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:

• Flavour, see tastiest tomatoes 2010 for more information
• High yielding
• Disease resistance
• Open pollinating or hybrid
• time to ripening

For the States, you might be interested in the following list of tomatoes that will grow pretty much anywhere, from North Central down to the Gulf Coast and both to the east and to the west

• Beefsteak
• Brandy Wine
• Early Girl
• Cherokee Purple
• Super Sweet 100
• Black Cherry
• Roma
• Amish Paste
• Saint Marzano

This list gives you a choice of hybrids or heirlooms, cooking tomatoes to salad tomatoes and a pretty sure fired chance that they will all cope with the climate in your region. In other words they are all safe bets for a good crop of tomatoes across a range of shapes and sizes that should suit most requirements.

There will of course be specific varieties that may be even more suitable for your specific location, so the other indicators and ways of establishing, which tomatoes grow best where still stand and may just lead you to exactly what you are looking for.

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.

For home growing gardeners, the reason is more likely to be for a better flavour or to perhaps deal with season constraints in the location they are to be grown. A good example of this might be to try and produce a beefsteak tomato that matures and ripens early, so that they can still be produced in a short growing season region.

F1 seeds are produced by means of a controlled pollination which needs to be repeated each season for reproduction. This is a manual process which involves taking a male flower off one plant and rubbing the pollen into a female flower on another plant. Then when the fruit is produced and ripens you have to save the seeds for planting the following season.

Sometimes you will see hybrid plants labelled F2, this means that these plants have been produced through the cross pollination of F1 varieties. The fruit from an F2 hybrid will be less consistent than from a F1 variety, so if you want to know exactly what you will be getting its probably better to stick to F1′s.

It’s worth noting that taking the seeds from a hybrid plant is highly likely to end in a failed crop. This is because more often than not the seeds produced in hybrids are sterile or the plants produced do not retain the characteristics of the parent hybrid plant. So they could be completely tasteless for example. As a general rule of thumb nearly everyone adopts the assumption that you cannot grow new plants from F1 or F2 seeds.

What are Heirloom Tomatoes?

Heirloom tomatoes are generally accepted to be open pollinated varieties i.e. if the seeds from the plant are saved they can be grown again the following year with the same characteristics, and this applies year on year. In fact many people will say that an heirloom is not an heirloom until it has been produced for 50 years or more. You can decide if you agree with that statement or not.

The final point which relates to whether a tomato is an heirloom or not, is whether its history can be traced. Ideally this will be back to the original production of the plant saying when and where it was first grown.

The main benefit of heirloom varieties is that you know exactly what you are going to get, provided you treat the plants the same way each year. So if you find a flavour, texture or size that flourishes in your region and produces enough fruit through your growing season, then you will be able to reproduce them consistently each year. Although that might be a bit boring and mixing things up a little might be a bit more fun.

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.

That said, you are probably wondering which tomatoes can be used to harvest your own seed for cultivating and the answer is pretty much any of the others. Some are easier than others and the most popular seeds cultivated by gardeners are the heirloom varieties.

Picking up on the ‘some are easier than other’ point, the main reason behind that statement is that there are various levels of disease resistance present in tomato varieties. So assuming that most people will buy their seeds in a packet, you can take the precaution of checking that the seeds are resistant to the most prevalent tomato diseases of verticillum and fusarium wilt. Just look on the seed packet for information on disease resistance.

After that, it really is a consideration of the plants or seeds that are best suited to your requirements and location. Some things to consider:

• the climate where you live, short season needs early maturing and visa versa
• cordon or bush tomatoes, depends on available space
• cooking or salad tomatoes, some tomatoes are better for cooking and some are better in a salad or to accompany a burger for example
• taste and flavour, heirloom are known for their flavour, but typically do not store as well. Last years tastiest variety was identified as the Sioux Tomato by ‘Which’ magazine. So probably worth a punt this year as well.

Of course there is nothing to stop you growing a mix of tomatoes either. Perhaps you would like cherry tomatoes for your salads, plum tomatoes for cooking or beefsteak tomatoes for the perfect accompaniment for a burger. Be careful with the latter however, the bigger they are the longer they take to ripen. Have a look at this tomato planting schedule.

As you can see choosing tomato seeds really is just a matter of applying a little common sense, but if all else fails you can usually rely on your local garden centre to be stocking varieties that will flourish in your area.

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.

Sorry I can’t help more than that it is very subjective and actually down to trial and error to an extent.

Of course the other thing that can help you with taste is selecting the right varieties and many home grown tomatoes come from the Heirloom varieties that have been kept going, not by the market gardeners, but rather the tomato growing enthusiasts that care less about transport toughness and shelf life than they do about getting the tastiest tomatoes. So go for Heirloom and there is a good chance that combined with the right watering program you will get very tasty tomatoes.

There is another source of information, and this was fed through to me by my brother in law who advised me that the UK consumer magazine he subscribes to, called ‘Which’, has stated that the tastiest tomato this year, identified through consumer trials, is the Soiux tomato; which is of American descendency and of course is one of the Heirloom varieties.

The second tastiest tomatoes are listed as being the Orkado tomatoes and while we are at it the worst and most bland tasting tomato was identified as, can you bear it, the Alicante. A firm favorite amongst many of you, I would hazard a guess. Sorry to disillusion you.

Now knowing what the tastiest tomatoes are and finding them for sale anywhere is a different matter. But I can advise you that if you would like to buy them in the UK you can get your tastiest tomatoes here, and I don’t even make any money out of it.

For anyone living in the USA you can get them here Sioux Tastiest Tomatoes and now I do make some money from this link. So if you go and buy some, thanks very much.

Orkado are much easier to find so I will leave you to hunt for them yourselves, and of course the Alicante which you can get pretty much anywhere, that is if you want the blandest tasting tomatoes on the market as reported by Which magazine and my brother in law.

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.

How much space you have will determine whether you can go for a determinate or indeterminate variety, the determinate variety as the name suggests grows to a limited size usually a couple of feet to maybe three feet in height then they stop. The indeterminate type are the vine tomatoes and they will just keep going unless you prune them. I actually think that the vine type are better in smaller spaces because you can control them to a size you want and train them where you want them to go whereas with the bush tomato plants they are what they are.

Also the vine plants continue to grow fruit over a longer period as the fruit of each truss ripens. The determinate (bush) variety on the other hand tend to ripen all at once over a relatively short period.

Unless you have a greenhouse the time the fruit takes to mature becomes important, if you are going to start to see frost at the beginning of October you need to be all done by then. So it is better to go for early maturing varieties in this case.

Something like Sun Gold will mature in 65 days or so and are indeterminate so lots of fruit over a longer period.

Beef tomatoes are large and are great for a burger but they do take longer to ripen so you either have to have a long summer or a greenhouse for growing these so that you can protect them from overnight frosts.

Bear in mind when making your final selection however that the choice also needs to work for where you are in the world. If you are unsure of the varieties best suited to your location then it is worth a quick trip to the local garden centre to pick the brains of the staff and see what varieties they are growing.

At the end of the day tomato selection is a matter of preference and as long as you actually end up with tomatoes that you like the taste of then the job is done, so make sure you take into account these factors and you will be sure to soon be enjoying lots of lovely ripe tomatoes.

If you prefer to buy your tomato support frames check out these options available through Amazon.

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.

Another way of controlling the growth of these plants is to cultivate them in pots or grow bags, but as one would expect growing in containers is a little more labour intensive particularly when it comes to a watering system.

Bush tomatoes are the alternative tomato plant and are known as determinate because their growth is self limiting and as the name suggests are bush like in appearance. The main disadvantage with this type of plant is that they tend to produce all their fruit within a very short time frame producing a short lived glut of tomatoes. Not great for the home gardener as you can end up with lots of tomatoes you cannot use fresh and have to turn to ways of preserving the fruit such as making chutney for instance.

For this reason many home gardeners tend to stick to the vine tomatoes that fruit regularly over the whole season, particularly when they have a reasonably long summer period.

Visit Growing Red Tomatoes for more tips and advice on tomato growing in a greenhouse and to get access to expert advice that could double or triple the size of your crop of tomatoes.

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