The tomato is, by all accounts, Canadian gardeners’ favourite vegetable. In this readable and useful new addition to the Firefly Gardener’s Guide series, veteran garden writer Jennifer Bennett ably proves her point that it’s also among the easiest vegetables to grow. (This will come as a great relief to those gardeners who optimistically plant seedlings each spring and end up with tangled sprawls of foliage, stems, and half-rotted tomatoes every fall.)

Bennett deftly unfolds the mysteries of hybrid versus open-pollinated varieties and determinate (or bush) tomatoes versus indeterminate (staking) plants. She offers a quick course in pests and diseases, from tomato spotted wilt virus – called “the AIDS virus of greenhouse plants” – to blossom-end rot.

There is hardly a more trusted garden writer in Canada than Bennett, a former gardening editor for Harrowsmith magazine, whose books include the landmark The Northern Gardener (re-published in revised and expanded form last year as The New Northern Gardener.)

Tomato plants, Bennett tells us, want seven things: warmth, fertility, water, bright light, pollination, calmness, and freedom from pests and diseases. She explains clearly and concisely how best to provide these. It’s important in a small handbook format like this to remain focused on the subject and to be precise in the advice you give. Bennett does just that.

Even experienced tomato growers will find meat in this handbook: the longest chapter gives brief descriptions of 142 varieties of cherry, medium-size, large, paste, and unusual tomatoes. For anyone who’s wandered dazed and confused past garden-centre racks or through seed catalogues, these listings will be a godsend. Recommendations are made for most growing regions in Canada and the United States and sources are shared between both countries, so there will hardly be a gardener who won’t find this compact book both useful and relevant.

I’ve long maintained that muddy thumbprints are a gardening book’s medal of honour; that the most valuable guides are carried into garden centres in hip pockets or shopping bags. The Tomato Handbook is sure to win both these laurels.