Therefore I plant a mixture of types, including those for sauce, some super-sweet cherry or grape varieties, and beefy heirlooms for slicing. I like to make several batches of sauce, but most of our tomatoes are enjoyed fresh from the garden in sandwiches and salads. When I’m trying to decide what to grow, I find it helpful to consider how I want to use my harvest. There are so many different types of tomatoes to grow in a home garden: slicing, paste, cocktail, grape, and cherry tomatoes for example. How are you going to use your tomato harvest? If you’d like to figure out the length of your growing season, check out this handy calculator on the National Garden Bureau website. In short-season or coastal gardens, opt for fast-maturing, early tomatoes, like Moskovich (60 days), Northern Lights (55 days), or Sun Gold (57 days). I find it more helpful to refer to the ‘days to maturity’, which is how many days a variety needs to produce fruit once they are transplanted (not seeded!) in your garden. You can grow them in containers, but I’d suggest finding a large pot and supporting them securely with stakes or a trellis.Īs you flip through seed catalogs, notice that tomatoes are categorized by how long they take to mature - early, mid-, and late-season. You’ll need to stake or support the vigorous plants. They can grow six to eight feet tall, and continue to grow and fruit until frost. Indeterminate varieties, also called vining tomatoes, are the big guys.They also mature earlier than many indeterminate tomato varieties. They grow two to three feet tall with fruits that mature around the same time (perfect for canning or sauce!). Determinate varieties are best for small spaces and container gardens.The growth habits of tomatoes are broken down into two categories: determinate and indeterminate. To learn more about the many awesome tomato varieties available to grow in your garden, check out Epic Tomatoes, the award-winning book by Craig LeHoullier.īut, with so many varieties to choose from, how do you pare down your list and decide what to grow? Consider these three questions: How much space do you have? Be prepared to encounter dozens, if not hundreds, of tempting varieties. Now that we’ve gotten some background on the types of tomatoes seeds, it’s time to crack open those seed catalogs. Sun Gold tomatoes are one of the most popular hybrids grown and yield a heavy crop of super-sweet, cherry-sized fruits. Sun Gold is a very popular heirloom tomato with golden, cherry-sized fruits. So, why grow hybrids? Most hybrids offer improved traits, like disease resistance, vigor, higher yields, earlier harvest, and uniform ripening. Generally, the seed of hybrids cannot be saved as they won’t come ‘true to type’. These are often listed as ‘F1’ varieties in seed catalogs. Hybrid – Hybrid seeds are the result of controlled pollination where the pollen of two varieties or species are crossed by plant breeders.Dwarf Sweet Sue, Dwarf Caitydid, and Glacier are examples of open-pollinated tomatoes. All heirloom seeds are open-pollinated, but not all open-pollinated varieties are heirlooms. If you only grew one variety, your open-pollinated seeds are safe to save. If you’re growing more than one variety of open-pollinated cucumber or squash, for example, they will likely cross-pollinate. The exception to this is when cross-pollination from other varieties has occurred. When the seed is saved you can expect the seeds to come true. Open-pollinated – Open-pollinated seed is pollinated by insects, wind, or even gardeners.Popular heirlooms include Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, Pineapple, and Big Rainbow. Of course, heirlooms offer diversity, too - fruits in an assortment of sizes, shapes, and colors. The main reason to grow heirloom tomatoes is flavor! The fruits are packed with mouthwatering flavors that are seldom matched by hybrid varieties.
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