You’ve got your huge beefsteaks, your tidy little pasters, your sweet, invasive little cherries (a.k.a. weeds), your romantic (kind of) looking oxhearts, and your regular round slicing/salad tomatoes. If you’ve got the room, grow at least one of each type you can come up with—and don’t be didactic about how you use them. Beefsteak types can be great for processing; they add a lot of distinctive tomato flavor to the finished sauce. And many folks prefer to use meaty paste tomatoes on sandwiches—there’s a lot less messy juice to make the bread all soggy.
However, don’t grow cherry tomatoes unless you:
a) have lots of room (they can make pumpkin vines look tentative);
b) grow for fresh eating (how many cherry tomatoes would it take to make a pint of sauce? You stand a better chance of guessing the number of pennies in those water-tower-sized jars at county fairs);
c) don’t mind bazillions of volunteer cherry tomato plants coming up in your garden for decades to come; and
d) have lots of room.
OK—if you love popping the little treats in your mouth, but are short on space, try to find one of the determinate varieties of cherry tomatoes—they’re not such terrible space hogs. But their reseeding habit is still as invasive as kudzu.
Perhaps the best way to grow cherry tomatoes is in big hanging baskets. That way, they’re not taking up valuable garden space, and they’re not crawling on the ground where slugs and mice will wreak havoc on them and where they’ll drop that endless seed we just spoke of. And if you hang them properly, you can just stagger outside, pop as many into your mouth as you want—without bending over (YBYG rule #3: “Bending is for chumps”)—and then run back into the air conditioning.
The bigger the container, the better. It should be made of solid plastic; otherwise the watering will become more tedious than riding in an elevator where a child too small for you to slap has pressed all the buttons while the parents stare blankly into space. The bigger the container, the less often you will need to water. The more inert the container (e.g., hard plastic), the less often you will need to water. Really cool-looking containers made of terra cotta will need to be watered daily. Really really cool-looking containers made of peat moss or coir (shredded coconut husks) will need to be watered hourly. Unless it’s extremely hot out, and then you’re just screwed.
Hybridizing is not genetic engineering, by the way, where a modern day Colin Clive inserts a fish gene into a tomato to make it swim better. (Colin Clive played Dr. Frankenstein—It’s alive! Alive! Hahahaha!—in the original Boris Karloff movies. Sadly, his tomato preferences are unknown.)
OPEN-POLLINATED OR HYBRID: SCIENCE TIME!
Essentially, the difference here is that if you save seeds from the fruit of an open-pollinated variety (such as Brandywine) and plant those seeds the following year, those seeds will grow you the same type of plant with the same kind of fruit (in this case, big tasty Brandywines).
Hybrids are the product of a deliberate mating of two different varieties in order to combine two desirable characteristics—like, for instance, to get some improved disease resistance into a very tasty, but disease-prone, variety of tomato. The process of creating hybrid seed is fairly complex and very labor-intensive. Basically, you force the flowers of two different, carefully chosen plants to have sex with each other, then protect the resulting pollinated flowers from any outside interference, like bees or wind (usually by covering the newly-pollinated flowers with paper bags). The seeds taken from the fruit that results will produce offspring that are different from either of the parents (like those bratty kids of yours).
The growers and sellers of hybrid seeds have to do this fresh each season—combining the pollen of those same two different varieties every year to create (actually, re-create) the hybrid variety. If you grow a hybrid tomato from seed or started plants, you will get the hybrid plant and fruit, with all of the traits the hybridization was designed to achieve. But if you save the seeds from some of your hybrid tomatoes and plant them the following season, you will not get those same improved plants or fruit. You will get tomato plants of some kind, but they might not be very good ones.
By law, hybrid plants and seeds must be identified by the word ”hybrid” or the term “f1.”
Some hard-line organic folks oppose hybrids on the grounds that they’re not “natural” plants, but there’s nothing diabolical—or even bad—about the process, and it has nothing to do with gene-jerking around. Professionals and talented amateurs have been hybridizing plants for centuries. (Heck—it evens happens out in nature, when frisky bees get promiscuous with different plants in the same genus.) I don’t personally have a problem with hybrid varieties and have grown many hybrids in my own garden. And some folks—in challenging climates and/or areas with extreme disease pressures, for instance—can really use the specialized traits of some hybrids as insurance against the awful possibility of a—sob—tomato-free summer.
And most of the varieties that have been proven to be resistant to specific diseases and pests are hybrids. So go ahead and grow a few if you like—just don’t save the seeds to start next year’s crop.
Now, let’s move on to some of your best choices. Organized by type (beefsteak, paster, etc.).
ONE MORE DEFINITION: HEIRLOOMS!
“Heirloom” tomatoes are at the root of tomato gardening. The best definition of an heirloom variety is a tomato that was once available commercially (in, say, a 1910 or 1911 seed catalog), but was discontinued, became unavailable in the seed trade, and only survives today thanks to dedicated home gardeners. These enthusiasts loved the specific variety in question, and saved some seeds from their best tomatoes season after season so they could continue to grow them, often because they were unique in some way: flavor, color (some wild ones), size, disease resistance, productivity, etc. By definition, therefore, all heirlooms are open-pollinated varieties. Thanks to a renaissance in old-time tomato interest—and the fine work of the individuals and organizations that have tracked down the descendants of the original savers who were still growing out and saving the seeds—many of these great varieties are once again available to all.
This tomato shows the classic “beefsteak” shape, prized by those who want a single tomato slice to cover a sandwich—and maybe hang over the edges a little. It’s available under its generic name (“beefsteak,” which has become more of a type over the years than a single variety name) and also has many more intricately named varieties. All are classic “bragging” tomatoes thanks to their size, flavor, and deep red color.
Top Tomatoes
BEEFSTEAKS AND SLICERS
