Game on! Let the Tomato Wars begin! LOL! I cracked up when I read your post, Bonnie--a/k/a HighAlt! I decided a few years ago that the biggest problem with growing tomatoes is finding out what works for YOU. I've been getting recommendations here for what to try ever since I got this house and had a place to grow veggies, and sometimes they do well, and sometimes they totally flop! I don't think there was anything wrong with the recommendations for the ones that flopped, I just think the people recommending them had different growing conditions from me. I still haven't found a red that's on my Must Have list, but I did FINALLY find a yellow/orange last year that will most likely be found in my garden into perpetuity! This won't help on this thread because I'm sure it's not available as a plant, but if anyone is wondering, it's Earl of Edgecombe. Set fruit the earliest of my large tomatoes and didn't seem to be much phased by heat--and large flavorful tomatoes. Ripened well when cut and hung in the garage too! It's a keeper for me--but who knows how well it would grow for someone else! But the thing that really cracked me up, HighAlt, was your recommendations for cherries! Hmmm! Too bad we're too far away from each other to do some Pelting! ;-) On the recommendation of several people around here I tried Black Cherry in '08, and I didn't find them to have much flavor at all (Who's gonna do the Pelting now!) For me they also took a LONG time to ripen, and they seemed to ripen just a few at a time, so I never really got a large amount to gorge on at any one time--unlike SunGold. I do totally agree that SunGold has a cracking problem, and if I didn't like the flavor so much I'd be looking for a replacement. BUT, I think I MAY have even found a solution to the cracking problem! When I go on vacation I always take a box of MY tomatoes with me, and in the past most of the SunGolds cracked right when I picked them, and even many of the ones I put in the box to take seemed to crack--sooner or later! This year I stood and Glared at then for a while, trying to figure out what to do--but I REALLY wanted some with me so I finally decided to cut off the whole "clusters" of tomatoes, which included many ripe ones and others ranging from near ripe to mostly green. There are a LOT of tomatoes on each SunGold cluster! I packed them carefully in the box, fully expecting them to split when I pulled them off the "cluster" but found, to my amazement, that when I started "picking" them, they weren't splitting! So I don't know what made the difference--is has to have something to do with the lack of water available after I cut them, but they rarely split if they've been cut from the vine with "stem" still attached, and then kept that way for "a while" before they're removed from the stem! I will be experimenting this year to see how long you need to wait to prevent the splitting! I started harvesting all my cherries like that after vacation last year, but there wasn't enough time left in the growing season to come to any good conclusions. My Must Have red cherry is Sweet Baby Girl, but that won't help here, again, because I'm sure it's not available as a plant! Even the seed is somewhat hard to find! But Sweet Baby Girl, IMO, has a GREAT flavor (not the same as SunGold), and it does NOT crack! Almost never! Don't remember why I tried that one, but I sure am glad I did! Interestingly, I have "discussed" SBG with Digit recently, and he said he had grown it too, but described a small plant that could be grown in a pot. NOT the same thing I have! Mine get over 6' tall and would EAT a pot! I'm sure we're not talking about growing conditions in this case, and we apparently got seed for two different things! From Digit's list Yellow Pear was one of the very first cherries I tried--I think because I remembered growing it when I was a kid--but for me it was a complete catastrophe! I DID get tomatoes, but they were mushy and mostly flavorless! They were bad enough that I didn't even eat most of them--threw them in the trash! Home grown tomatoes--in the trash! I don't believe even the good Illinois Dirt they were grown in when I was a kid could explain the difference in this case, so I don't know why they were so bad, but I will not be wasting time with them again. I haven't seen this linked around here for a while, and I recently managed to find it again after losing everything to the hard drive crash, so here is a link to the Cornell Tomato Base. It's set to list them by DTM (you need to scroll past the ones that don't have DTM listed), but you can change it to look them up by ratings or variety name or some other things! The ratings come from Real Life people who have grown them! On this list SunGold is rated 4.5, Sweet Baby Girl is 4.0, Black (and Chocolate) Cherry is 4.0, Sweet 100, Sweet Million, and Super Sweet 100 are all 4.0. you can check out the specific comments about each if you click on the individual varieties! Like Bonnie/Lucky, I've had problems with Mortgage Lifter! I had grown it in the past with no luck at all, but wound up growing it again this year since, in my search for the perfect yellow/orange, I had neglected to buy seed for some new red varieties! This year I finally did get some tomatoes off of it, and they were large and pretty flavorful, but they were very late, and it definitely had the hiccups when it got hot out! I'll "keep it on the back burner" but will be testing out some new ones this year. Bloody Butcher, another one that came highly recommended around here, suffered a TOTAL Failure to Thrive for me, and I never got any tomatoes at all off of it--but there are definitely other folks around here who LOVE it! Another highly recommended one here, Thessaloniki, did very little for me. Grew it twice and both times I got VERY few small tomatoes and I rated the flavor as: very average! Others in our area swear by it! Had tried Kellogg's Breakfast in the past and not gotten much/anything but decided to give it another whirl this past year and I did, pretty late, get some big and pretty tasty tomatoes, but Earl of Edgecombe was better and more productive. It'll be another of my Back Burner ones for possible future reconsideration! So, in my opinion, I guess the moral of the story--with or without The Pelting--is that you really just need to try different varieties and figure out which are going to work the best for you, and which ones have the flavor you like best. Taste is a very subjective thing, and while reading reviews might help a LITTLE bit, the best review comes from your tongue and your sense of smell! I still very much recommend you go with more than just one, Aloha, because if you just grow one and happen to get one that flops, or that just doesn't Tickle Your Taste Buds, you might decide they're not at all worth growing--and they are SO, sosososo, worth growing, even with the yearly catastrophes we all experience! Still picking a few tomatoes from last year, Skybird P.S. If you check the drop-down menu under "crop," the Cornell site has listings and ratings for WAY more than just tomatoes!. Here is a link that might be useful: Cornell Tomato Base

of the best I've tried- super fantastic is a nice good tasting tomato,i like lemon boy, I also like a burpee hybrid called orange wellington which lasts longer into the season. I have yet to taste a decent early hybrid, for early tomatoes I still prefer the open pollinated, I still like new Yorker. another tasty non hybrid for me personally is campbells 1327. I once tried a French hybrid I believe called olimpyc or something like that from the Italian seed company ingegnoli. though for decent production I found that the further you plant the plants apart makes a big difference no tomato is going to do well crammed in the middle of a row. they say tou can plant 18 inches apart. which I find ok for some smaller determinates but for larger plants. plant them 2 ft or more between plants and a little more than 3ft for the rows. the more sun and air circulation the better. don't worry about planting less plants. ps two good mainstrays are also jet star and supersonic.

Taste is subjective, what's good for you might not be good for me and vice versa. Also the same variety can vary in flavor from year to year depending on the type of growing conditions each year. Of the ones you listed and that I have grown I'd rank Sungold and Black from Tula at the top of the list, for different reasons. The Sungold are like tomato candy. Everyone who comes to my house who has tried them picks and eats them in the garden, especially the grandkids. BFT and Brandywine (no need for the pink designation) are excellent, with BFT being more productive for me, and Brandywine was the sweeter of the two. Old German and Big Rainbow are both pretty tomatoes and have good flavor, but are milder than others. Children love yellow pear for it's shape, but it is rather bland in flavor. "Your mileage may vary." Betsy

Earl of Edgecombe and Golden Queen (Livingston strain) have both been very productive for me in the past. The average size is not as huge as the big yellows like Aunt Gertie and KBX, though some GQ's can get some size to them. I do agree that the yellows are not as intense a flavor, and in a cool year like this one, even my favorites Lucky Cross (bicolor) and Yellow Brandywine are washed out tasting. I had a lot of production from KBX this year. The tomatoes were big and beautiful,very smooth without catfacing, but the flavor just wasn't there. Might have been the weather, but I didn't think regular Kellog's Breakfast was that great either in a normal warm year.