2018 Tomato Grow List

6 years ago

last modified: 6 years ago

Okay, let's make it clear up front: I have really, really, really cut the tomato grow list down to the bare bones, and it is going to be really short compared to my usually long, long list. This is a deliberate part of downsizing the garden to fewer edibles in the hope that I won't have to spend all day every day in my kitchen canning, dehydrating and freezing tomatoes. I cut back a lot on food preservation in 2017, and want to cut back even more in 2018 as I try to align the amount of food I preserve more closely with the amount of food we eat.

Here's the list, in no particular order:

1. Nebraska Wedding

2. SunGold F-1

3. Galina's

4. Dixie Golden Giant

5. Illini Star

6. Heinz 1350

Halladay's Mortgage Lifter

8. Mamie Brown's Pink

9. Vorlon

10. Black Krim

11. Spudakee Purple

12. Spudatula

13. Cherokee Carbon F-1

14. Genuwine F-1

15. Big Brandy F-1

Short, simple, sweet. Let the tomato games begin.

Featured Answer

wxcrawler

6 years ago

last modified: 6 years ago

Girl Girl's Weird Thing is a funny name for sure, but the tomato is no joke. It is dee-licious, beautiful, and productive. I've grown it the past two years and it will be an every year tomato for me. Don't let the fact that it's a mutation from Green Zebra fool you. It tastes nothing like Green Zebra to me. It is highly recommended to anyone that has the chance to get the seed or plants.

Lee

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Comments (34)

Nancy RW (zone 7)
6 years ago
:) Thank YOU! From culling through all the comments from the group this year, as well as tasting a few from Amy, my list, mostly from Johnny's is:

Heidi

Super Italian Paste

Sungold F1

Carbon

Cherokee Purple

Cherokee Carbon

Mortgage Lifter, Radiator Charlie's

and now Sophie's Choice for SIL
luvncannin
6 years ago
I will be growing

Early girl

Celebrity

Roma

Supersweet 100

Sungold

Black cherry

White cherry

The last 3 were my choice ;)

I also want to add porter and a few others I already have seeds for just for fun but we will see when the greenhouse is done.
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In previous years I have coddled my tomato babies and used different contraptions to protect them from inclement weather. I usually have great success. This year, I can barely spare 5min away from my baby girl to sneak into the garden to see how the maters are doing. They aren't doing so great. So, from my original list, I have had to do a few replacements with whatever I could find from the "big box" stores or local plant sales. 1.Great White (need a beefsteak) UPDATE - DEAD 2.Purple Calabash (hoping for taste since I liked purple prince) UPDATE - 1 barely alive (Jbox) 3.Green Sausage (novelty) UPDATE - DEAD 4.Purple Prince (LOVE the taste) UPDATE - DEAD 5.Polish Linguisa (need a paste!) UPDATE - Pretty sure it will be dead when I get home today. 6.Black Cherry (hoping for taste and early) UPDATE - Really DEAD 7.Sungold (last year sucked, give it another chance) UPDATE - One of 4 tomatoes I had in 2 J-Boxes(Josho) that is alive 8.Stupice (early) UPDATE - Not sure actually. Suckers are forming where the original branches were sunburned and windwracked (Jbox) 9.SilveryFirTree (for the foliage) UPDATE - I give it 45% survival chance at this stage 10.Oxheart (need a regular red!) UPDATE - ALIVE! One of 4 in jbox. Managed to find - Red Zebra - Amish Paste Box Stores - Lemon Boy - Sweet Million Will probably get something like beefsteak etc. .Will cross my fingers and pray the rest survives!
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Johnny, I know you will hate having to use a chemical fertilizer this year, but sometimes it is a necesary evil and growing crops for the food banks is more important that staying 100% organic in every instance. Then, next spring, after your green manure crops have grown and have been incorporated in the soil, it will be in much better shape. I was hoping the orchard had been there more recently so you had a chance of having more organic matter in the soil. I love the jar soil test too. I recommend it here about 2 times a month probably, and even more as planting season approaches and new gardeners join the forum. My dad's family dry-land farmed as sharecroppers in Montague County, TX, just catty-corner from the western end of Love County, OK, in the 19-teens through the start of World War II, including the Dust Bowl years. They nearly starved to death in the Dust Bowl years and my dad and his brothers often said that WWII saved their lives by getting them off the farm. At least once they joined the military, they got 3 good meals a day and put some meat on their bones. If you've never read the outstanding book, "The Worst Hard Time", by Timothy Egan, I highly recommend it. It is about the Dust Bowl years, including the role that land speculators and wheat prices paid in the whole plowing-up-the-Great-Plains and leaving it fallow debacle, as well as the unproven-but-highly-touted-at-the-time belief that dust mulch would hold moisture and prevent erosion (we see how that theory failed). I read this book at least once a year, usually during the worst of the hot, dry, summer months, to help me keep our hot, droughty summers in perspective because, no matter how hot and dry a summer, nothing we endure here comes close to what the folks in this part of the country endured during the Dust Bowl years. While Timothy Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting done on another topic, I certainly thought "The Worst Hard TIme" was also worth of a Pulitzer. He did receive a well-deserved National Book Award for "The Worst Hard Time". A friend of mine who grew up on land adjacent to ours was not born until after The Dust Bowl Years, but her mother remembered those years and she has shared with me her mother's memories of what the Dust Bowl was like for those who lived here in our part of OK, a bit east of the true Dust Bowl region, and those memories are of a very harsh time. I cannot imagine living through all of that. Just the amount of effort it took to try to keep all the dust out of their homes is staggering to think about, as is the number of lives taken by Dust pneumonia. After reading this book shortly after it was published, I became much more diligent about both mulching and cover cropping. There is not a bare inch of soil in either my front or back garden right now---the front garden is mulched and the back garden has a cover crop sown/sprouted in the fall by Mother Nature. I would have planted a cover crop back there this fall if she hadn't. It may be a weedy cover crop, but it covers every inch of the back garden except for the thickly mulched pathway that cuts through the center of the garden. And, I have no idea what "they" are thinking, but they need to read "The Worst Hard Time" before they make some errors that lead to another Dust Bowl. You know, we had some mini Dust Bowl like flare-ups here in OK during the drought of 2011, and we don't need any more of that! When we first moved here and broke ground for the garden, our neighborhood crowd of old farmers and ranchers told me about how lovely the soil used to be at our place, back before the Dust Bowl carried it all away. Our wicked red clay is, of course, the subsoil that was left after all the topsoil blew away. All those guys, except for Fred, are gone now and I miss them. There's nothing like hearing the history of your own place from the folks who grew up here, even if parts of the history are hard to bear. When I discovered cotton root rot in our soil during our first or second year here, it was the old farmer crowd who told me about how our land once was used to grow cotton. I don't know who was more surprised---they were shocked I figured out the cotton root rot on my own (but we had it in Texas, so I knew it from plant symptoms as soon as the plants began dying) and I was shocked to learn our grassland pastures once grew cotton. Those guys also regaled me with fun stories of how they'd come over here to swim in our pond after working hard all day and other stories of floods that would bring water from our creek up over the roadway, effectively giving them a day off from school because the school bus wouldn't cross the bridge when water was running over it. They also were the ones who didn't laugh and tell me I was imagining things when I told them I was hearing cougars from a distance and assumed the cougars were down in the river bottom lands. Instead, they shared their cougar stories with me and, once they knew I was hearing cougars, they cautioned me pretty much daily to be careful and to never go into the woodland unarmed. I didn't heed that advice as well as I should have until I encountered a cougar near my garden. Since then, I am better about keeping a gun nearby at all times, though occasionally I still forget to carry it with me. One of those guys, who came here in 1903 and who grew up on land very close to where we now live, would tell me how they had to take the horse and wagon down to the Red River to cut wood to haul home for firewood when he was a child because there were no trees anywhere else. Standing with him in my garden right beside a woodland of mature trees that were easily 50, 60 or 70 years old, it amazed me to hear about the time when this place was treeless. I kept asking him if he was sure there were no trees, and I think that made him mad, but it just was almost impossible for me to imagine a time when our huge woodland trees were not here. Everyone told me our first year here that I should hire someone to clear an acre of woodland for me so I could plant a garden there and have great garden soil from the start, but I'd never sacrifice decades of woodland growth for a garden plot. Tim and I have such a great appreciation for all our trees that to this day we won't hardly cut down a tree unless it is dying and is a threat to fall on a building or on the garden or something similar. Our only exception is cedar trees and we have cut down hundreds of them since moving here and have to relentlessly fight them still or they'd take over every square inch of our land. I spend part of every winter going into the woodland and cutting down all the cedar trees that sprout nonstop. Dawn
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Megan, I agree about how surprised ranchers are to learn anyone wants their empty feed tubs. The last time that Fred gave me some, he just casually told Tim "I've got about 25 feed tubs that I'm fixing to burn just to get rid of them. You can come get them if you think she wants them." If? If? Tim hopped in the truck and followed Fred home, bringing me back a big pile of feed tubs. It shocks me that someone would burn them to get rid of them, but from what I gather, that is common here. Fred is in his late 90s now and has grown tomato plants in feed tubs for about 15 years now, after he saw how well it worked for me. He puts his feed tubs up on picnic tables, a stone wall, and whatever else he has that raises the height a bit so he doesn't have to bend over to tend the plants. Jack, I have tried 5-gallon buckets and it was really hard in our July and August heat. What worked best with them was a drip line set up with several small emitters in each feed tub so that the roots were evenly watered. I had to water three times a day during the worst of the summer heat in the worst summer I remember. It is much easier if you just step up to 10 or 15 gallon sized containers, but of course, those are not as easy to find as 5-gallon buckets. If your heat isn't as bad as ours, the 5 gallons likely will work well for you. I've also grown in a galvanized metal 4' round stock tank and that worked pretty well. I had 4 tomato plants in it, plus ornamental sweet potatoes strategically planted along the edge to hang over the edge of the tank, shielding/shading the galvanized metal from the sun. And, I've even grown a lot of the weeping, cascading and patio types in one of those black cattle feed troughs that sit up on legs. I couldn't believe how many of those small to tiny plants I squeezed into that one feed trough. Where there's a will, there's a way. Dawn
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This year will be Estler's Mortgage Lifters only. I need to save seed and I just do not have any luck trying to isolate just some of the buds. I will be starting seeds of several varieties for family though. KBX, Cherokee Chocolate, Big Rainbow, some cherry types. It's so silly, seed starting is not that difficult but everyone is always carrying on about it being too hard. Oh well, at least it's something I enjoy doing!
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Rebecca (7a)
6 years ago
last modified: 6 years ago
I think I can handle posting a tomato grow list now. It's fairly short due to not wanting to accidentally plant too many tomatoes like I did last year. And trying to get on top of the disease problems with hybrids. It's all the other stuff, particularly flowers, that will be tough to nail down.

Early Girl

Brandy Boy

Big Beef

Jet Star

Sungold

SS 100

I have room for one more, TBD.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
6 years ago
last modified: 6 years ago
Hahaha! Now I'm already second-guessing myself! What a hoot. I'm thinking I need to add a red beefsteak hybrid. Maybe Better Boy? Oops, getting lost in Territorial Seeds and Tatiana's database, to boot. Head is getting fuzzy.
LoneJack Zn 6a, KC
6 years ago
I made a seed trade with a fellow GW member in the KC area a couple months ago and received 27 new to me varieties of tomatoes. I am only growing 10 slicers and 2 cherry plants next season so I obviously won't be able to try all of the new ones.

As of now my grow list includes:

2 Big Beef

BKX ( Black Krim potato leaf)

Black Cherry

Carbon

Girl Girl's Weird Thing

Indian Stripe

JD's Special C-Tex

Orange Jazz

Pork Chop

Rebel Yell

Sungold

I'll also be starting some tomatoes for some neighbors and friends and I'm hoping to talk them into trying a few of the other new varieties so I can at least taste a few more.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
6 years ago
Nancy, Not Better Boy unless you like tomatoes with the texture of grocery store tomatoes. I'd suggest for a red slicer, you follow Rebecca's and Jack's lead and plant Big Beef. It is so much better than Better Boy, and I grow it often when I want a red slicer. It just so happens that reds are my least favorite tomatoes because I like the flavors of pinks, purples and blacks so much more, but I'd say Big Beef ends up in my garden at least half the time anyway.

Jack, I think Girl Girl's Weird Thing is my favorite new tomato name just because it sounds so odd. lol. You'll have to tell us what it is that makes it weird.

I have tried so hard to cut back on the experimentation with new varieties, and that possibly will make me crazy. My husband would say I'm already crazy so he won't notice any real difference if the lack of experimentation makes me nuts.

I toyed with growing Principe' Borghese for sun-dried tomatoes but talked myself out of it. The last time I grew it, I think I planted 8 of them and it took me hours and hours each week to harvest them. If I ever grow them again, I'll just wait until the plants are heavily loaded and then pull up the entire plant to hang and dry instead of laboriously harvesting all those small tomatoes.

The hard part about trying to simplify the garden is that even though I know it is a smart decision, my gardener's heart still wants to grow everything.

Y'all keep posting your lists so we all can keep drooling over the many wonderful varieties.

Dawn
LoneJack Zn 6a, KC
6 years ago
last modified: 6 years ago
Dawn - GGWT is supposed to be a mutation of Green Zebra that developed by chance in someones garden only a few years ago. It was said that the grower's dog whose name was Girl Girl picked one of them and brought it to the grower and the grower then noticed the mutated plant growing among the GZ plants.

Here is a link to one vendor website that offers it.

GGWT
Nancy RW (zone 7)
6 years ago
Wish they had a laugh button to choose, at the bottom.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
6 years ago
Jack, Thanks for the info, and I am still laughing. This might be the first tomato I can think of that was named after a dog.

Nancy, I agree.

Dawn
Rebecca (7a)
6 years ago
Nancy, Big Beef really is a good standard red slicer, nice hefty, juicy tomatoes, and tolerates heat and disease very well. Taste pretty darn good too. You should be able to find a Burpee pack when the seed racks hit, if you don't want to order. I think that's where mine are from.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years ago
The contenders for in ground spots. There's 20 here. I think I put that many in 3 beds last year. There are a few I can cut if I decide to give them more room. Of course I had 3 Heidi plants last year, but Large Red Cherry will grow in a pot. I might cut one of the Sioux.

*=new to me

Arkansas Traveler

Cherokee Carbon

Cherokee Purple

Defiant F1

Early Girl (F1) ind

Gary ‘OSena

Grandma Suzy's Beefsteak

Indian Stripe

J D’s Special C-Tex

Jetstar F1

Ozark Pink*

Sioux

Super Sioux

Vorlon*

2017 not JDs saved seeds (the wonderful tasting cherry that grew in the same solo cup as my JD's Special C-Tex)

Black Cherry

Large Red Cherry

Early Girl Bush (F1)

Heidi

Speckled Roman

Then I have these dwarfs:

Adelaide Festival (dwarf) Purple

Boronia Dwarf Tomato

Chocolate Champion

Fred's Tie Dye

Maralinga (dwarf)

Sleeping Lady (dwarf)

Tanunda Red (dwarf)

Walter (det)

Walter and Fred's Tie Dye have done well in the past. (Both are bigger than dwarf). I grew most in 1 gal pots last year, which I don't think was big enough. I think Chocolate Champion did well despite abuse. However, there is also a Cherokee Chocolate I show I started, but maybe put in a big pouch. I can't remember it now. I thought it was a dwarf, but it's not, it's a mutation of Cherokee Purple. Pretty sure it would not have done well in a pot. Might need to grow it instead of CP and the Chocolate Champion, so I'm sure which is which. I also notice I bought San Marzano last year I haven't grown yet. Obviously this will be tweeked before things go in the ground.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
6 years ago
Will be anxious to hear about them all as the year progresses--were do you get the dwarf seeds from, Amy? I did order the Big Beef, Dawn and Rebecca. Jack must REALLY like them since he got two. I may try to pick up an Early Girl, too.
zippity1
6 years ago
my favorite is chocolate cherry
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
6 years ago
I cannot tell you where Amy got her seeds for varieties from The Dwarf Tomato Project, but I think the biggest selection of those varieties that I've seen is from Victory Seeds:

VS's 66 Varieties From The Dwarf Tomato Project

Some other places have some of them as well. You can Google and read all about The Dwarf Tomato Project, which also is addressed in some detail in Craig LeHoullier's book, "Epic Tomatoes".

I really like The Dwarf Tomato Project and want for these varieties to succeed, but.....

in my garden, in the recent wet Springs we've had, every single one of the Dwarft Tomato project plants has, at some point, succumbed to black mold even when no other tomato plants in my garden have it. One day they look fine and then the black mold shows up and they go downhill rapidly after that. They have done better in the bad drought years when our relative humidity and rainfall both are lower over the long haul. In the horrific drought of 2011, varieties from The Dwarf Tomato Project produced later in the summer than most other varieties I grew that year, even after I stopped watering. For reference, in 2011 we had about 90 days with highs over 100, often over 110, and no rain for over 60 days and the dwarfs thrived in those conditions, at least until I stopped the supplemental watering. No black mold that year that I can remember. So, having had them let me down so much in wet Springs, I don't have any on the list for this year. If we were to go without rainfall for most of January and February and it was starting to look like a bad drought year, I might start some from dwarfs from seeds late to grow in containers in the drought.

It is harder to follow the lineage of individual dwarf varieties now than it was in the beginning, but these plants originated from a breeding line initially named after the seven dwarfs. There's been so much more breeding and crossing and so many descendants now that it is harder to follow the family tree than it used to be.

Dawn
Nancy RW (zone 7)
6 years ago
Thanks, Dawn. I was just thinking my SIL in Wyoming might be interested. Maybe I'll grow her one. (See, it's not enough for just ME to be enabled!) Heck, maybe I better grow my DIL in Mpls one, too.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years ago
I may have gotten dwarfs from Victory, but probably Sample Seed Shop for most of them. They haven't been diseased for me, just not very productive. But they were also probably abused.
Macmex
6 years ago

Baker Family Heirloom

Prudence Purple (Strain I received in 1984)

Sioux

Sunray VF (Our youngest daughter's favorite)

Black Cherry

Black (maybe?)

I may grow "Black" again. This is from Sandhill Preservation Center. It's one of the earliest black tomatoes to surface in this country. By that, I mean, while it was still in the 80s. I found the plants to be super vigorous and hardy, even after being nuked by herbicide laden mulch. The fruit are plentiful and gorgeous. They are more sweet than acid, which is not my personal preference, but my wife LOVES them. Whenever I write a negative about a black tomato, the reader needs to keep in mind that we all have differing tastes. If I'm not fond of the flavor, that's "just me." This is a good one.

Eros (Maybe?) - I have the seed and have never grown it. Yet, when I looked it up, it appears to be a good one for canning. Anyone here grown it?
LoneJack Zn 6a, KC
6 years ago
last modified: 6 years ago
George - I grew Black last year for the first time and liked it. It was fairly productive for an OP yielding 36 fruit and 23 lbs. The only reason I'm not growing one this year is because I received 27 new varieties in a seed trade and probably 1/2 of them were blacks and I want to try some of the new ones.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
6 years ago
I like "Black" too and it has done well for me. My problem is there's so many black tomatoes and so little time and space to grow them all.

Amy, I have no idea why the dwarf plants from this breeding project are so prone to black mold in my garden, especially when none of the other plants seem to get it, but it is what it is. It has happened every time I've grown them except for 2011, so it is a definite thing in my front garden. Other than that I liked them. They were more productive early than late, but often that is linked more to the heat here than anything else so I do not know if that is typical for them in all parts of the country. I grew Dwarf Mr. Snow in a container beside the garden shed one year and it did well there (no black mold) and was fairly productive, though not heavily productive. Perhaps here at our place, the dwarf plants need to be grown in containers well away from the front garden since it clearly harbors black mold that it somehow saves just for them. Even when I tried planting the dwarf plants in a row with non-dwarf types, alternating Dwarf-Nondwarf-Dwarf-Nondwarf, etc., the dwarf plants all got black mold but the regular plants between then did not. It is maddening. They always are absolutely the best looking plants in the garden until the black mold hits, and then it is all downhill from there.

Dawn
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
6 years ago
Hi Lee!

Good to see you here. Got your grow list made yet?

Dawn
wxcrawler
6 years ago
last modified: 6 years ago
Hi Dawn!

I have most of my list made. Like you, I am scaling back this year. I had 26 tomato plants, 7 peppers, 3 cucumber, and 2 melon plants last Spring/Summer. That was just way too many plants for my little Suburban South Tulsa backyard garden. So I am limiting myself to 15 tomato plants this year. I may do a cucumber and a pepper or two, but I haven't decided yet.

Assuming I stick to my 15 plant limit (big assumption :-) ), here's what I have so far.........

Every Year
Black Cherry
Sun Sugar
Girl Girl's Weird Thing
Break O'Day (new seed source)
Aunt Ginny's Purple
Kosovo
Yellow 1884
Cherokee Green

New This Year
Rebel Yell
Missouri Pink Love Apple
Maglia Rosa
Fuego Verde
Cherry Roma

That leaves me with 2 slots left. I'll probably fill those with a couple of plants from The Tomatoman's Daughter here in Tulsa. Lisa always has a great selection, so I'm sure I'll find a couple I've never tried before.

Lee
luvncannin
6 years ago
Okay inventory is done but I have 46 varieties. HOW to choose? Only 10.....
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
6 years ago
Lee, Great list! I want to see if you can go to The Tomatoman's Daughter and only bring home 2 plants. I know that I could not. Keep us posted!

Kim, Choose the 10 varieties that have proven to be your best overall producers. Since you're doing this professionally, it has got to be all about the productivity and sales appeal of the varieties you choose.

Dawn
luvncannin
6 years ago
My 10 are personal lol even though I dont eat them.

Market list (350 plants total)
Early girl
Celebrity
Roma
Abe Lincoln
Sweet 100
Snow White
Cherry
Black Cherry
Sungold

My list (quantity to be determined at time of planting lol)
Golden Jubilee
Black Krim
Cherokee Purple
Porter
Pink Bertoua Cameroon ?
and a few others, maybe just close my eyes and pick. I received so many from WS and havent tried them all yet.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
6 years ago
Nice list. It is impossible to try them all because there's just too many. Believe me, I've tried, and honestly, after growing close to 1,000 different varieties in my lifetime, I am somewhat amazed to report that my favorite tomatoes still are some of the ones I've grown the longest---despite my efforts to find 'better' ones. So, I think I mostly have been growing the best ones all along. This would amuse my father greatly because even though he enjoyed watching me grow many, many different varieties, he didn't care to experiment like that himself---he felt like he already grew great varieties (and he did). It isn't that I haven't found a lot of good ones, but I haven't found that many that are good enough to knock the old favorites off the growing rotation.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years ago
FYI Kim, since you don't eat them, I will tell you I was sorely disappointed in the taste of Pink Bertoua. It grew like a weed in a difficult year and produced a lot. But it was down right sour, not just tart. It would be ok in sauce, mixed with other tomatoes, but on its own I didn't like it.
luvncannin
6 years ago
Amy that s funny cause I never tried it. I grew it out 2 years ago and love the plant and production and the look of the tomato
hazelinok
6 years ago
Okay. Decision made. My lengthy tomato list:

Early Girl

Sungold

Arkansas Traveler

Eva Purple Ball

Hoping to plant 6 of each for a total of 24 plants.
LoneJack Zn 6a, KC
6 years ago
last modified: 6 years ago
Lee - Thanks for the great review of GGWT. I am looking forward to growing it out and especially eating them.

Looks like everyone has exciting tomato lists this year! I have to wait a few more weeks than most of you before I can start my seeds. Until then I'll have to be content with my indoor lettuce, my leek and bunching onions starts, and eventually broccoli and cauliflower late in February

An update on my chia Trump head. It seems that I must have let the seeds dry out early on because only about 25% of the seeds germinated and then none of them grew out. I think putting his head under my grow lights with a fan blowing on it was a mistake. I have enough seed left to start it again

Leeks - 2 Megaton, 2 King Richard, I Gevaria at 16 days from seed

Evergreen Hardy White bunching onions at 9 days from seed

Muir lettuce is ready for harvest #6
Nancy RW (zone 7)
6 years ago
I enjoy seeing your tomato-growing lists, all. I also had a good time looking up some of your choices. And seeing your seedlings, Jack. My fingers are itching! I think I might plant some slow-growing flowers, just to be doing something.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years ago
I broke down and bought some Ramapo seeds and I think there are 2 tomatoes on my Sand Hill list. I thought I could get by this year without buying tomatoes. Oh well.
luvncannin
6 years ago
Anyone ever try shady lady?
User
6 years ago
last modified: 6 years ago
The Ag Experiment Station in Lubbock included Shady Lady in their tomato trials back in 2007. It was in the bottom 25% for total production and at the bottom for marketable production because of its relatively high %age of fruits with radial cracking. 2007 was an odd year, very cool and wet from March thru June and continued relatively cool but drier thru the remainder of the growing season. At LBB there were no days above 100F and only 62 days got above 85F during the whole growing season, compared to the normal 120-125 days above 85F.

I grew one plant in 2010 with a locally grown plant from Ivey Gardens in LBB. It is a large red, round similar in fruit size and plant growth to Celebrity. Celebrity tasted better to me, though Shady Lady gets rave reviews for taste in California. It developed tomato spotted wilt virus pretty quickly and had a shorter production life than either Celebrity or Early Girl. I live in a hotspot for TSWV, in the country 35 miles out of LBB, and since 2010 I have grown only TSWV resistant hybrids. There are just two of us well past 65 and only water and labor for 12 plants and we grow tomatoes mostly for canning and freezing for winter use. Even the TSWV resistant hybrids with crack resistance and heat setting ability taste better than store bought tomatoes .

Hope this helps and let us know where you are selling this year in :Lubbock.

2018 Tomato Grow List

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