The king of summer crops. Red gold. The reason for a BLT. Whatever you call the tomato, it is one of the most versatile vegetables that we will see at the farmstand. Slice them, dice them, puree them, freeze them, can them, sun dry them. Make sauce, make soup, make juice, make a sandwich. Heck, eat it with a little salt, pop those tiny ones as a snack. No matter what you choose to do with them, there is a tomato being grown for your desired use. However, like many things in life, a little diversity brings the best result. For example, when canning tomatoes, we love to use a mix of several varieties to give a great flavor. Using a single variety still yields good results, but when another flavor profile is added, it’s just a little bit better. Making a tossed tomato salad? Use more than just red and your salad will be prettier and have a more complex flavor.
Now that you’re dreaming of tomatoes, let’s talk about the varieties that are growing for the season.
Amana Orange: This is a large, juicy, slightly sweet heirloom that is returning this season. The fruits take a little longer to get started, but it has been a heavy producer of yellowish orange fruits. Because it is an heirloom, there is generally no built-in disease resistance and tomatoes are uneven in shape and size. No matter that they are sometimes large and multi-lobed, you’ve told me repeatedly that you love this tomato.
Amish Paste: This is a large heirloom sauce or paste style tomato which means that it is meatier with smaller seed pouches. This one has fairly consistently sized fruits in the peak of the season, but the shoulders tend to crack or sunburn slightly. That means it is not always the prettiest tomato on display. But, this one is excellent for sauce, soup, salads, or canning. The meat is deep red, a little firmer than others, and definitely has less watery seed pouches.
Apple Yellow: This is new for us this year! It is an apple-shaped yellow cherry tomato that replaces the Yellow Pear. Apple Yellow is a hybrid, and this should help us have less cracked fruit (a big problem with the tiny tomatoes). The flavor is supposed to be slightly sweeter and have maybe a hint of a fruit flavor. They should be a little firmer and hold better than the previous heirloom pear. I’m looking forward to seeing this one produce buckets of pretty little tomatoes!
Big Beef Plus: This is a staple in the gardens for those big, beautiful slicers that everyone wants. As a multi-generational hybrid, this tomato gives really pretty, consistent fruit until the days get much shorter at the end of the season. Big Beef has been bred for things like firmness, flavor, color, and most recently it was bred again to increase the potential disease resistance. This one doesn’t like high heat and humidity early in the growth cycle (like last year). They lost blossoms in a high wind event last year, and then struggled in the hot conditions that followed and stayed. There’s another new slicer joining the lineup to pinch hit in case we see those August-like days in June.
Big Mama: This is another large sauce or paste tomato, but this one is shaped like a long lemon with a little point on the end. The color is a little more orange/red than most other reds that I grow. But, if you like canning, freezing, or making salsa, you should add this one into your mix. It is very meaty and the skins slip easily during the blanching process. One supplier has the exclusive market for these seeds, and they keep raising the price but many of us keep buying them because they are heavy producers in most seasons and these Big Mamas are easy to use.
Carbon: This heirloom with a dusky appearance is new to us this year! This one looks like a deep red that has been brushed with a semi-transparent charcoal glaze. You can still see the red, but the gray shows over it. This is a medium to large tomato with a smoky, slightly sweet flavor. This should be sweeter than the popular Cherokee Purple tomato. The fruits have a natural tendency to resist cracking and cat-facing (when you see those very odd shaped heirlooms with weird lobes and pollination scars). It will be fun to see this one growing and ripening!
Cherry Bomb: This is our returning cherry tomato for several years. It is a workhorse for me on the huge trellises. I grow 2 of these plants to satisfy all of your tiny tomato needs. They are definitely a heavy producer, and after losing all the flowers last year in that super windstorm, they bounced back after just a few weeks and we were loaded up! This one resists cracks until the end of the season. And, folks, if you want to make a delicious pan-seared pasta sauce, this gem is what you want!
Cipolla’s Pride: This will be our third season with this heirloom Italian sauce tomato. These tomatoes are big, round to slightly pear shaped tomatoes with the most meaty fruit of any that we grow. They may produce a little less than others, but they are so big that it doesn’t matter. And, when we can or make soup with these, the flavor is overall a little sweeter. This one sometimes has marks on the shoulders that remind me of growth rings. They size up fast, and those little stretchmarks don’t bother me one bit.
Defiant: This is a determinate tomato (has a defined fruiting period and then is finished). The plants are more compact and produce those early, smaller fruits that are perfect for single use. The flavor is well balanced – not too sweet or too acidic. We’ve had these for several years now, and if I keep them happy with compost and other organic inputs, we get really good harvests for longer than most determinate tomatoes. These have been transplanted into pots for a couple of weeks, and will go outside earlier than any other tomatoes because they can tolerate slightly cooler temperatures. They will be planted in large containers, so if an early season weather event threatens, they can get moved. Defiant will give us the earliest tomatoes in the lineup!
Galahad: This is a new slicer for us this year. Galahad shows resistance to early blight, which happens in hot, humid weather that arrives early in the growing season. Galahad also shows resistance to several other diseases and fungal issues. This one is our pinch hitter and let’s hope it lives up to its potential. These should be nice sized, round, red slicers with a balanced flavor. The size range is 8-12 ounces and look perfect for burgers and sandwiches. Galahad is a determinate tomato that will give most of their harvest within a few week period, which will make them prime candidates for freezing or canning, too.
Mountain Fresh Plus: This is a returning slicer that gives lots of round, firm fruits over a few weeks in August. This tomato has a good amount of disease resistance, but lacks the ability to ward off early blight. These determinate plants top out at about 36 inches tall, only need the lower leaves pruned (as a general rule), and have the ability to bloom a second time with plenty of organic matter and phosphorus added before the first fruits have ripened. A late harvest of these is always welcome!
Mountain Magic: This has been our salad tomato of choice for many years, and it is very productive! By that, I mean, these things are the champion of salad tomatoes. There are exactly two of these plants here every year to satisfy the farmstand. Yes, that’s right. Two plants that are pruned, trained, given plenty of organic material and in return, we get an explosion of little tomatoes with big tomato flavor. These are a hybrid of several larger fruiting tomatoes bred to produce tomatoes the size of that super ball that comes with a set of jacks.
San Marzano: This is an heirloom Italian tomato in the sauce/paste category and often this is what comes to mind when someone says that they want a Roma tomato. Some seed companies believe that San Marzano is in the ancestry of all Roma style tomatoes in today’s marketplace. These fruits are on the small to medium size, with a teardrop or slightly pear shape. As a premier sauce tomato, they are meaty, red, and flavorful. There’s a reason that you can buy expensive cans of these in the specialty stores or see all the celebrity chefs using them for rich sauces. Roast them and the flavor only gets more intensified (think about soup or tomato sauce). These plants need room to grow and a few good pruning sessions to keep them happy and productive, but it is definitely worth the work.
Whew! Those are all of the tomatoes that are growing and we expect to harvest this season. What’s missing? That Ananas Noir tri-colored tomato didn’t make the cut. They were just too big, watery, and inconsistent. Mostly, there will be some adjustments to the numbers of the slicers to make room for the new Galahad and then we’ll have a good way to compare all of them in the same conditions.
About half of the tomato starts were potted up yesterday, and the goal is to get the rest potted today and work on peppers tomorrow. Fingers crossed that we can keep them all happy after transplanting! Once the plants have sized up, grown good root structures, and look to be past the “don’t die on me now” stage, I’ll put together a list of plants and quantities that will be available for sale.
Thanks for reading through to the end! Now, we’re all ready for tomato season and that starts in late July and really kicks into gear in August. We’ve got plenty of other things to enjoy from the gardens before tomatoes are ready (lettuce!!). Enjoy your weekend and think spring!! We could use some sun and warmer weather to get the rest of the outdoor “stuff” done.