This is my 2022 experience with brachytic dwarf, open pollinated tomato varieties. This year I grew them in a tall raised bed, about two feet high. I gave each a 1/4 cup dose of Dr. Earth vegetable fertilizer when I planted them. These had drip irrigation, and a cardboard mulch covering all of the soil as well as covering the drip emitters. I used stakes to keep the plants vertical, definitely needed.
I used that strategy to avoid splashing soil borne disease onto the leaves, as well as reducing my own labor by a lot. I always do a crop rotation, this year’s beds with alliums, beans, and greens get tomatoes and peppers next year, and vice versa. The soil is organic, supplemented with bone & wood ash, coffee grounds, crushed eggshell, and biochar. Weather was generally hot, dry, smoky.
Here is what the bed looked like in June, before they really took off and grew.
The sharpie labels on cardboard didn’t last. The cardboard lasted all summer. Butcher paper, used on other beds, rotted away too quickly.
I grew from my own saved seeds, the varieties Dwarf Champion Improved, Dwarf CC McGee, Dwarf BrandyFred, Extreme Bush, and Dwarf Tanunda Red.
I grew from bought seeds, New Big Dwarf, Livingston Dwarf Stone, Dwarf Golden Champion, and non-dwarf but determinate Bush Early Girl, Bush Early Boy, Reisentraube, and Sungold. I pruned the Reisentraube and Sungold to grow in a bush shape, contrary to all tomato growing wisdom out there, but I wanted reasonably compact plants.
I didn’t keep great records, but my impressions and memories are below.
First, Extreme Bush was again the earliest of my tomatoes, highly dwarf (under 18 inches tall), produced salad size, very good tasting tomatoes all summer long.
I don’t know why, but Early Girl Bush and Bush Early Boy were not that early or productive for me. Especially Early Girl Bush in the past was a real workhorse. They also didn’t have the flavor of the open pollinated ones.
Image below, the yellow one is Dwarf Golden Champion, the orange ones are Sungold, the biggest id Tanunda Red (one of the smaller fruits on that plant), the red ones on the edges are Improved Dwarf Champion, and the red ones mixed with Sungold are Reisentraube.
I often could not stay outside to observe (long story, this area allows outdoor brush/grass burning, I’m downwind of that, and is often too polluted for me to spend a lot of time outdoors, even when there are no forest fires). However, my impressions are -
All of the dwarf types stayed under two to three feet tall. There were no disease issues using these methods. All had similar production, although some tended to be too late for me to get full use (New Big Dwarf, Livingston Dwarf Stone, Dwarf CC McGee)
Of the yellow tomatoes, Golden Bush Champion had more tomatoes earlier, and they were more useable, compared to Dwarf CC McGee. Flavor of the two was similar. The Golden Bush Champion (yellow, pictured above) were nice round tomatoes. CCMcGee were really lumpy, OK for some uses but not as easy to slice.
Tanunda Red were easily the largest and most productive, excellent heirloom flavor. Improved Dwarf Champion were fairly small, perfect round, pink tomatoes, good production and very good flavor. BrandyFred were easily the richest flavor, big tomatoes, not a lot of them, maybe a dozen over the season.
The bush-pruned Reisentraube tomatoes were very productive, very tomato-flavored (not just sweet/sour of a lot of cherry tomatoes), and very productive. They were bigger than Sungold. Sungold was very productive as a bush pruned vine, no complaints. People love Sungold although for me they don’t have a classic tomato taste. It’s still really vigorous and was a challenge to keep pruned as a bush.
One wasn’t in the main bed, Dwarf Johnson Cherry. It did not do well, bet neither did other species of plants that I grew in that same locally bought raised bed soil mix. So I think the problem was the soil, not the variety.
My conclusions for 2022-
Grown as I described, there were no disease problems at all. (Side note, I grew sauce tomatoes the same way, except I let them sprawl on the cardboard. Also no disease problems). Also no weed problems, and despite some disability on my part, the plants were much easier to maintain than non-dwarf tomato plants. Production was good, with more than enough for fresh eating for two, all summer long, plus many tomatoes to give away and five tomato pies.
For next year, I again saved seeds for BrandyFred, Improved Dwarf Champion, Tanunda Red, Extreme Bush, Dwarf Golden Champion and Reisentraube.
I’d like to shift production to a bit earlier, so I ordered seeds for Chocolate Champion (70 days), Dwarf Moliagul Moon (75 days), and Puck (40-50 days). Even though the tomatoes are very good, I’ll probably not grow Livingston Dwarf Stone (85 days), New Big Dwarf (90 days), or Dwarf CC McGee (“late season”). I think I’ll also not bother with Bush Early Girl or Early Boy Bush, which didn’t do well for me and had no advantages over the open pollinated, brachytic dwarf indeterminate types. I do think I’ll repeat my bush pruning experiment with Sungold and Reisentraube, and might add to that Ukraine Purple which I like a lot too.
Since my rotations can be intense and space is limited, I’m also growing a winter green manure crop of Nemagon mustard, for organic matter and for the pest / disease risk reduction. I also chopped a crop of marigolds and turned them under, before planting the mustard. I’m not saying that I know these things work, but I figure the organic matter at least is beneficial and I’m at least not bringing in potentially herbicide-contaminated or disease-containing compost.
