Rutgers is a classic 3R tomato, it's round, red, and reliable. It's been grown for nearly 70 years, making it an heirloom type simply because of its longevity as a favorite for home growers and farmers too. Any tomato can be cooked but choosing them are based on your preferences. DETs are varieties which have an expected or determinable height, they crop the majority of their fruits all at once, flowering and fruiting drops dramatically after that and so, just for convenience, you can yank the plants after you crop them and give the ground over to another plant. INDs have an indetermined length, they just keep growing and growing and flowering and fruiting along their stems until the plant is killed by frost or disease. Pastes and beefsteaks generally are meaty fruits, not as juicy, drippy, slurpy as others and do quite well for sauce or slicing. Globes or Oblates (slightly flattened fruits) are all-purpose and do well for salad, slice or stuffing--baked or fresh. Small fruited tomatoes are nice for salad or tossing into a saute pan. They can be cooked whole or just slice in half to prepare them. Hubs likes cherries, they're convenient snack-sized tomatoes, juicy and sweet. He's also fond of tomato salad made by chunking up something ripe off the vine and stirring in just a dibdab of mayo. Heirlooms or heritage types can be red, but a good many are not. They come in all colors of the rainbow--the purple or black types aren't really purple or black, but are shades of brick. White tomatoes aren't white, they're cream to pale yellow in color. There are GWRs--which are Green when Ripe--they don't have a color gene and just ripen to green hue, some, like most tomatoes, will develop a rosy blush as they ripen and sweeten. And there are bi-colors too, which may have more than two colors, like Berkeley Tie Die, Black and Red Boar, or Striped German--to name a few. Shapes are varied. Currants, cherries, grapes, saladettes, round, oblate, beefsteak, ruffled, pear-shaped, plums (which can also be elongated). Some tomatoes have shoulders, some have nipples (giggety), some have a few cavities where seeds develop and some have more but smaller cavities where their seeds develop, and some seem to be all wall--and these are nice for stuffing--that's a trait called Puffiness. And then there's different foliage types--there's one called Silvery Fir Tree which makes really odd leaves which you can gather from the name. Strangeness is part of the passion of growing heirlooms--they're not all 3Rs, and flavor is part of the love. If you're new to growing tomatoes from seed then selection of what you want to grow can be overwhelming. It's akin to walking into a wine store and wanting something that tastes good but you don't know where to begin. So, because of the overwhelming amount of choices I am happy to select for people--I understand that it's tough to decide if you're new to the hobby. At WinterSown.Org there's an order form which you fill out with your choices and defaults--people who want me to choose for them just send in the blank form. I look at the address that the seeds are going to and I use locality as a guide for beginning the selection process. If someone lives in North Dakota then it doesn't make sense for me to select a tomato that will mature in 90 days after being set out into the garden--they need a tomato which will ripen before their first freeze in later summer or very early Autumn. And conversely, people who live in the deep hot south will also need fast maturing varieties because hot, hot summer weather causes malformation of blossom and fruiting is very, very difficult until the cooler weather comes along. If you're in zone 6 and 7 and 8 you can grow just about any tomato in your climate and expect a success, you may still have your local disease pressures, but growing season nice and long. Zones 9 and 10, Zones 5 and 4, are going to need fast cropping tomatoes.

Again this is my opinion only. Many of what I call the "dark" types taste very similar to me. There are a few exceptions. There are a few that I feel the flavor stands out and different. But here in my climate I have to choose a variety not only for flavor but for what will produce well also. And many of the darks do better here. Another issue with many of the varieties is there are several what I call imposters being sold. Cherokee Purple is one of them. The first time I ordered seeds and tried it I said I would never grow it again. Then the original person who received the seeds and distributed some out sent me seeds. The difference was daylight and dark. I have grown plants from commercial sources usually alongside those from my saved seeds of the original.So far I've always seen some differences either in taste, size or color. There are several other varieties that this applies too. I feel this along with each of us having our own taste preferences is the reason there is so many differring opinons about a variety and not only the darks. Brandywine is one. I'm strongly convinced that your soil and growing conditions also enter in. I have never found that "to die for" flavor in a Pink Brandywine. The best tasting, best producing Brandywine type I've grown is a selection from the Tulsa area named Randy's Brandy. Very good and very productive for me last year. The seeds I received produced both leaf types and the seeds I saved from the RL plant that did so well is also. I will continue to select to see if I can stabilize so the seeds from each leaf type are stable. This is one I feel is worth trying for anyone who likes Brandywine. Our growing conditions including our soil influences the flavor greatly also. Another reason one person will really like the flavor of a variety and another may not. KB is a prime example. It is one of my favorites. For the ultimat flavor it needs to either be grown in well draining soil or watered only when absolutely necessary. Otherwise the flavor will be watered down. It also produces very well here normally. I believe it is Dawn who says it doesn't produce as heavy for her. But then varieties like Rutgers produce a lot better for her than they do for me. So in the end we each have to find varieties we like the flavor of, that will produce consistently in our own garden. Jay

Hi, nopeda123! There are several versions of Rutgers. I don't know if any are single-crop or double-crop; the one I've grown had continuous production. It sounds like you're starting seeds: if purchased at a store, what brand are they? If purchased from a catalog or seed-seller, who did you buy them from? What is the exact variety name on the packet? Does the packet say "Indeterminate," "Determinate," or "Semi-determinate"? As far as I'm concerned, the only reason to prune a tomato (i.e. limit its yield) is lack of space and/or size of container and/or the limitations of your support system. So how large (in gallons ... or height and width ... or whatever) are the containers you'll be growing them in? How do you plan to support or cage them, and how wide is the space they'll be able to expand into? Do you have the containers already, and if so, how large are they? Last question: what's your USDA zone -- or failing that, where do you live? If you post it in your GW account (the "Garden Zone" box on the "Edit Your Membership Details" page), we won't have to keep asking you. 8-D Just enter your zip code here to find your zone: http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/

I don't agree with blanket statements that more sun is always better. While this might be true in places with high humidity and lower elevations, here in the hot arid SW at 5000 feet, there is such a thing as too much sun, and plants which receive a few hours of shade/partial shade always produce better and are less stressed. Plants here that receive 12 hours of direct sunlight will develop a blasted look in the summer where the color is more grayish-green than lush green. The lower leaves get leathery faster than shaded plants, and the leaves rarely provide a flattened surface to the sun, no matter how carefully you maintain moisture levels. At a certain point here, sun ceases to be a critical component and becomes a stress factor. Plants grown in buckets in these conditions do even worse. They dry out very quickly, and the buckets can get extremely hot when placed on surfaces like concrete, brick, or stone. To help, you can put a layer of mulch in the bucket to help retain moisture, and if your ground temperatures are high, you can place the bucket higher up on some type of stand. Regarding your plants, yellow pear does have thinner, more sharply jagged leaves. It's typical of that variety. Under the right conditions, they can become obscenely large. Since you only have one plant to compare, it might not actually be the conditions that are unfavorable, but it could be the individual plant itself. When you transplanted the yellow pear, was it still in any type of peat container?