All about the growing and eating of tasty tomatoes!
[Image description: a thicc green hornworm hanging onto the stem of a tomato plant. The hornworm is speckled with little white dots, has eyespots and angular white stripes down his side, and the namesake sharp little spike of a horn on its butt.]
I have... thirty different types of tomatoes.
Which are your favorites? Which do you dislike?
What am I missing that I should add to my arsenal in the future?
[Image description: a seed starting tray, each cell with a label, the first few cells have little tomato seedlings.]
3 different family members have given me tomatos and they keep spoiling
[Image description: a hand holding a large beefsteak tomato bottom up, with grey stitching in a line along the bottom and up one side, and alternating thin swirled stripes of red, yellow, and green spreading from the bottom stitching.]
Poor Golden King of Siberia. I've noted that they are particularly susceptible to getting toasted.
[Image description: a hand holding a yellow tomato. On one side, the tomato skin is bleached white and leathery, and the flesh has sunken in.]
Science - How Tomatoes Lost Their Taste
Turns out these green shoulders are a result of the same gene that controls the amount of sugar present in ripe fruits. When farmers selected for a mutation that produced uniformly red tomatoes, they sacrificed flavor.
[Image description: a hand holding a glass bowl stuffed with red plum and cherry tomatoes. Most of the plum tomatoes have splashes of green on their tops and shoulders.]
[Image description: a raised garden bed with a focus on a small tomato plant. The lower branches along the stem are brown and dead, but the upper branches have healthy new growth.]
Though that Black Pineapple I'm pretty sure must have crossed with something else, it's normally green with splashes of red, not orange with red.
[Image description: a cutting board with seven medium to large sized tomatoes of varying colors, with the name next to each. The tomatoes are the Golden King of Siberia, the Black Pineapple (or Ananas Noire), the Berkeley Tie Dye Green, the Sart Roloise, the Dr. Wyche's Yellow, the German Pink, and the Black Beauty.]
[Image description: three roughly heart-shaped slices of a yellow beefsteak tomato tinged with pink, on a blue plate.]
Tried these for a few seasons before I finally had to admit they weren't suited to my climate/gardening style. They're deliciously sweet, but go from underripe to overripe very quickly, and don't hold well on the vine or on the counter. That meant the overripe fruit would often pop between my fingers as I was picking them.
[Image description: a hand holding two yellow cherry tomatoes with deep red shoulders, the greenery on the tops of the tomatoes has been plucked off, revealing bright yellow star shapes where the fruit was shaded.]
Man, if you ever want to eat 10,000 tomatoes in a season, plant yourself a Spoon Tomato.
I made the mistake of growing two of these last summer, and each grew up, over, and across the length of my trellis arch, about 20' in length. To keep them from utterly smothering their neighbors required pruning fistfuls of vines literally daily.
It's insanely prolific in fruits too, I gave up harvesting them all when I was picking hundreds a day. That sounds great, but each is the size of a pea or smaller, and they had the tendency to split at the top rather than keeping their caps, so they didn't store well at all.
The flipside is they do have a great tart, intense tomato flavor. I mostly ate them as garden snacks, or sprinkled on salads or focaccia.
[Image description: a small metal spoon holding a dozen tiny, bright red round cherry tomatoes. Green tomatoes and flowers are seen on the vine adjacent to the spoon.]
[Image description: a hand holding a bright yellow, medium sized, heart shaped tomato. The tomato has some light scaring and zippering near its shoulders.]
[Image description: a hand holding a heavily ribbed, bright orange, heart shaped tomato.]
[Image description: a hand holding a plum-sized tomato with dark blue-black shoulders grading to red on the base< with sunflowers in the in the unfocused background.]
[Image description: a cluster of cherry tomatoes on the vine, each with a top to bottom gradient of purple to green, and with chunky dark purple stripes over the whole tomato.]
These are literally the best flavored tomatoes out of the dozens of heirloom and hybrid varieties I've grown. Surprisingly temperamental plants make them more difficult to grow, but man is it so worth the effort. They are savory, and balanced with just the right amount of sweet and tart.
[Image description: a hand holding a vine cluster of elongated oval cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes are subtly striped with a gradient of color ranging from brown to purple to red to green.]
I do wonder where they're getting their water, we had an unusually wet spring, so maybe deeper soil is still moist. But another option is that it's growing in an area sandwiched between mine and my neighbor's pools, and maybe one or both of them are leaking ๐
Another interesting thing is that I believe these to be bird dropping volunteers. I've never tried to grow anything here (the previous owners used to drain their pool water here, always thought the chlorine would have hurt the soil), and I've never put compost down that may have had stray seeds. They also don't look quite like any tomatoes I've grown before.
[Image description: a hand holding a red plum sized tomato and a red mini cherry tomato. Unfocused in the background are two sprawling tomato plants, growing together to look like one.]
This sweet millions plant has been a chonker since I got it.
Was the first one with any maters on it. Today, when I was fixing the ties to the trellis, I knocked a small green tomato off.
Of course, I had to taste it. Even green it was delicious... though it had an interesting apple flavor and bite to it.
