideal, and six is the necessary minimum) and a frame that can support them, you can grow tomatoes easily enough. They like good rich soil and a lot of water, though you should stop watering them once the tomatoes begin to ripen, because doing so will cause the plant to consolidate its sugars into the fruit, resulting in a less watery and more delicious harvest. A new gardener could do far worse than to head to a big-box garden store in spring once the weather has ceased to dip below fifty degrees at night, grab a plant or two, and plunk them into the ground underneath some of those ubiquitous metal basket-frames.

But, if you want to push things just a bit, it’s best to know one or two more principles. The first is that, in general, there are two types of tomato plant: determinate or bush varieties, and indeterminate or vine varieties. Determinate tomatoes, though they still need support, will reach a determined height and retain a bushy structure. By contrast, indeterminates will keep growing all season unless they are clipped, behaving like a true vine. For those who are pressed for space, I recommend a classic indeterminate like the Roma, which can be trained against a single stake driven into the soil of a plot or a pot, strapped gently as they grow, then trimmed so that only a single main vine persists against the support. You’ll get plenty of fruit from this arrangement while sacrificing a minimum of real estate. But, of course, Romas are sauce-making tomatoes rather than sandwich tomatoes, so those with just a little more space might be better off with a bushy beefsteak variety, or with the universally loved Sungold cherry tomato.

Basil, the tomato’s best friend, grows into giant bushes in the Classical Roots Veg Garden by this time of year. We let it flower in late summer as a last boon for the bees.

The second most useful piece of tomato knowledge is simply that it’s best not to trim, harvest, or otherwise touch the plants when they are wet. In our North American climate, tomatoes are very susceptible to molds and mildews, which can spread like wildfire once they take hold and kill a whole crop in just a few days. Waiting until the plants are dry is a good way to prevent such tragedies. And this policy brings us to our third and final piece of general advice: don’t crowd tomato plants, either against each other or against other plants. As lovers of hot, airy climates, they need air and light to penetrate their interiors, ripening the fruit and whisking away molds before they can take hold. And if you do see a few tomatoes with birdseye spots on them—the white damaged parts of the flesh that slowly grow to consume the whole fruit—it’s best to get rid of the infected tomatoes fast, tossing them into the garbage rather than the compost, since molds can persist in soil quite happily for years. With these few principles in mind, you can expect a happy, lovely harvest by the end of summer.

Every year in late May, my wife and I come out of our door one morning to find a little Sungold tomato seedling waiting for us on our porch. A neighbor of ours grows them indoors during the last cold of the New England spring, hardens them off as the weather warms, then leaves them as gifts for the whole street. A more generous or hopeful gesture would be hard to imagine, because tomatoes are more than just a crop: they are the distillation of summer’s sweetness, little red orbs of captured sun that we can take into ourselves, sometimes savagely perhaps, but always gratefully. They are, as the poet said, a fine excess.