see what you should have done is just toss some rotten ones onto your driveway or behind the shed and ignored them and next year you'd have had the biggest baddest bitchingest tomato plants you'd ever seen

Yeah. I have the largest respect for people who manage to get that far. It really is not easy.

We planted tomatoes on the backyard last year and we drowned in them, kilos and kilos of the stuff

It also would’ve been a lot cheaper to get the same amount from the grocery store 😅

Not wanting to add complexity or anything but have you considered trying a deep water culture (DWC) hydroponic system? That’s all a fancy way to say a dark colored large 5-ish gallon bucket of water with specific hydroponic nutrients dissolved in the water (I use a generic balanced powder and it works nicely) and an air pump to keep the water from going stagnant. As long as you keep the air pump dry, you can do the whole thing outside without issue. I hang mine under a plastic camera guard and it works nicely.

I’m terrible at growing things in dirt because dirt remembers what you did to it (holds salts and nutrient excess unless you flush the soil), but hydroponics is a totally different thing. You can just toss the water and give it new when it starts showing signs of nutrient deficiency/toxicity. The roots end up massive and healthy and everything grows faster since there’s zero resistance in the growth medium. Just sucking up everything they can. Tho since the typical advice is to just completely toss the water at least weekly once it’s grown up (great for outside gardens or houseplants after the tomato buckets), you usually don’t end up with imbalances like that at all.

Proper care of a hydro system makes for a bountiful harvest most years, and if you want, you can very easily keep a tomato clone over winter to keep some smaller amount of production going. Hydro works very well inside because you don’t bring most of the bugs you would with a dirt pot.

Throw like 4 standard screw-in daylight bulbs of 60+watt-equivalent leds and you’ve got a grow space. No fancy expensive nonsense required.