I hope this thread will be a good source for proven tomato champions between countless tomato varieties!
I am personally looking for an early determinate tomato I have to try. I have few spots left for short tomato plants, any suggestions?
I can recommend to try 4th of July if you didn’t try it yet - true to the name super early, very productive, snack size( golf-ball size or a bit bigger) tasty tomato that also makes wonderful juice. My main “working horse” tomato for everything - juice, canning, fermenting, snacking form the bush, cut in salad.
Oregon Spring is popular here for an early, fairly large tomato, but it has a very limited season. Seems to grow short and quick, set a few fruit with perhaps a second flush, and then quit.
that is not necessary a bad thing - at the second half of the season I am so fed up with tomatoes, so some of them quitting on its own is a blessing
Interesting thing is, that as of now I know 4 determinate tomatoes - Defiant, Triumph and two just suggested - they all are paste tomatoes. Are there any juicier ones in determinate?
While technically not a determinate, Picardy is still a very compact plant. I especially like Picardy for a canning tomato but it is also a good flavored slicer.
A potential problem with planting tomatoes close to fruit trees is Verticillium wilt. Tomatoes easily catch this fungal infection, spores get into the soil, tree roots get infected, and the tree dies.
Oh, I didn’t know that. I always was worry about phytophthora, not about Verticillium wilt. Unfortunately, the spot the apricot goes in is a former garden bed, so at some point either tomatoes or other plants from the same family did grow there. I guess I have to check the tomatoes I plant are resistant. Actually I never had any tomato wilt, a lot of blights, case of canker ones many years ago, but no wilt. I guess with mt tight space I have to accept the risk. There is no other place to put the apricot.
Here’s a determinate that I tried to grow a couple years ago, called Cyril’s Choice. It was the smallest plant compared to all my indet’s. I grew two of them, and they both were no more than 3-4’ tall.
Because of disease issues and heavy rains that year, I didn’t get to try hardly any fruit off of it. But, this site (where I bought the seeds) speaks highly of it. I’ve bought just about all my tom seeds from this site, very reasonable prices.
