🍅 Tomato
King of fruit vegetables. Loves warmth and sun, dies at first frost — worth the wait.
Tomato at a glance
Is Tomato frost tolerant?
No. Cold hurts it even above freezing: damage starts at 2°C and it is killed below 0°C. Sow or plant it out only after your last frost.
What temperature does Tomato grow best in?
It grows best between 15 and 30°C. Below 10°C it stops growing altogether, and above 33°C it slows down.
How many days does Tomato take to mature?
About 75–95 days. That is a typical figure: it needs roughly 1300 °C·d of warmth above 10°C, so a warm season gets it there sooner and a cool one later. The city calendars below give the sow and harvest dates for each place.
Is Tomato a cool-season or warm-season crop?
A warm-season crop. It needs warm days and nights, so it goes in after the last frost, once temperatures are reliably above 15°C.
What the numbers mean
These are the actual parameters this game runs on. Growth is driven by growing degree days: each day contributes max(0, min(mean temp, 32) − 10), and Tomato is ready when that total reaches 1300. That is why the same seed takes a very different number of days in Dublin and in Guangzhou.
| Base temperature | 10°CBelow this, the plant accumulates no growing degree days at all. |
|---|---|
| Degree days to maturity | 1300 °C·dThe heat budget it must accumulate before it is ready to pick. |
| Comfortable range | 15–30°CWhere it grows without stress. |
| Frost damage below | 2°CLeaves start taking frost damage below this low. |
| Killed below | 0°CBelow this it does not come back. |
| Heat stress above | 33°CAbove this the plant slows down and stops setting fruit well. |
| Typical time to harvest | 75–95 days |
| Yield per bed | 25 tomatoes |
Things worth knowing
- Botanically a fruit — but in 1893 the US Supreme Court ruled it a vegetable for tariffs.
- Native to the Andes; Europeans grew it for 200 years as an ornamental, afraid to eat it.
Where and when to sow Tomato
Pick your city to see the months when Tomato scores well against that city's real climate records: