To me the criteria that most matters is the taste. If this one doesn’t pass the test I won’t plant it again. I do like that it is a heirloom determinate and loads up with a lot of tomatoes early. I have three of these planted and this is the largest at about 18” high. I’m thinking as these ripen the plant will be finished. If I like it I will save some seeds for another planting if not I will move on to other varieties. I currently have 9 Celebrity, 2 Rutgers, and 2 Bush Goliath growing so I have a few backups.
A real simply strategy I’ve found is when I finish a jug of milk to not rinse it out, and instead fill it with tap water, and then I water the plants with that milky water. 1-2 applications usually does it in my experience.
BER is a physiological condition, not a disease. It is tissue breakdown in the fruit from an imbalance of calcium. Tomato plants are inefficient transporting calcium so anything that disrupts the process results in BER. What can you do? Add calcium as a foliar spray is the first and best option. It is available at most garden centers. Now, here is the rest of the story. There is a cluster of genes on chromosome 5 that heavily impact calcium transfer. Paste tomatoes concentrate those genes in such a way that it is almost impossible to eliminate BER on paste varieties. BUT! It gets better with time. Usually the first fruits to ripen are affected but then the plant manages to provide enough calcium for the remaining fruit. Determinate tomatoes are more likely to have BER than indeterminate. This is because the fruit load on determinate plants for a short period of time is heavier. More fruit load = more demand for calcium = something already in short supply just went too low.
Someone mentioned good flavored early tomatoes. I highly recommend Bloody Butcher and Gregori’s Altai. I’ve grown 50 or 60 early maturing varieties over the years and to be blunt about it, most of them are as insipid as grocery store tomatoes. Bloody Butcher and Gregori’s Altai are widely adapted and produce good flavored fruit in most places where they have been grown.
Back in the early fifty’s we planted Fireball early tomatoes. They had great flavor and sold good at the market. Seems as though we got $8 per 8qt basket at the whole sale market. The tomatoes were round shaped and about the size of a tennis ball. The plants were not large but bore a fair sized crop. No staking required and easy to pick. My dad planted them between the rows of a new peach orchard till the peaches got bigger.