Sorry,there is no substitute for home grown. And a lot of those vendors at farmers markets do buy their stuff from the grocery store and resell it, unfortunately.

When I was small there used to be 2 men on the side of the road every summer. One sold tomatoes the other watermelons out of the back of their pickups,with signs "homegrown". I would see those same 2 men in Sam's buying carts of tomatoes and watermelons on the weekends. Pitiful.

Maybe next year you can grow some yourself? They are fairly easy....

FWIW, I find that store-bought plum tomatoes tend to have more flavor than slicers. Same with grape tomatoes.

Not sure where you're located, but the only thing I could imagine growing quickly enough at all would be small-fruited varieties like grape or cherry tomatoes.

I'm not sure how anyone could mistake store bought tomatoes for home grown. They look nothing alike, except for stores that sell the organic heirloom types. Not to mention the need for anyone trying to pass them off having to pull off countless little plastic number code labels :-)

Farmers' markets here actually feature produce grown on local farms. It's hard NOT to find tasty, ripe tomatoes at this time of year!! But they are not always very pretty.

I also agree that both the plum and cherry/grape varieties sold in local supermarkets tend to have far more flavor than the "hothouse" or "vine ripened" slicing toms.

I will grow them myself next year. I usually barter with my friend who grew them, but this year, she had a last-minute issue that prevented her from planting them, and I simply never got around to it myself, assuming I'd just get something else locally. I've tried nearly every source in my area and just can't find anything that's comparable.

We get all kinds here, from garden grown heirlooms to picked early and chilled flavorless hard wastes of money. You have to be very selective. The most important thing is that they not be chilled before they're fully ripe. I learned that here in CF. If a tomoto isn't comepletely ripe and at its full flavor, chilling will stop any hope of it getting any better.

The best way to choose a tomato is by smell. The blossom end should smell tomatoy and the stem end should smell more tomato than vine (unless there's some stem/leaf still attached, which is better, but then should smell like a live tomato plant), but if it smells like nothing it probably tastes like nothing.

A local woman with 5 or 6 kids took on a project with them in August. On weekends they left home about 4 or 5 AM and went to New Jersey (we are right outside Philly in Montco) and they picked corn, tomatoes, peaches, zucchini, peppers, maybe one or two other things. They advertised on the township facebook page, opened between 11 and 3 and sold out every day, Those kids worked hard and so did mom. Best tomatoes EVER. I can hardly wait until next August!

It's been a lousy year for gardening here, so maybe that's the problem with the blah tomatoes you found. Even my homegrown tomatoes are bland from all the rain we've had, my peppers have hardly even flowered, and the local sweet corn is more than a month later than usual and not worth eating.

We had a very late summer and a long cold spring, so things are late, but the sweet corn is sweet and delicious and the tomatoes are juicy and flavorful. I have about a ton of them, from standard red Rutgers for canning to Great White and Pineapple that I grow myself from seeds I've saved from prior years.

As has been said, there is no substitute for home grown tomatoes, certainly not those styrofoam impostors found in my local big box grocery store, ugh. Here the farm markets have a rule that if you don't grow it you can't sell it there, so you're generally pretty safe when buying at the farmer's market. If you stop at one of those roadside stands or in a parking lot where someone is selling out of their trunk, though, you're on your own, no guarantees at all.

Elery had sliced tomatoes with his breakfast this morning, thick slices of this Big Rainbow, perfectly ripe. Yes, that's the right color, a lemon yellow with red in the middle.

I agree, they are easy to grow, if you only want enough to eat fresh you can easily grow your own. Some varieties even do well in containers, so if you are short on space, you can still grow a tomato plant.

Annie

This year has been bad for a lot of things. Too wet for cabbage, and what you do get is way too expensive. The lettuce is almost at the rotten stage when you buy it, the produce guy says it's because of too wet conditions. So I don't know the problem with your tomatoes, the ones here have been OK so far.

I find Kumatos - the brown tomato- to be best tasting with a nice texture. I don’t know if you can get them in the States. We have them here in Ontario.

Sounds like you made a good effort. Around here it would be hard to find a bad tomato this time of year. Even hot house tomatoes in the winter are decent-ish. Like the Kumato.

Our spring and summer have been wet and cooler than usual, so perhaps that's affecting them. I'm off to try one more farmer's market today... if that's a bust, I'll get the Kumatos from the store. We can get them here in the states (at least near me) but I feel guilty buying them in summer rather than supporting more locally grown.

Sleevendog, you're such a great help and generous with your photos--thank you. I thought of you this morning as I was bottling my latest batch of kombucha. Lime (new for me), mango and blueberry this time around.

In Florida, there has been to much rain for good tomatoes. All my herbs are decimated too. And the slugs are having a ball.

Central coast California here and we had a weird thing happen to our tomatoes this year. We plant ours end of March, beginning of April and usually start getting some by 4th of July. We usually have summers that come with cool foggy mornings. We plant cherry tomatoes because they are the only ones to get ripe uner those conditions. Not enough sun or heat for big tomatoes.

This year we didn't get many foggy mornings and we kept getting heat waves up in the mid 90's. It cooked the tomatoes on the vine. They actually tasted like cooked tomatoes when we picked them in the morning. We got the best crop we ever had, 100's of tomatoes, but most were so bad that we couldn't eat them. They went straight to the compost pile.

I have been growing tomatoes for 50+ years, 42 years here in CA, and never have had this happened. Any one else had this happen? What a disappointment.

And I haven't found any really good big tomatoes at the local veggie stands, farmers markets or stores. I miss the ones my dad grew when I was growing up. I haven't had a good tomato sandwich in ages.

Not a normal year here in NY zone 6, same as Sleevendog's area.

Lot's of cracked tomatoes from rain, watered down flavor tomatoes and major green shoulder tomatoes.

Still there are many good one. Many huge ones.

After given tons to friends and relatives, eaten tons BLTs, still have to dehydrate tons and make lots of tomato sauce.

My tomato plants are huge, 8' to more than 10' tall.

dcarch

The farm I get my tomatoes from has had a bumper crop. Cool and wet through June but then hot and fairly dry since.....but not desperately. A little late but nice. However they are now worried about frost .....what the he!!.... so I'm picking my canning tomatoes up Tuesday. Not quite as ripe as I want them but it will work.

If you are short on garden space there are over 100 varieties of dwarf tomatoes that you can grow in 5 gallon buckets and will give you about 5+ lbs. of tomatoes each. I grew 6 dwarf varieties for the first time this year. Dwarf Beauty King, Dwarf Mr. Snow, Dwarf Tasmanian Chocolate, and Dwarf Brandyfred did the best for me and all tasted excellent. The dwarfs I grew in containers actually did better than the ones I had in raised beds.

That's good to know, LoneJack--thanks for these recommendations, too.

My suggestions for dwarf tomatoes:

1. New Big Dwarf.

2. Line Green Salad.

dcarch