2019 Tomato Grow List

5 years ago

Here's my tomato grow list for this coming Spring. This year I'm going to try to do proper garden rotation by moving all the tomatoes from the front garden to the back garden. Hopefully the back garden's more sheltered location will give the tomato plants more protection from the airborne herbicide drift that kills some of my plants every Spring when people around us start spraying herbicides. Last year I lost not only tomato plants to herbicide drift, but also watermelon, okra and bean plants, as well as some herbs and flowers. I cannot move the whole garden to the back, so I'm moving the most important part of it.

Aunt Ginny's Purple

Azoychka

Big Beef F-1

Big Brandy F-1

Black Krim

Black Cherry

Brandy Boy F-1

Carmello F-1

Caspian Pink

Cherokee Carbon F-1

Cherokee Purple

Dora

Dr. Wyche's Yellow

Early Doll F-1

Gary O Sena

Greek Rose

Heidi

Homestead 24

Indian Stripe

JD's Special C-Tex

Jetsetter F-1

Jetstar F-1

Juliet F-1

KC-146

Liz Birt

Moreton F-1

Mule Team

Nebraska Wedding

Orange Minsk

Phoenix F-1

Pruden's Purple

Ramapo F-1

Rutgers 250

Sioux

Stump of the World

Sunsugar F-1

Supersonic F-1

True Black Brandywine

Tycoon F-1

Vorlon

Okay, I've shown y'all my list. Now show me yours.

Dawn

Featured Answer

Macmex

5 years ago

last modified: 5 years ago

My list rarely changes very much. I'm going to grow Baker Family Heirloom for sure.

Last year I didn't grow Heidi and regretted it. So, this year I will.

I'm mulling a good size planting of Roma VF, as we haven't canned any tomatoes for two years. Time to can again.

Sioux is a must for me.

Last year I grew out an unstable F6 or F7 cross called Mocross. We had some unfortunate circumstances which coincided with its planting, yet by the end of the season this one proved itself to be excellent. Essentially, the fruit was of uniform size and flavor, but I had both red and pink fruited plants. Mocross carries Sioux in its linage, and that's the closest I can come in describing the fruit, though, it has a thicker, more durable skin. The plants were determinate but very heavy producers. I hope to grow out a nice stand of these in 2019. This might well be a new long term favorite

Here's a picture of fruit set.

Here's a picture of the pink version.

I also planted Tuxhorn's Yellow and Red, an Indiana bi-color I've had for decades. It didn't make. I'm still dealing with herbicide contamination, from hay we purchased in 2016. This one took until August to recover and never produced fruit. So, I'll probably plant it again in 2019.

Jerreth will kill me if I don't grow Black Cherry. I planted it in 2018, and the herbicide contamination got it.

I may plant Little Bells again. This is a small plant, small fruited indeterminate. Fruit are red and standard red tomato color. Flavor is good. I'd like to plant it for a fall crop. We'll see. I struggle to keep up with weeding and planting.

I need to renew my Prudence Purple seed again. This is a smooth, large fruited pink beefsteak, which grows on a determinate plant. It has pretty good heat resistance for a large beefsteak, and excellent flavor. But it never sets a really heavy crop in our climate. I got my seed from an older fellow in Charleston, SC, in the early 80s. While we were out of the country a seed saving friend, name Roger Quiet grew it in Broken Arrow, and had his brother grow it in Tahlequah. I lost my seed in the process of moving back to the USA in 2001, and Roger sent me frozen seed from something like 1986, which got me back in business. I have to keep this one going.

I almost forgot, I will almost certainly put in a fall planting of Tomato Rocky, the heirloom I received through my father. It doesn't like our heat, but I've learned it will produce if planted to come into production in the fall.

History and Lessons Learned from Tomato Rocky

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Comments (44)

okoutdrsman
5 years ago
These are the ones I plan on growing as of right now. I have additional seed orders in that include some of the others I liked from Spring Fling, but I'm not locked in yet on growing them this year.

Black Cherry

Big Sungold

Carbon

Black From Tula

Vorlon

BKX

Jetstar

Heidi

Juliet

Some of the others I'm looking at once the seed comes in, are.

Spudatula

Spudakee

Big Beef

Snow White

JDs Special C Tex

There's probably 6-8 more I'm looking at, but haven't ordered and about that many I have seed for already, so I may add more to the list later on!
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
5 years ago
My plan is to cut back on tomatoes and grow more greens. But it's hard to pare down the list.

My "Always" list includes

Arkansas Traveler

Large Red Cherry

Cherokee Carbon F1

Early Girl F1

Heidi

Ramapo F1

Grandma Suzy's Beefsteak

My "Probables"

Black Cherry (this has been sickly last couple of years, so I'm not sure)

Jetstar F1 (early and productive)

Defiant F1 (disease resistant if we have a wet spring)

Indian Stripe

Cherokee purple

Gary 'O Sena

Sioux or Super Sioux

Vorlon (I've grown this before, but when DH brings in tomatoes I don't know who's who. Don't know what it tastes like. what do you like about it?)

Baker Family Heirloom

JD's Special C-Tex

I have a bunch of dwarf varieties that really have not impressed me except for Fred's Tie Dye, which is pretty big for a dwarf.

"Maybes":

Earliana

Pink Boar

Dester

Cherokee Chocolates

Black Brown Boar

Ozark Pink

Shoot, I don't have time for this.
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Hi Bob, I'll preface my comments by stating we were in drought throughout the spring and summer with very little rainfall at all until June, and even then, there was far too little. So, while our growing conditions here in Oklahoma are always pretty harsh, this year was worse than usual because it was backwards. Instead of having good spring rainfall to get the garden off to an early start and then the usual summer drought, we had drought from Jan-Sept (and the drought still is going strong), and began June with only about 6" of rainfall recorded for the entire year at that point. We got a lot of rain and humidity in June and July, though not nearly enough rain to end the drought. With the weather being so bizarrely dry during our normal wet season, some tomato plants weren't very happy. TexWine (and Dixiewine, and it was my first year with both) germinated a little slowly and grew, as seedlings, very slowly. Because of that, I kept the seedlings in their starter containers longer than all the other varieties I grew, and didn't put them into the ground until late April. Most of the other varieties went into the ground between late March and mid-April. Even then, the Dixiewine and Texwine plants were ridiculously small and were so far behind my other plants that I feared transplanting them into the garden was going to be a waste of time and space. How did it work out? Texwine set fruit earlier than Dixiewine, and set a lot more of it. The first few were quite large, and the later ones got progressively smaller as summer went on, which is typical in our hot growing conditions. Because we had several good days with decent rainfall and cooler than normal temperatures in both June and July, Texwine (and Dixiewine) continued setting fruit well into July. The Texwine fruit had very good flavor. So did Dixiewine, which may have hurt its own cause by setting tons and tons of fruit all at once. Because it had set so very many fruit during a period of severe to extreme drought, the fruit stayed much smaller than I expected. TexWine had significantly fewer fruit but they enlarged to the expected size. Even though Texwine produced less fruit per plant than Dixiewine, it still produced a lot of fruit. I hate to even attempt to form an opinion on varieties that are new to me on the basis of one very odd growing season with weather that is almost totally opposite from what we usually get, but I was pleased enough with how they both performed that I'll plant them again next year. Drought conditions worsened again in August in conjunction with very hot weather at our house, and both plants died back to the ground. I didn't irrigate as much as I usually do in August and probably could have kept them alive if only I'd watered them. A little rain (though not nearly enough) began falling again in September, and both plants have resprouted from the ground but the chances that they'll flower and produce a ripe tomato before the first freeze here (around mid-November) falls somewhere between slim and none. I do think it says something about their resilience that they did regrow from the roots once some rain finally fell. Are you wondering if the flavor is a good as Brandywine? I'd say that, as grown here in the conditions we had, it isn't quite as good, but it is very, very good. Finally, to give you the proper context, I planted two Brandywine Sudduth plants in the ground around the end of March. Normally, I am lucky 4 years out of 5 to get 6 fruit off a Brandywine plant. We just get too hot too early for it most years and the heat and humidity shut down pollination before many fruit can set. In this most bizarre year of years, both my Brandywine Sudduth plants produced dozens and dozens of fruit per plant, with the first ones ripening very early (either very late May or earliest June). They also continued setting fruit as late as mid-July, though production slowed down a lot by early July. This was our best Brandywine year since 2004 (a very wet and humid year that the Brandywine plants loved, likely because the weather also was cooler than usual). I wish I'd had the Texwine and Dixiewine plants at the same size as the Brandywine Sudduth plants and could have put them all in the ground, side by side, at the same time, because that would have been a more fair comparison. My expectations (prior to sowing seed) were that Texwine and Dixiewine likely would outproduce Brandywine (in my garden everything outproduces Brandywine most years) and, instead, the total opposite happened. I don't know if their slow growth as seedlings will be repeated in 2015. I'm hoping it was just a fluke. I grow hundreds of tomato plants from seed every year, and there's not many varieties that ever have been as slow to grow in the seedling stage as Dixiewine and Texwine so I am hoping that this year's extremely slow growth was an anomaly. We had an incredible tomato year here despite terrible drought conditions, and a huge onslaught of grasshoppers, so I cannot complain. Mostly, this was due to the miracle of irrigation. Local gardeners here in our area tended to have either a very bad tomato year (if they were not irrigating in March through May when the rain was almost nonexistent) or an outstanding year (if they irrigated in spring) I'm hoping for more typical weather conditions next year so I can see how Texwine and Dixiewine perform in the type of weather we normally have. Dawn
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From your list I've grown the following: Isis Candy - was nice and fruit was super sweet but prone to cracking; prefer Sun Gold Super Snow White - not much flavor though the fruit was large (2oz); prefer Dr. Carolyn's (ping pong sized white cherries) Stupice - gave me an early harvest but flavor was mushy; my fav for early is "Kimberly" Sungold - classic home run variety. I grow it every year. Thanks for highlighting those two sweet cherry varieties. They certainly sound fabulous. This year as a little experiement I'm going to compare Sungold (F1) and Sun Sugar (F1) with their supposed OP replacements: Ambrosia (OP) and Big SunSelect (OP). Here's my tomato list: smithmal
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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. 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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. 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Jay, I do grow Black Cherry and really like it. It has a very unique flavor that I've never found in any other cherry tomato. It was released by Vince Sapp of Tomato Grower's Supply Company, and it seems like it hit the market just a few years before he passed away. The flavor is indescribably good. I don't know a lot about Burrell's Special and I'm not sure if they've ever released breeding info on it. I believe that it is a lot like Sioux because it is a good heat setter but may set fruit slightly larger than Sioux if there is good moisture. Daniel, Did you have the whiteflies this year? Last year? I've only had whiteflies twice in my life, with about 20 years in between, so I'm hoping my luck holds. All my tomato plants are outside to stay and the first two dozen plants are in the ground. With all this early heat, I hope to get more in the ground tomorrow. I'd be out there putting them in the ground now, but I just looked at the thermometer and it says 89.6 degrees, so it still is too hot for me to go back out to the garden and put anything in the ground. I am going to put the hot peppers in the ground sometime after 5 pm. I keep waiting for the temperature to start falling, and it hasn't started yet. This abnormal heat is making me crazy. Samantha, That's a great list. I used to plant a lot more than I do now, so I really really have scaled it back. In my best/worst year I had about 600 plants in the ground, representing about 150 varieties. I wanted to trial them all together so I could compare their performance in the same year. I believe that was either 2005 or 2006. Because the deer hadn't yet found our garden, many of those plants were not within the fenced garden. And then the deer found us. That was the end of growing anything that deer will eat outside the fenced garden, so I started cutting back and cutting back and now will have maybe 100 plants in the garden. Maybe less. I'm still workin on that whole 'cutting back to a manageable level' thing. Some years I'm more successful than others. In the years when we had 600 plants, and then about 400 the year after that, about all I did was harvest tomatoes all day every day and give them away. I don't regret it though because I found a lot of varieties that we loved and still like and grow and eat, and I ruled out bunches of others that just weren't for us for one reason or another. Needless to say, our friends all had all the tomatoes that they could eat and that they could give away too back in those days. Now we eat all we are able to eat fresh, and preserve the rest so we can eat tomatoes in many forms year-round. Bon, This early heat is going to drive us all bonkers. I'll be mad if the heat is here to stay because we need to stay cooler for a while to get good fruit set. Kim, Are you planting yet? Dawn
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Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
Bruce, I am confident your list will grow.....and mine might grow as well. After you and I were discussing shorter, more compact varieties this morning, I started thinking I should grow some of them in containers near the house so the girls can grab handfuls of tomatoes whenever they want. I haven't actually decided to do it yet, but I am mulling it over.

Amy, I like Vorlon because of its earliness (often produces early than or at least as early as some of the so-called early varieties like Early Girl and Early Doll), the large size of the fruit, and the flavor. It is very, very dependable and never lets me down no matter what the weather is doing.

When Ron goes out to the garden to harvest, send a Sharpie or any other non-toxic marker) with him. (A Sharpie on a string or lanyard a person wears around their neck is perfect for this as you don't lose the marker in the mulch.) If he'll jot down fruit names or initials on the stem end of each fruit, you'll know what is what. Well, I don't do that with bite-sized tomatoes, but it works great with the bigger ones.

Now I am looking at the list and asking myself questions like "why isn't Dana's Dusky Rose on this list?" Or.....Mortgage Lifter....or Jaune Flammee.... any other of our other favorites that didn't make the cut this year. I was trying to keep the list short and even though it is longer than last year's list, I'm thinking it is not quite long enough yet. One problem is that we have too many favorites.

I don't have time for this either, Amy, but I posted the list anyway, and could discuss it endlessly, even when there isn't time. Now, I am going to head back into the kitchen in just a minute to decorate gingerbread men. With the way my mind is focused on the garden while trying to do Christmas tasks, my family is lucky I don't have a tomato-shaped cookie cutter, or the gingerbread men might be tomato men (or women) instead. Wouldn't they look cute? They still wouldn't taste like tomatoes though.

Oh, and because I was discussing compact plants with Bruce elsewhere this morning, here's some of the ones we were discussing. None of these are on my grow list yet, but I'll list them here in case anyone else is pondering whichvarieties to use in edible landscape beds or in containers. These perform well in containers or in the ground and remain a manageable size:

BrandyFred

Dwarf Mr. Snow

Dwarf Wild Fred

Rosella Purple

Tasmanian Chocolate

(The above are from The Dwarf Tomato Project)

Red Robin

Orange Pixie

Yellow Canary

(The above three can be grown in 12" pots. Some people in some climates grow them in 4 or 6" pots, but I think those would dry out too quickly in our climate.)

Bush Early Girl

Bush Big Boy

Bush Champion

Patio

Totem

Bushsteak

The above 6 produce large fruit on short plants. I also like New Big Dwarf, but it really doesn't produce very many fruit per plant before the heat shuts it down.

Martino's Roma

Window Box Roma

The two Roma varieties produce paste tomatoes on compact plants.

Then, there's all the rest, which produce bite-sized fruit to slightly-larger-than-bite-sized fruit:

Red Balcony

Yellow Balcony

Tumbling Tom Red

Tumbling Tom Yellow

Red Profusion

Yellow Profusion

Lizzano

Terrenzo

Sweet Baby Girl

Cherry Falls (spectacular in an urn type planter.....you can see a photo of it in an urn style planter at the website of Swallow Tail Garden Seeds)

Cherry Cascade

Green Grape

Elfin

Micro-Tom

Tiny Tim

Dawn
okoutdrsman
5 years ago
Yes, I figure my list will grow or possibly even double!

I had scratched Mortagage Lifter off the list after last year, but then I realized I had two packages of ML seed. One, the one I grew last year is the VFN, the other is Radiator Charlie's. The prettiest plant I had in the garden was ML VFN at about 8', stocky and appeared healthy in every way! It bloomed as expected, but never set a single fruit. The bad thing is, I gave away 15-20 started out of that same package! I can only hope no one else had the same results.

I haven't messed with any of the dwarf varieties, but it does have my attention. If nothing else I may trial a few just for future reference or for gardeners that simply don't have the space.

As far as the flavor of Vorlon, I probably couldn't tell the difference between them and a few others that did well last year. They were just dang good and we loved them!

Carbon, Vorlon and Spudatula were the standouts as far as production, but they may or may not perform as well this next year?

Spudakee Purple didn't get a fair shake after I snapped the plant off about 2" above the soil line when I was transplanting it. I rooted the top and it came on nicely, all things considered!

I ended up ordering what I hope are the 4 mentioned above from Tatiana's. The reason I say hope, is she lists them as Spudatula Black and Spudakee? I really didn't need the Carbon and Vorlon, but after following her FB posts about moving to a new farm and then having total crop failure, along with difficulties with internet service, I figured they can use the business. With her being in a somewhat remote area, she only ships on Wednesdays and evidently the Canadian Mail carriers have been on strike off and on, it may be a while before I see that order?

Headed out to lay up some buckboard bacon and possibly piddle in the garden a little bit!
Nancy RW (zone 7)
5 years ago
I'm going to keep it very simple.

Sungold

Heidi

Cherokee Purple

Cherokee Carbon

and only 2-3 others, undetermined at the moment. Maybe Black Krim. Dr. Wyche's Yellow, Gary O'Sena or Arkansas Traveler-- not sure yet. I'll have to read the reviews soon. After last summer's success with the four above, I certainly will try them again. I loved them all. And this way, growing fewer tomatoes, I can grow more of each. (Except Sungolds. Note to self: ONE Sungold is more than enough.)

I had the same thing happen with ML Radiator Charlie, Bruce. Huge beautiful plant. I had 2-3 tomatoes from it.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
Bruce, For me, I don't believe Vorlon ever has produced poorly. I believe it is because this variety produces early before the heat can set in, so even early heat doesn't prevent us from getting a crop....so far....knock on wood.

Tatiana certainly has had her challenges since moving. Let me know how her seeds grow for you. I've never ordered seeds from her, but suppose I really should....because I use her informational database like mad when researching tomato varieties.

The Dwarf Tomato Project has been fascinating to observe. I believe Craig said last year that TDTP has achieved its objective and is ceasing its operation as a volunteer breeding project, but they have released dozens of new dwarf varieties that may or may not live on---it depends on whether folks buy and/or save/share those seeds and keep those varieties going. Victory Seeds has a good selection of them. I always admired TDTP's goal of having more compact plants that produce full-sized (i.e. not bite-sized) tomatoes, In my garden, they produce well early on, but most of them drastically slow down when the heat arrives and, since they are smaller than the typical indeterminate varieties I grow, they produce fewer fruit per square foot overall. I also have had a lot of trouble with them getting black mold the minute we have any combination of high heat/high humidity. So, they are not necessarily on my grow list that often. I do like them in the really hot dry years when relative humidity and rainfall are low. They have produced well for me when I can keep the foliage healthy. The ones I listed are the ones that have done best for me here, but there's many, many more of them available---often with bizarre names that relate to the worldwide nature of TDTP.

I truly love Mortgage Lifter but its performance is highly variable and very much influenced by the weather. Y'all know that my summer weather is not kind. We are so far south that we just get too hot too early for tomatoes that produce later in the season like RCML/ML, so it only appears sporadically on my grow list nowadays.

Nancy, After so many years of excessively large grow lists and far too many tomatoes, the last few years I've tried to cut back and simplify. While it has worked out well enough, I haven't been as happy as I am when we have endless varieties, so I'm slipping back towards a big grow list. Mind you, this is nothing like what I used to grow---for years, my grow list was easily 80-100 varieties and sometimes 150. Those were the good old days! In the years when I grew 125-150 varieties, I could spend all day virtually every day just harvesting tomatoes, and I gave away the fruit by the hundreds. I just don't have that sort of energy any more. However, time, age and increasing shade that is devouring my former gardening space means the list never will be that big again unless we cut down several dozen trees, which we won't. I just have to be content with fewer varieties in an increasingly smaller/shadier garden.

George, Rocky has done very well for me here, though late. Maybe I should try it as a fall variety. The recurring July/August droughts just destroy the tomato crop no matter how well they've performed prior to the onset of drought. I am not inclined to water tomato plants heavier through July and August just in the hope they'll produce well in the fall. In terms of dollars it is not a wise investment of resources. New plants for fall probably have a better chance of producing here than ones I've babied through the drought months.

Herbicides are the devil incarnate. (grin) I've managed, through extreme pickiness and hugely excessive caution, to keep them out of our soil and mulch, but the airborne herbicide drift gets my garden every year, and last year I got hit at least 5 separate times. It is getting old quick, and the use of herbicides are so pervasive around us that I do not see the situation ever improving. No matter what one does on their own property, herbicides seem to find a way in.....

And that is probably one of the biggest challenges we gardeners face nowadays.

Dawn
jacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
5 years ago
last modified: 5 years ago
Well, not fully decided yet. Here’s my current list...

Pruden’s Purple

- This is saved seed from my great grandma’s freezer, as I’ve mentioned before. It apparently was her favorite so I’m going to try it. Seed is all viable after testing.

German Pink

- This is what she called it. Again, the seed is all viable, home saved seed from my great grandma. She said she got it from a plant in Cabool, very good with 5 underscores underneath.

Yellow Brandywine

- I grew this last year and just loved it. It is the best tasting tomato I have ever had, and it just kept chugging along with deer infestations, fungicide damage (my bad, an overdose), early heat (Keep in mind our highest temp last summer was 98 degrees F in late June, so this is relative.), bugs, drought with no irrigation, etc. It produced so many tomatoes well into the first half of October! One of these tomato plants even got snapped at the base by a deer. I put the base in soil and they continued to produce a decent crop once rooted. These are big tomatoes.

Cherokee Purple

- This is another favorite. It does really well and tastes delicious. Popular in our area it seems.

Earlirouge

- This is a semi-determinate I got seed from a guy in southern Indiana. Produces several heavy flushes of red tomatoes all season long, the man claiming to get a bushel per 4 plants in one picking. An article he wrote for it below. I have an aunt in the same region of southern Indiana and they have a very similar climate to ours here in the Ozarks, so I reckon they’d probably do quite well. Canadian variety bred by Jack Metcalf in the 70’s. http://www.senior-gardening.com/features/earlirouge.html

Moira

- Same guy from above have this to me. Similar to Earlirouge but bigger plants and supposedly better tasting red tomatoes. Semi determinate, but claimed to have a low disease resistance in his area and commonly succumbs to fungus of all sorts. He claims the flavor is worth it though...

Quinte

- Got from the same guy from above, again, but an indeterminate. He said it’s far more disease resistant than Moira, as is Earlirouge. Will be a fun one.

Sweet 100

- got seed from my aunt in southern Missouri no far from us, mostly east. It’s her favorite, interested to try it. I’m sure you all know what it is, a red productive cherry tomato. Her plants were beautiful.

Sungold F1

- My favorite cherry. You all know what this is...

Mortgage Lifter

- I got only a few tomatoes from these guys this year because of heavy deer infestation (they were the deer’s favorite) and heavy shade, but the flavor was amazing. Really excited to try these guys again in a sunnier location with electric fencing.

Kellog’s Breakfast

- Never even tried these, but I know some people who claim the flavor is quite delicious. Will be a fun one. Yellow, indeterminate. Anyone have any experience?

I just know I’m forgetting some. I’ll update later once I figure out the rest, if there’s more.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
Kellogg's Breakfast never, ever, ever does well for me and I have tried to grow it many times. I'm lucky if it produces 3 or 4 fruit per plant. It tends to be a late variety, and my garden heats up early so this variety just is not a good match for someone this far south. I grow Orange Minsk instead. You are much farther north than I am, so KB might do well for you. Based on the few KB fruit I've been able to harvest and eat over the years, I feel like it is overrated. However, keep in mind that flavor is subjective and each of us perceives flavor differently, so you might love the flavor of varieties I hate and vice versa.
hazelinok
5 years ago
It's fun to see how much fun y'all have growing so many tomatoes. Maybe someday for me too.

My short list is:

SunGold

Early Girl

Supersonic

Jet Star

Two of each plant. That's all this year.

I'm not starting tomato seed until March 1.

My tomatoes will be planted in the back garden too, Dawn. It's been 4 years since they've been back there. How weird will it be to only have 8 plants?! The past 2 or 3 years I've had between 24 and 30...and that is nothing compared to what some of you grow.

SunGold is amazing. And Early Girl is just a trooper...although not the yummiest fruit in the world.

More than likely there will be volunteers coming up everywhere.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
You're really cutting back a lot, Jennifer. One of these days I know that you'll have the time and space to grow all that your heart desires. My tomato growing didn't get truly out of hand until Christopher went off to college and I no longer had my 'boy' here at home occupying some of my time.

I agree that Early Girl is not the yummiest fruit in the world, but it is a very reliable producer. It usually is not the earliest variety to ripen a fruit in our garden (it should be, but it isn't) but what it has going for it is that it often sets fruit virtually all summer and autumn until the plants freeze. That alone makes it worth growing.

I have tomato volunteers come up everywhere most years but usually don't do anything with them except yank them out and throw them on the compost pile. By the time the volunteers sprout, I usually have all the tomatoes on my Grow List planted and no space available to which I could transplant a few volunteers.
LoneJack Zn 6a, KC
5 years ago
last modified: 5 years ago
Hi Y'all...It's been awhile since I've posted here in the Okie forum. No excuses! Looks like you all have some fine grow lists put together.

Jacob - don't forget to make room for a Bolseno that I am going to send you a few seeds for. I might include a couple other varieties as well.

I've got most of my grow list settled. I'll be growing 15 plants in 3 4x10 raised beds and 3 others in 4x4 raised beds (2 cherries and one Big Zac).

Big Beef F1 (2)

Big Zac F1 (I want to try to grow a 4 lb. tomato!!!)

Bolseno F1

Brandywine Suddeth's strain

Chyornyl Tarasenko

German Johnson

Girl Girl's Weird Thing

JD's Special C-Tex

Kellogg's Breakfast potato leaf ( aka KBX)

Paul Robeson

Pineapple

Pink Ping Pong

Purple Dog Creek

Rebel Yell

Sungold F1

Super Sweet 100 F1

Wes

I am also planning to grow a few of the dwarf tomatoes in containers of some sort but haven't decided which seeds to order yet. My son bought me a copy of Epic Tomatoes for Christmas that I have been reading and Craig LeHoullier has peaked my interest in growing some of the dwarfs that were developed in the Dwarf Tomato Project. Heritage Seed Market has most of the varieties from the project and I was already planning to place an order with them. Right now I have the following on my radar. I'll probably only grow 4 or 5 plants total.

Dwarf Arctic Rose

Dwarf Beauty King

Dwarf Confetti

Dwarf Black Angus

Dwarf Mahogany
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
Hi Jack, I've missed seeing you here. I'm sure you've been staying busy.

Epic Tomatoes is a great book and I know you're going to love it. In my mind, when it comes to growing tomatoes, no one has a higher level of credibility and authority that Craig LeHoullier---particularly when it comes to heirloom/open-pollinated varieties. Don't get me wrong---I loved Dr. Carolyn Male's book too back when it came out and I read it which I think was in the early to mid-2000s, but Craig gardens in a climate more similar to ours in terms of summer heat and I do think that makes a difference or, at least it does to me. If a variety does well for him there in NC, the odds are it will do well for us here in the southern plains.

When I grew Big Zac, it did not particularly produce extra-large tomatoes---most were just a pound or a pound and a half. I hope your results with it are better than mine. It largely depends on the weather, though. Tons of rain at the right time (earlier in fruit production, not as they are approaching maturity because at that point it ruins the flavor) can produce very large tomatoes. We had that in 2012 I believe, which was dry overall---just a lot of rain at the right time and it produced some very large tomatoes, none of which was Big Zac. Delicious never has produced biggies for me either, by the way. I do get very large tomatoes from some of the pinks, purples and oranges: Greek Rose, German Queen, German Pink, Ferris Wheel, Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter, Marianna's Peace, Belgium Giant, Carol Chyko's Giant Paste, Golden Queen, Pruden's Purple, Orange Minsk, Chocolate Stripes and Brandywine-Platfoot. The category that consistently gives me the biggest fruit is that of the big open-pollinated pinks. There's been a lot of others that produce larger fruit for me, but the ones I listed are the ones I've grown most often.

To be fair to any given variety, I let each plant produce however many fruit it sets and enlarges---I do not remove most fruit and leave only 2-4 on the vine, eventually removing all but 1 or 2 so the energy can go into making big fruit---which is what the folks do who enter Giant Tomato Contests. (Have you read Dr. Marvin Meisner's Giant Tomatoes book? It is a great book about growing tomatoes in general, with the added info on growing the big giant ones.) So, I hope your experience with Big Zac is better than mine was, but if Big Zac doesn't give you the huge fruit you crave, there's other varieties that have the potential to do so. And, if size is all that matters, just strip your Big Zack down to 2 to 4 tomatoes early in the lives of the fruit, and then as they enlarge, remove all but the two best. Keep that plant well fed and well watered and you should get larger than average sized tomatoes. I always try to remember that Gordon Graham's world record Delicious tomato, which held the title of world's largest tomato for a very long time, was the sole fruit produced on that plant (perhaps unintentionally).

I have found that I get the biggest tomatoes, every time, from fused blossoms. Usually, if I get a fused blossom, it is earlier in the season while the weather remains cooler, and it is 2 or 3 flowers fused together. I assist them in pollinating (by shaking or thumping the blossoms) because fused flowers do not always pollinate well naturally. I've never had as many fused blossoms as it probably took to produce Dan Sutherland's 8-lb. plus world record tomato in 2016, which probably also explains why I've never had a tomato remotely close to that size. The bad thing about fruit from fused flowers is that often much of the fruit is unusable for eating because of all the bends and folds that often contain skin within some of those bends and folds, and also because there tends to be a lot of catfacing on fruit from fused flowers. I don't grow for size on purpose, but when I see a fused blossom and know it might produce a big tomato, I do my best to encourage it.

For those of you who haven't seen the latest world record tomato, here's a photo of it:

Photo of World Record Tomato at the BigPumpkins page

No one ever said that the tomatoes that win the big tomato contests are beautiful---because they aren't. I've always wondered if they are tasty, but then, they aren't being grown for flavor---they are being grown for size. It is fun to get a naturally extra-large tomato from time to time, but I think I would lack the patience to try to grow the huge ones for contests.

Dawn
LoneJack Zn 6a, KC
5 years ago
Dawn - Dan actually beat his 8.61 record by nearly a full pound just last season. Here is a link to the ugly looking thing.

I just think it would be fun to try to grow a really big tomato but I doubt I go to the extremes that some do. I'll probably prune some, look for mega blooms and pollinate, and leave only a few fruit on the vine. I'll give the plant plenty of Texas Tomato Food and see what happens. If all else fails I have some big lead sinkers in my fishing tackle box that I can stick in here and there. lol

I've not read that Growing Giant Tomato book but I might have to check it out. My biggest tomato to date was a 2 lb. 4 oz. Orange Jazz and it was from a mega bloom.

I just went over to Victory Seeds website and found the Dwarf Tasmanian Chocolate that I was looking for and I believe all of the dwarfs that you are planning to grow. Is that where you got your seeds? They have a few other varieties I want to try as well so I guess I'll place an order there too....it's only money right?
Rebecca (7a)
5 years ago
Simple list here.

For certain:

Early Girl (maybe the bush version)

Big Beef

Brandy Boy

Sungold

Plus:

a yet to be determined cherry

possibly Heidi

maybe Porter

whatever random seeds I pull out of the seed box

whatever follows me home from the nursery
Nancy RW (zone 7)
5 years ago
Ha--so it begins. I needed a few seeds and am already bogged down. Have any of you grown Eva Purple Balls? I liked what I was reading about them.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
5 years ago
last modified: 5 years ago
Here is my preliminary list. I didn't want to order from 3-4 different places, and Tomatofest had the most of the ones I think I want. So the list is modified a bit, and bigger than it's supposed to be, of course. I'd very much appreciate hearing what you all think of any of these.

Giant Paste (Have you tried this one?)

Heidi

Sungold

Arkansas Traveler

Black from Tula

Brandywine Sudduth

Cherokee Purple

Cherokee Chocolate (do you prefer one of these Cherokees?)

Eva Purple Ball

Yellow Brandywine (I'm undecided between this one and Dr. Wyche's yellow. I liked what Jacob had to say, but also Dawn's Dr. Wyche's yellow description, )

And Anthony Bourdain, just for sentimental reasons.
hazelinok
5 years ago
last modified: 5 years ago
I grew Eva Purple Ball , Nancy.

It was okay...not great. But none of my tomatoes were great last year except SunGold... and really those plants didn’t look great eother but produced a lot.

I started seed at the end of January. we kept having those late freezes along with the normal winds, and occasional hot day. They were potted up 3 times and never were properly hardened off... but were 24 inches tall and needed to be planted. So I finally stuck them in the ground—basically putting the plants on their side in the ground, and sheltering it with a large metal food can. Covered them all with shade cloth until they were somewhat hardened off. None of them were really healthy plants ever (except when they were small seedlings) I say all of that because I didn’t give them the best chance last year. I’ll try them again in Garden 2020.

Oh, they aren’t very purple... just slightly tinted.

Look forward to seeing how they do for you.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
5 years ago
Oh how well I remember last year, Jennifer! Remember, I ended up topping off all my tomatoes and peppers? LOL. But mine DID all turn out pretty good, so the topping off must not hurt them at all. I planted mine at the same time you did last year, and like you, I was regretting it!
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
Jack, That is amazingly large, and even uglier than his other big one. It also is even more obviously from fused blossoms (which is permitted---there's no rules against fused flowers/fruit as far as I know). Kudos to him for his achievement, but I'm sort of at the point where it seems pointless to keep striving for ever increasing fruit size. Why do it? Bragging rights? Because I bet those big ones aren't good eating quality, and to me, that's the reason to grow tomatoes---to eat them. : ) I'm just old-fashioned that way.

I don't remember if I've always gotten my TDTP seeds from Victory Seed, but that has been the source I've used in the most recent years. Heritage Seed Market also has a huge selection of them---maybe more than Victory Seeds carries. I always try to throw my seed business to VS when I can because I have such a deep appreciation for their dedication to keeping the history of their varieties accurate.

Any large tomatoes I've grown have been via an act of God...namely, excessive rainfall. I guess it helped that they started out as megablooms, but it didn't matter to me if they got big or stayed small or whatever. It matters so much more to me that they taste great. There have been years we have had too much rain as the fruit were breaking color and enlarging. What did we get in those years? Gigantic tomatoes that were flavorless bags of water. Sure, the fruit looked impresssively huge, but there was nothing you could do to make it palatable. So, watch out what you wish for or you may get a lot of rain and 3 lb. tomatoes that aren't worth eating. (grin)

It is only money, right? I agree. The pleasure I get from trying new varieties, growing them, eating the fruit, comparing it to other fruit....well, it keeps me busy all spring, summer and into the fall, so I think trading the money for the seeds is a reasonable exchange. I always tell Tim that if I wasn't spending the money on seeds, I'd just be spending it on something else....and he knows I would too.

Rebecca, I especially like that comment "whatever follows me home from the nursery". With me, it would be a cat, and not a tomato plant. I'm always the person in the nursery who is ignoring the plants and petting the nursery's resident cat. Pet a cat like that long enough and it follows you all over the nursery, making its own plant suggestions.

Nancy, Eva Purple Ball was a disappointment. It was okay, but nothing special---color wasn't special (really a pink and not a purple anyway), flavor was not anything special, productivity was so-so. I know some people rave about it, but I'm not one of them.

I don't know which Giant Paste you're referring to. If it is the hybrid from Park Seed, I haven't grown it. Otherwise, I've grown several paste tomatoes over the years that had the words Giant and Paste in their name, but usually along with some other word that further described them, like Giant Italian Paste or Giant Sicilian Paste. None of them were keepers. I may have grown the one that Tomatofest calls Giant Paste, but it has been so long I don't remember much about it. All the Giant types of paste tomatoes I've tried are late to produce, and then the horrible summer heat impacts them negatively. Heidi beats them all hands down, and Striped Roman/Speckled Roman is giant enough for me without having the word giant in its name. It also is later than other paste types, so is out of sync with the garden and me at canning time. I wish it could produce fruit at the same time as Heidi but it never does.

Cherokee Chocolate, Cherokee Green and Cherokee Purple always produce almost identical fruit, flavor-wise, but Cherokee Purple's flavor always is slightly better. What distinguishes them is the skin, which has mutated. Cherokee Purple is the original one, and the first of the three that I grew. It has clear skin and superb flavor. Cherokee Chocolate came from a mutation or a bee-caused accidental cross in Craig LeHoullier's garden and I believe what he noted at the time was that it had yellow skin. For me, I feel like I can detect slightly different flavor in Cher Choc, so I stopped growing it because my taste buds liked Cherokee Purple's flavor better. Then, along came Cherokee Green. It is a very interesting plant. It also originally was believed to be another skin mutation or a stable bee-caused cross from Craig's garden, but then other people who were growing it, saving seeds, and growing out the seeds started getting fruit of different colors and sizes, which would be an argument that it was an unstable accidental cross of some type. Green-when-ripe types never fare well in my garden because I get them confused with other colors and keep waiting for them to ripen, which is not their fault, even though I have tried to overcome that by growing the green-when-ripes in their own bed, labeling them clearly, marking the fruit with the variety name with a Sharpie at the time I harvest, etc. Also, other than Aunt Ruby's German Green and Tom Wagner's delicious little Green Zebra, I'm just not much of a fan of the flavor of green tomatoes and, in my garden, Cherokee Green was not very productive and didn't taste as good to me as Cherokee Purple. So, if you like Cherokee Purple, there's no real reason to grow the others, other than curiosity. I am such a fan of CP that the others seem like cheap imitations. (grin) If you really want a Cherokee Purple-like tomato that is just as good and produces slightly better, then I'd suggest Indian Stripe. I can be happy in any year just by growing either CP or IS, but in the years I grow them both, I am exceptionally happy because we're going to have so much superbly flavored fruit.

With Yellow Brandywine (as with all true Brandywines), the flavor is absolutely out of this world and quite superb, but production in our heat is not. Therein lies the problem. My favorite Yellow Brandywine is the one sold as Platfoot. It is from seed originally saved by Gary Platfoot from a planting of Yellow Brandywine in his garden. He choose to save the seeds from the plant or plants whose fruit he thought were better that standard Yellow Brandywine as grown in his garden. When I grew both of them side by side, Yellow Brandywine-Platfoot was slightly more productive and more flavorful than regular Yellow Brandywine, and it was more rounded and smooth in appearance....not so irregularly lobed or catfaced. Because Yellow Brandywine, whether the regular or Platfoot, is a late-season variety here, productivity is compromised because we usually get too hot too early and the plants stop setting almost fruit before they begin. If our heat wasn't so atrocious, I would grow tons of Brandywine plants every year, but our heat makes them a poor bet. I have had years (sad, depressing years) where we got hot early and the Brandywines grew all summer and never set a single fruit, so they were a waste of space. They were big beautiful and healthy, happy plants, but just didn't set fruit. Your mileage may vary, of course, especially as you are significantly further north than I am and may warm up later. Dr. Wyche's was grown by him in southeastern OK just a couple of counties east of me, so I had high expectations for it when I planted it. I figured if it produced well over there, where they warm up a bit before we do here in the center of southern OK, then it would produce well here, and it does. It produces more fruit per plant than any yellow variety I've grown of similar fruit size, and the flavor of the fruit is outstanding.

Anthony Bourdain is new on the commercial market this year and is an oxheart. The rap on oxheart varieties is that they generally do not set fruit well in heat. I have found this to be true, but have found a few (very, very few) that don't mind our heat. Or, at least, maybe I just get them in the ground early enough to get fruit to set before it gets too hot. The good thing about the Anthony Bourdain tomato is that its DTM makes it a mid-season tomato, while most oxhearts are late-season, so that could lead a person to expect it might set better in our climate than the typical oxheat merely because it should set fruit before the heat gets too high. You'll have to let us know how it does for you.

Y'all know this discussion is dangerous for us at this time of the year, right? Between our longing to grow something, anything....and I mean to grow it right now (!) and our longing for the flavor of a home-grown tomato, we're all going to end up with grow lists twice as long as we should have.

I'm watching the Orange Bowl and so far things are not going well for the Sooners, so we might as well be discussing tomatoes. There's not much happening on the football field worth discussing!

Dawn
Rebecca (7a)
5 years ago
Dawn, TDTP plants might be good for the girls. You could put a couple in each feed tub, and they wouldn’t get so big that they couldn’t reach them. I might grab seeds for one myself. I do think I want a couple Heidi again.

I have seeds for Black Pearl that I forgot I had.

I want to like Jet Star, but it’s always been the first to collapse from disease for me.

I should have one Creole. Maybe TMD will have it.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
5 years ago
Yes, very Dangerous! I somehow emptied my cart so had to go back and start over. And of course saw another 4-6 I thought I had to have. I subtracted Cherokee Chocolate and the giant paste, so added San Marzano Redorta and Florida Pink.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
Rebecca, I've been thinking about doing that for the girls. I could put the molasses tubs right up by the house where at least it is easier to see snakes in the grass. Having the girls in the garden during snake season worries me because the copperheads, in particular, blend in so well with the mulch.

I'm toying with the idea of letting the girls grow their own little container garden just outside the sunroom. This is close to where we have the fire pit, the grill and the swimming pool in the summer, so we already hang out there a lot and keep the bermuda grass cut really, really short for safety reasons. I also have a cattle trough out there that is elevated on legs that would be perfect for the 4 year old to grow carrots, which she loves. I know I have a lot of varieties from TDTP in my seed collection as well as some of the smaller cherry varieties, like Tumbling Tom and Cherry Falls, that we could grow in pretty containers. I've also thought about buying 4 or 5 Earth Boxes to set on the patio and then we could let each girl plant what she wants in her own Earth Boxes. Yesterday I was looking at a very cute little playhouse at Sam's Club, and was visualizing it in the side yard with Earth Boxes and other containers sitting around it. That may end up being their little garden set-up.

I understand your issues with Jet Star---what is the point of growing it if the plant won't stay healthy? I have had varieties do similar things---growing well for everyone I know except me. I have no idea why we occasionally encounter a variety like that, but it does happen. There is a very similar plant called JetSetter that produces fruit about the same size and it is at least as productive as Jet Star, but it has a lot more disease tolerance bred into it. The JetSetter's proven disease tolerance is VFFNTA whereas Jet Star's is just VF. Of course, if your garden is like mine, the diseases that pop up in summer tend to be Early Blight or Septoria Leaf Spot, and the breeders can offer us little relief from them, though they keep trying.

Creole is one of those hard ones for me. It survives. If it gets EB, it outgrows it, but it never produces well. I have no idea why because plants right beside it will be producing just fine. I suppose this is one reason why we all grow so many varieties---always searching for the most consistent producers with the best flavor, and our weather varies so much from year to year that what works exceptionally well one year might not do so the next year. It keeps us on our toes.

Nancy, Oh how well I know the agony and indecision of ordering tomato seeds. The minute I hit "submit" to order seeds, I immediately wish I had ordered 3 or 4 other varieties that I considered---and that is not a reflection on what I did order, it just means that I always want more I suppose. My tomato philosophy is that too much is never enough. Honestly, if I never order another tomato seed for the rest of my life, I have enough in the seed box to keep the garden going, though I do need to grow out some of them periodically if only to save seeds for the future. The problem is that I don't necessarily want to grow the same things over and over.

Back in the early 2000s, I grew almost all of the Livingston Seeds tomato varieties carried by Victory Seeds, and some of them were amazingly good considering how far back in time they were developed. Would we expect any less from varieties from the father of the modern tomato? I was going through a phase where I read Livingston's book and all that and thought it would be fun to grow historical varieties. I think their flavor is better than that of many modern-day tomatoes. One day I'll grow them all again. It might happen next year. Since I went through my Livingston tomato phase, I believe Victory Seeds has introduced a handful more of his varieties than what they had back then, so that means there's some Livingston varieties available that I haven't grown yet. As I'm typing this, my mind is doing exactly what it always does---it is saying to me 'why wait until next year? why not now?' lol. You know, because what would it hurt to add another 20 varieties to the Grow List? I guess if I did that, it would mean the whole back garden would be nothing but tomatoes. Hmmm. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Yesterday we were in Central Market in Southlake. I had to drag Tim through the produce section as quickly as I could because looking at their huge array of tomato varieties in many shapes, size and colors just kills me. I wish I could be the typical customer and just grab some of them and buy them. Unfortunately, I'm a spoiled-rotten, grow-my-own tomatoes aficionado who has very specific and picky taste buds when it comes to tomatoes. Every time I buy commercially grown tomatoes in a grocery store, I am disappointed, and that applies to the ones at this store as well. Number one, winter tomatoes are not summer tomatoes no matter how much we wish they were, and number two, commercially grown tomatoes sold in grocery stores never taste the way that I know tomatoes should taste. Nor is their texture even close to adequate. So, while I enjoy the produce section at Central Market, I cannot let myself buy tomatoes there because they're never as good as home-grown ones, and I cannot compromise on that. I've bought them there in the past and even though they looked like the heirloom tomatoes they were said to be, they did not feel or taste anything close to the heirloom tomatoes from our garden. I wish they did because it would make the long home-grown winter tomato drought more bearable.

December and January are the hardest months. By February, the tomato seeds are sprouting and the first ripe tomato of the new gardening season just a few short months away.

Dawn
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
Y'all should be amused by this. Someone on one of our OK Gardening FB groups asked everyone to list their three favorite heirloom tomatoes. Three! It is hard enough for me to list my top three of each color or type, much less top three overall. So, I listed three, but if someone asked the same question 30 days in a row, I could list three different ones every day and feel like I was giving a valid answer. I love too many of them to have only three top favorites. I realize that when it comes to growing heirloom tomatoes I am, umm, not normal.
hazelinok
5 years ago
Haha, Dawn! I'm one of the annoying people always asking "what's your favorite tomato?" In fact, I'm pretty sure you gave me an awesome list (but said that you could never narrow it down to just one or two varieties) when I first came to this group. I'm not "far enough along" nor have tried enough varieties to have favorites yet (other than SunGold and EG for reasons I've said a million times) and am still trying to find my keepers. I just know that any tomato from my garden is tastier than any tomato from the grocery store.
okoutdrsman
5 years ago
Dawn, I had the same reaction when I saw the 3 favorites post. Top 1-3 in each of the different types of tomatoes, maybe? Even then the numbers would be up around 20-30?

Jennifer, like you, I've decided Mar. 1 is my intended start date for tomatoes, although I'll probably start some of the other garden varieties around mid February. Peppers, herbs and cole crops, most likely.

George, I like the tried and true approach you have when it comes to your grow list. I set out several years ago trying different varieties with the intent of selecting 8-10 favorites and then just growing them year after year after I found what I wanted. At one point I felt like I had 4 or 5 that I would always grow, but I probably won't grow more than 2 of those this year. Maybe just 1? Guess I'm backing up in my quest?

As Dawn predicted, my list is growing. Some of it is due to discussion in this thread and some of it is due to wanting to grow some varieties that didn't produce well in the past. Some that I know should. Once I get that list finalized, I'll either go back and edit my original or may just tack them on as a separate list.

The good thing is, this isn't FB and things don't just fall off the table!

I'm not big into making New Years Resolutions, but I think I've come up with a few that won't end up like most. I'll put those over in the other thread.
jlhart76
5 years ago
I'm trying to be ruthless in my planning and not crowd a million plants into a tiny space.

Definite repeats: Sungold, Snow White, & Cherokee Purple or Black Krim

New this year: Stoney's neighbor, Dwarf pink passion, Girl Girl's Wild Thing & Boxcar Willie.

I'll also probably try starting a dozen others, then have to choose which ones to plant out.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
5 years ago
I am laughing about your March 1 plant dates, Bruce and HJ and for sure know why you're aiming for then. It's like being at a garden casino, isn't it. I think I will plant mind in stages. maybe, beginning about Feb. 1 and ending the first of March. Maybe. It was exasperating, to say the least, last year, wasn't it? But though the cool weather prevented us from getting the tomatoes in, I'm remembering that it turned hot summer in May. Kinda like overnight to my recollection, right?

Jennifer, how did Snow White compare to Sungold?
Megan Huntley
5 years ago
So, what had happened was... in the Week 1 thread, I said I was going to get back to work, then I remembered at lunch that I hadn't finished reading this thread. Not a good one to wade through on a lunch break, but thankfully it's a slow day. I'll pop back over later and add my list but wanted to jump in really quick and answer Nancy's question for Jen.

I grew Snow White two years ago from a purchased plant and looked for it again last year but didn't find it. It had been a Red Dirt plant and I guess they didn't grow them last year so neither did I. I asked Bruce to keep an eye out for seeds and he found them, so by the grace of Bruce, I'll have them again this year. For me, they produced as prolifically as Sungold/Sun sugar. They are milder, very pale yellow, almost white - hence the name - and slightly larger than Sun sugar. I grew them in with purchased Sungold plants, they all went in at the same time, plants grew about the same, produced about as much and through the entire summer. Something I've noticed about my sungolds/sugars is that by late summer the fruit size has reduced significantly due to the heat. Snow White did the same, but because the fruit size is slightly larger at the beginning of the season they were still decent sized while many of the fruit on the sungolds almost weren't worth the effort anymore. I mixed sungolds and snow whites in salads and they looked very nice together.
Megan Huntley
5 years ago
My grow list isn't completely decided. After far too many grocery store tomatoes, I don't even want to grow red tomatoes much. You'll notice I have a fondness for yellows. Last fall, I swore I would grow all the same things this year, but after giving it some thought, I've made a couple cuts. Here's where I've landed, with quite a bit of TBD. Fair warning, I'm keeping a mental note of who to beg for some plants at SF!

Cherries

Sunsugar

Snow White

Orange Sunshine (not sure how I ended up with these seeds but I'm intrigued, so I'll give them a go)

Egg Yolk (Heard about these from A Way to Garden - Margaret Roach's podcast when she interviewed Craig LeHoullier)

Beefsteak

Lemon Boy (Liked it last year but didn't produce great. Trying it again but will try Dr Weche in 2020 if Lemon Boy doesn't do well again)

Cherokee Purple (Best performer for me last year)

Botanical Interests (Big. Giant. Maybe. It has a long DTM of 95 days, but as soon as the heat broke last summer it started setting, a couple weeks before anything else did and was prolific after that)

1-2 TBD plants. (I want to try some of the darks that are supposed to do better than Cherokee purple, but I'm wondering if I should use the space for some paste)

Paste

Dunno yet but maybe a couple Heidi plants but that could get bumped by beefsteaks. Could I get 1 or 2 Heidi in a molasses tub?

Dwarf

TBD (These weren't on my radar until the post above but I have some smaller containers that might be begging for some of these.)

I have some questions about other things on my grow list but I'll pose those in the Jan Week 1 post to keep this thread on-topic.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
Jennifer, I don't mind people asking for lists of favorite tomatoes, but it is important for people to understand that all of us have taste buds that are unique to us so that what one person adores, in terms of flavor, the next person could hate. So, I think lists of faves aren't as helpful from a flavor standpoint as they are from the standpoint of being varieties that do well in our extreme climate. Also, some of us find it hard to narrow down the list of favorites to just a few. I am guilty of that. There's so many good ones, and I've grown hundreds and hundreds of varieties to arrive at the current point where I'm pretty settled in with a fairly long list of what we like best.

Y'all are killing me with your March 1st start dates. I want to start seeds today....but I won't. I also, being much further south, won't wait until March 1st either.

Jen, I fail at being ruthless. I start out with great intentions and I whittle down my grow list. Maybe I even start putting those plants in the ground and I'm still happy. Then, one day, I walk into a garden center and see tomato varieties I wish I'd had on the grow list, you know---the ones that almost made the list but then didn't---and it is shockingly easy to just pick up 4 or 6 or 8 plants and carry them home so I can squeeze them into a space previously set aside for something like okra or melons or whatever. Truly, if something happened and I only could grow tomatoes and nothing but tomatoes, it wouldn't be ideal but at the same time I would be okay with it.

There's so many tomato varieties to try, and so little time.....the sense of the passing years that are behind me being greater than the remaining years left ahead of me sometimes makes me sad because I'll never live long enough to try another 1,000 tomato varieties. Not that I need to try another 1,000 varieties, but wouldn't it be cool to do that if I could? I bet I wouldn't find many, if any, that we like more than the ones we already grow. I've noticed the last few years that I rarely find anything new to us that is better than what we already grow and eat.

Megan, I went through a phase for about 10-15 years where I grew far too many bite-sized tomatoes. Perhaps 20-30 varieties a year. I simply loved always having bowls of bite-sized tomatoes in every shape, size and color sitting on the counter at all times, and I could dehydrate the extra ones and save them for winter. We called the dehydrated tomatoes (jokingly) tomato raisins or taisins (they really are more like sun-dried tomatoes) and filled quart-sized ziplock freezer bags with them and put them in the freezer and ate them all winter long. In a typical year back then my grow list of bite-sized tomatoes would have looked something like this:

Green Grape

Sweet 100

Sweet Millions

Large Red Cherry

Santa (when its seed still was available, before the lawsuit and all that crap)

Tess's Land Race Currant

Austin's Red Pear

Riensentraube

Red Robin

Gardener's Delight

Sara's Galapagos

Sun Gold

Sun Sugar

Pixie Orange

Super Snow White or Snow White

Dr. Carolyn

Coyote

Beam's Yellow Pear

Canary Yellow

Cuban Yellow Grape

Galina's Yellow

Rosalita

Sweet Treats

Sweet Quartz

And, eventually, after they were introduced near the end of my years of obsessively growing too many, Black Cherry, Brown Berry, Chocolate Sprinkles and Indigo Rose. By then, I was already trying to whittle down the list to a smaller size.

There were others but this list gives you an idea of how out of control my bite-sized tomato growing was. I had to give it up because there weren't enough hours in the day to harvest them all, or to slice and dehydrate all of them in a timely manner no matter how hard I tried. Now I try to restrict myself to two or three bite-sized types, but I've never lost the urge to plant them all. I just control that urge.

I then went on another sort of different binge of growing dwarf and extra small determinate types of cherry tomatoes so I could squeeze in a bunch of them into containers, reserving in-ground bed space for indeterminate plants that produced beefsteaks, pastes and slicers. Some of my favorites during that time were Cherry Falls, Peardrops, Rambling Red Stripe, Rambling Gold Stripe, Tumbling Tom Red, Tumbling Tom Yellow, Tumbling Tom Yellow Jr., Sweet N Neat Yellow, Sweet N Neat Scarlet, Tumbler, Patio Choice. I miss those days, but I don't miss the many hours devoted to dealing with all those little tomatoes.

I think you could get away with two Heidi plants in one large molasses feed tub.

There have been some years when I have been so extremely exhausted from keeping up with the tomato harvest that I swear that the next year I'll cut back so that I don't have to spend every day picking tomatoes and then either canning, freezing or dehydrating the excess (the ones we cannot eat fresh). I contemplate taking off a whole year from growing tomatoes or even growing veggies, but even though I contemplate it, I know I'd never do it. At best, I'd truly intend to take a year off and would fail, would run out and buy plants and would start throwing them into the ground in April before it was too late. 2011 was the year that came closest to being a garden free year, but not until June after the garden was planted, the severe to extreme drought was deepening and we were having those horrendous fires day and night. From that point forward, the garden was pretty much abandoned, but that's not the same as not having a garden in the first place.

I did cut back a lot on how many tomatoes I grew in 2017 and 2018. Part of me loved that. Part of me hated it. I am a Gemini, so I guess it makes sense that I'd have totally opposing feelings about it. Anyhow, this is 2019 and I'm back to having a more normal list for me.

I still think the list I posted above is going to grow a lot more. I just haven't been able to sit still long enough to decide which ones to add.

I am looking out the window at 38 degrees and rain, and longing for all that freezing drizzle, sleet, freezing rain and snow that supposedly was going to occur. At one point the NWS had us in the 6-8" range, then 5-7", then 3-5", then 1-3" and now less than 1". I will be surprised if we get anything other than rain at all. If the rain this winter doesn't stop falling and my garden doesn't dry out, this will not be a great tomato year. The back garden has sandy, well-drained soil and, therefore, no raised beds. It it stays excessively wet. the tomato plants and I are in trouble.

Dawn
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
So, today the Tomato Grow List expanded by a little bit. I added a few more open-pollinated varieties, and a few hybrids. With the hybrids, I want to grow them side by side with O-P varieties similar to them so I can compare performance and flavor.

Here's the new additions:

Purple Boy F-1

Chef's Choice Red F-1

Chef's Choice Black F-1

Chef's Choice Orange F-1

Bear Claw

Campari

Ramapo O-P (to grow beside Ramapo F-1)

Santa O-P

Aldi Orange

Big Cheef

Cowlick's Brandywine

I do not think that I need to add any more varieties to the grow list, and I am not planning to order any more tomato seeds. However, I'm not saying the list won't get even longer because I have a seed box with a ton of tomato seeds in it, and some of the older seeds in that box probably need to be grown out so I can save seeds of those before the current seed loses its viability.

Dawn
jlhart76
5 years ago
For me, the snow whites out produced sungold 2 to 1. I was harvesting them earlier, in larger quantities. The only thing I didn't like is their performance in wet conditions. Sungolds would crack when we got heavy rains, but the snow whites literally exploded. They would curl up so the skin was in a tight ball inside and all the pulp was on the outside. But I could pick them when they were still green and they'd ripen perfectly.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
5 years ago
I have a question--which tomatoes do best in the fall for you?
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
For the fall, I get the best results from those with shorter DTMs, let's say 75 days or less, though it really just depends on when I plant them and on what the weather is doing. Often, we do not cool down enough for good fruit set down here until mid- to late-September, making fall tomatoes sort of iffy because the fruit have to hurry up and mature before we freeze.

Some great producers for fall include Better Boy, Super Boy, Fourth of July, Fantastic, Super Fantastic, Arkansas Traveler or Traveler 76 or Burgundy Traveler and Mortgage Lifter. I generally plant the AT/Trave T-76 or BT and Mortgage Lifter at the same time in Spring as the others but I plant the rest of the ones I listed in late June. A lot of the heirloom O-P types that take longer than 70-75 days to produce just aren't able to set and mature fruit in the years that Sept stays too hot too long.

Dawn
Nancy RW (zone 7)
5 years ago
Thanks so much, Dawn! I didn't do fall tomatoes last year, but with as many as I'm accumulating, I think it'll be fun to do this year.

And Jen, since I don't need any more cherries than what one Sungold provided, I don't care about the quantity. Taste-wise, do you prefer one over the other? Not this year but maybe next. I am so excited to plant my new tomatoes this year!
jlhart76
5 years ago
That's tough. If I absolutely had to choose, I'd probably go with sungold.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
5 years ago
The first chicken year, the chickens ate most of my tomatoes, but when fall came around, the Black Brown Boar, which had vined up the trellis too tall for chickens, went crazy setting fruit. It could be that it just preferred cooler weather. It could be it spent the summer saving up for fall. It's not a pretty tomato, but it tasted good. It sticks in my mind as the tomato that produced best for me in the fall. Early Girl will produce in fall, too.
LoneJack Zn 6a, KC
5 years ago
last modified: 5 years ago
My list has changed a bit. I'll be growing one of each in my list. A few of the dwarfs will be grown in containers of some sort.

Big Beef - F1
Big Zac - F1
Black from Tula
Bolseno - F1
Brandywine Suddeth's Strain
Dwarf Beauty King
Dwarf Black Angus
Dwarf BrandyFred
Dwarf Mr. Snow
Dwarf Rosella Purple
Dwarf Tasmanian Chocolate
Dwarf Wild Fred
German Johnson
Girl Girl's Weird Thing
Jaune Flamme
JD's Special C-Tex
Kellogg's Breakfast (KBX)
Linvingston's Yellow Oxheart
Lucky Cross
Pineapple
Pink Ping Pong
Rebel Yell
Sungold - F1
Super Sweet 100 - F1
Wes
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
That is a nice list, Jack. Are you close enough to any sort of agricultural area that you can find the big molasses/sweet feed/mineral tubs that ranchers buy at feed stores? The ones that a ranching friend gave me are roughly the same size as a whiskey half-barrel and you can grow anything in them once you're drilled drainage holes in the bottoms. I've been using some of them for about 12-15 years now and only a couple have cracked. The cracks are on the bottom, so I still can use them....they just drain even better than they used to. Most of my feed tubs are black, but a few are orange and there is one that was pink and one that was blue, though after many years of sun exposure they have faded to an off-white.

Once my ranching friend, who also is a gardener, figured out how great the feed tubs are for growing tomatoes, he stopped giving his old feed tubs to me and started using them for his tomatoes. I don't mind that though, as I have all the feed tubs I need.
LoneJack Zn 6a, KC
5 years ago
Dawn - there is a MFA (Missouri Farmers Association) coop not too far from me but not real handy. We do go up there about once a month to buy All Stock feed for our little cattle herd and I buy urea there when needed. I think they have several sizes of stock tanks.

I have a 1/2 barrel and a couple 20 gallon grow bags that I can use for the dwarfs but I want to experiment with growing one of them in a 5 gallon bucket like Craig LeHollier claims can be done in Epic Tomatoes. It will take some getting used to having to water every day though.

I have allocated room for all 18 of the non dwarfs and 4 of the dwarfs in raised beds.
Megan Huntley
5 years ago
Jack, you can contact the 4H coordinator at the County Extension and they can probably round up some feed tubs. I contacted one in a neighboring rural county last year and she was in shock that anyone would want them, let alone pay for them!

I'm editing DOWN my grow list some. I've decided against the Botanical Interests Heirloom Beefsteak in hopes of finding someone with a Vorlon to share. I've also decided not to try any of the dwarfs this year... until someone shows up and says X variety is as good as a sungold. Then I'll be clamoring to get my hands on some since my space is so limited.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
5 years ago
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
Megan Huntley
5 years ago
last modified: 5 years ago
I resisted the urge to buy any dwarf varieties, but ended up with a packet anyway as a "Free Trial" from Totally Tomatoes - Lime Green Salad (aka: Green Elf). I'm intrigued but still debating whether I'll try it.

You Grow Girl speaks highly of it here, but her note on it not liking heat has me concerned. I'm not positive of her location, but I believe she's in the Northeast and if it can't take that heat.... However, I'm reading [this GW post[(https://www.houzz.com/discussions/lime-green-salad-dwarf-tomato-is-anyone-else-growing-it-dsvw-vd~4690647) that document's its progress pretty well and it continued performing in high-ish heat, but maybe not as high as ours. I also found your reviews on it, Dawn, in [this old post[(https://www.houzz.com/discussions/lime-green-salad-tomato-plants-dsvw-vd~2071248).

I'm waffling because I haven't grown dwarf or green when ripe and I have seeds. This combo is making me tempted to give it a go, so I can add both to my tomato growing resume. On the other hand, if I'm going to try either, it makes sense to try varieties more proven in our climate, doesn't it? I'm done ordering seeds for this growing season, so if I don't try these, it will be next year before I will consider any other GWR or Dwarf varieties. Dilemmas...

2019 Tomato Grow List

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