With around 7500 different tomato varieties to choose from finding the tomato that suits you and the region you live in can be a little bit like finding a needle in a haystack.
A way to easily narrow down the choice and still stand a chance of finding one that will thrive in your location is to see what the local garden centre or store are stocking. That should at least help you find a tomato variety that will grow in your region.

Then the next question is how do you want to use them. The answer to this is usually in a variety of ways which could include for cooking, slicing into salads, to accompany a burger or just to pop into your mouth as a lovely little chery tomato taster.

Other factors to consider when selecting a tomato are: (more…)

Traditionally home grown tomatoes are produced from the heirloom varieties rather than hybrid tomatoes. So what is the difference between hybrid tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes.

What are Hybrid Tomatoes?

Hybrid tomatoes come from a mix of tomato plants i.e. they have 2 different types of parent tomato. The reason this is done is usually to try and create a hybrid tomato that has the best features of both the parent tomatoes. On a commercial basis that might be to prolong the shelf life of a tomato so that they can sit in the shops longer before starting to degrade or to perhaps make them a little more robust when handled.

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Tastiest Tomatoes

When it comes to choosing tomato seeds there are many synergies with choosing tomato plants. The reason is pretty obvious and that is the seeds will eventually become plants.

There are a few more things to consider than when choosing plants and the first and most important one relates to cultivating tomatoes from your own seed. Never try and cultivate seeds that have been recovered from the ‘hybrid’ varieties of tomatoes. These have been specially developed for specific characteristics and cannot simply be used to grow tomatoes in a domestic environment. They just will not grow into a plant.

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Finding the tastiest tomatoes for 2010 is going to be a bit like hunting for a needle in a haystack. There are so many different varieties available and it’s worse than needles, because everyone will have a different opinion. A needle is a needle at the end of the day, but the tastiest tomatoes is very much a question of – well taste.

Understanding what makes the tastiest tomatoes might help a little. The answer relates to the watering program to a significant extent i.e. if you over water then there is a risk you will make your tomatoes watery and a little bland. There are some circles that advocate dry cultivation with no irrigation. But this is a little bit of a specialist activity and you need to know what you are doing, it requires a soil mix of clay and loam with a minimum rainfall of 20″ to be effective. Not an area I am completely familiar with so if you want to know more about this then you could visit Home & Garden Publications who have an article on that exact subject.

For us lesser mortals what it comes down to is getting the level of watering right so that you get a concentrated flavor as a result. Over water and you end up with those watery, bland tomatoes mentioned earlier. Maintain your watering program so that the soil is moist, not dried out or waterlogged and there is a good chance that you will get the tasty tomatoes you are looking for. As the fruit reaches the ripening stage you can consider backing off on the watering program a little so that you err on the side of a drier soil, but again not completely dry.

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There is a massive range of tomato plants available, something like 700 varieties, and they come in all shapes, sizes and colours. So which is the best tomato plant for you to grow?

When choosing, one of the most over riding considerations to take into account is what they are going to taste like, after all when you are growing tomatoes at home that is one of the primary reasons for doing so, otherwise you may as well go and get the plastic ones from the supermarket. It’s quite difficult to recommend a variety for taste because everyone’s taste is different but what a lot of people opt for are the Heirloom varieties, mainly because they are as the name suggests an older and more traditional type of tomato which are full of flavour but may not have some of the more modern characteristics built in such as disease resistance.

Talking about disease resistance and to help ensure that you actually get some lovely fruit from your tomato plant it is a good idea to pick a tomato type that has a reasonable level of resistance to disease, especially if you have had trouble in this direction in the past. Check out the seed packets and make sure that they have a natural resistance to fusarium wilt and verticillium, these are two of the most common tomato diseases that they can get from the ground.

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Tomato Plant Types – Vine Tomatoes Or Bush Tomatoes
By Brian R Stephens

Vine tomatoes are also known as indeterminate tomatoes or sometimes cordon tomatoes. These are the varieties that need to be pruned in order to limit the growth to a central stem consisting of around 4 to 6 trusses.

This is achieved by pinching out or pruning the side shoots and then, when there are the required amount of trusses, the main stem is cropped off at the top. If you don’t do this then you will end up with an indeterminate amount of growth with lots of small fruit that is unlikely to ripen. The plants will also be prone to problems as the side shoots will run along the ground where they can pick up and are likely to contract disease.

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