Favourite Tomato Varieties??

I keep looking out the window and yearning to see the green green grass of summer - goats and chickens grazing..... But alas it's still white and wintery so I'm stuck dreaming of summery things like my garden.

I did a small tomato variety trial last summer. Nothing special just planted a little bit of this and a little bit of that from the local greenhouse.

Here is some of my 'results'

Table/salsa tomatos
Favourite by far was the Super Fantastic - best yield and size!! Flavour was plentiful.
La Roma and Bush Early Girl came in a close second with bush type growing (space saving), excellent yields and good fruit size.
Celebrity had lovely fruit but a smaller yield, and the Beef master had crazy HUGE fruit - but very little overall yield.
I really like the Roma VF also and the Bush Beefstake - didn't have those this past year.

Cherry/small tomatos
My favourite was the tumbler. So sweet and yielded heavy! Yumm!
The sweet 100 yielded awesome as ever, the biggest suprize coming from the yellow pear cherries.  Soooo delicious!!! However it's growing habit wasn't my favourite. It grew crazy branches everywhere!
Juliet and Black Cherry were great also however were planted later than the rest so didn't get the chance that the rest did.

Oh and my Toma Verde Tomatillos did AMAZING!!! Can't wait to have them again!

Suggestions from anyone for next year?

Sigh, I have not lived in a place that I can grow tomatoes for 4 years not. I will live thru you all that can.

Coop You should be able to grow them where you are now even if you do Raised Bed Gardens
That is what we do as it is so rocky here You will do good this year I am sure

I have been told the frost risks here are to high for tomatoes. I may experiment a bit. I have never been one to go with what I am told to do.......  

Coopie, you CAN grow tomatoes!  I find they are best in the ground or raised beds in front of a south facing wall.  They will be warmer and out of the wind...more or less.  Pots tend to dry out too fast in the wind.

The determinate varieties work well.  Indeterminates will require major staking in your wind.  Choose cold weather varieties.

Plant them in the ground at the end of May but make sure you have a cold frame or insulation of some sort and keep an eye on the weather.  If it dips, insulate those babies.  You may lose them anyway, so if you do, put new ones in ASAP.

At the end of the season watch the weather forecast again and prepare to drape your plants in blankets or quilts for the odd low temperature.

If you get an early snow, you can always pull off the green ones and ripen them in your kitchen.  They are still better than store bought.  

And my favorite....

SUNGOLD!

My fav last season was Mayor Rothchild. Huge juicy yellow tomatoes with a wonderful sweet flavor and very productive. Our largest was the size of a small pumpkin! Made a beautiful salsa with it.

coopslave wrote:I have been told the frost risks here are to high for tomatoes.  I may experiment a bit.  I have never been one to go with what I am told to do.......  

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I've been growing tomatoes everywhere I lived in Alberta, from Stony Plain, to Calgary and several places in between. It's a bit of extra work but always worth it. Just don't expect to can a winters worth of tomatoes off your harvest!

Last year I planted Stupice tomatoes. They are an indeterminate heritage variety, and I was very pleased. I kept seeds from them to plant this year. The fruit is fairly small but I had a great yield. However, I did grow them in the greenhouse. They are a very early variety. The supplier said 35 days from transplant, which may have been a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. I planted 17 plants and we got enough to last us the winter I'm thinking. I take in my lunch to work, we make our Salsa and Spaghetti sauce as well.

I want to try an early determinate type outside in the garden this year as well, see if I can get a harvest.

Whenever I have grown tomatoes, I have had huge harvests. And I suck at gardening.

From Mother Earth News on FB today:

EXPERT INFO ON HEIRLOOM VEGETABLES
The link below will take you to a collection page describing dozens of heirloom crops. This information was written by William Woys Weaver, one of the world's leading experts on heirloom varieties of North America. The page also includes a link to a custom Seed Finder search tool that will help you find companies that are selling whichever heirloom varieties you are interested in growing.
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How about a hoop house, raised bed, and add hot water bottles on cold nights? Or add a string of outdoor regular, not LED Christmas lights to add a bit of heat to the soil.

Do it Coop!!! Plant some tomato plants this year!!! I started in pots and now have a nice 8x8 square (well two or three or four maybe) to plant them in. Follow what Sue says in her post and it's easy peasy!
I think the determinates are simpler as they don't crawl all over!
Sungold sounds interesting - is it heritage?
I can't wait!! Last year the entire spare bed was covered in boxes of green tomatos. I have salsa and tomato sauce coming out of the ying yang!! Enough to last til next processing season that is
Authentic I see more tomatos in your future )))

Karaandblue wrote:Do it Coop!!! Plant some tomato plants this year!!! I started in pots and now have a nice 8x8 square (well two or three or four maybe) to plant them in. Follow what Sue says in her post and it's easy peasy!
I think the determinates are simpler as they don't crawl all over!
Sungold sounds interesting - is it heritage?
I can't wait!! Last year the entire spare bed was covered in boxes of green tomatos. I have salsa and tomato sauce coming out of the ying yang!! Enough to last til next processing season that is
Authentic I see more tomatos in your future )))

Trade for apples/raspberries/supper? Lol

Well of course.

Kara=best person to know.

We've done tomatoes the last couple of years and had not bad crops in our raised beds.  We have a 4x6 bed and a 4x5 bed for toms.  I ignore all planting instructions and place 8 large plant varieties in the 4x6 bed and 8 medium sized varieties in the 4x5 bed.  Because cold lasts so long and comes again so early we put up wooden frames around the beds and place plastic over the top and sides.  on warmer days I left up a side or 2 until it actually gets warm and then I lift all the sides.  Sadly its not long before I have to start only lifting a side or 2 as it gets chilly again.  This year we still didn't many red toms before frost came but we picked it and let it ripen in the house.  We canned 34 1lt jars of toms and a dzn or so small jars of salsa.

It doesn't make for a pretty garden area with the plastic tents but it works for us   We got tons of cucs and zucchinis this way too.  

Our favourite eating tomatoes this year were the sunnyboys?  Yellow ones, wow so tasty and firm and just really good.  We had beef steak, sub arctic maxi, brandywine, sunnyboy, lunchbox, prairie pride, basket vee and romas.  I like the variety   We haven't had great luck with the small tomatoes at all but the medium sized are great

Sungold were Lois Hole's favorite tomato, but not a heritage variety.


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My personal fave tomato would be the variety that gave those thieving deer a serious gut ache at the first bite.

Deer don't eat tomatoes. This is true. But they do bite each one off the vine and spit it out on the ground, ruined, with teeth marks in it!

Serjay, my garden is not pretty either, roped and fenced like Fort Knox, everything caged and wrapped. What is not caged and wrapped is gnawed by deer. I have 20 year old lilacs that have never bloomed because every winter the stinking deer come and gnaw them to the ground, little twisted, shredded lilac stumps are all I have left.

So deer poisoning tomatoes would be my favorite, but second were the few Sungold we got to ripen. They were wonderful!

I love Sweet Million cherry tomatoes based solely on their production. They are an 'improved' version of the sweet 100 and, if you can believe it, produces several times the amount of the sweet 100 variety.

I, however, have fallen madly in love with the black varieties. I grow Black Early ( a standard sized tomato) and black cherry. Last year, they grew, produced and ripened from seed, despite the stupid-short growing season. This year, I will be trying Black Plum tomatoes as well.

coopslave wrote:I have been told the frost risks here are to high for tomatoes.  I may experiment a bit.  I have never been one to go with what I am told to do.......  

My mil grew really nice tomatoes in Okotoks. She grew them on the south side of the house and had some old sliding glass doors that she set up in front of them. She got huge yields too!

I like crisp tomatoes for sandwiches. If I can find them, I use Lemon Boy.

coopslave wrote:I have been told the frost risks here are to high for tomatoes.  I may experiment a bit.  I have never been one to go with what I am told to do.......  

Look into shorter season tomatoes (one of the reasons I went to blacks). I had 3 volunteer tomato plants last year, after stupid amounts of snow and cold. 2 of them produced fruit, but none ripened on the vine. The tomatoes I grew from seed all grew to have some fruit ripen on the vine, despite being mowed down twice by escape goats.