I’d add for cherry tomatoes Barry’s Crazy Cherry Tomato puts out trusses with 60-70 flowers and maybe 30-40+ fruit eventually form on them (reminded me of a similar cherry “Ildi cherry tomato” that makes tons of cherries). Only disadvantage is the fruit pulls off very easily (maybe thats an advantage if you don’t live in a very windy area) and the flavor where I grew it was growing it was a bit mild to my tastes (might grow better flavor for you in better soil).
I am interested in beefsteak production which most people seem to be posting about. I always say im going to count how many fruit per plant I get but it gets tiring for 40 tomatoes over whole summer and I always quit :).
My fav medium-large tomatoes are always the black tomatoes (Black Tula, Paul Robeson, Cherokee Chocolate and the newer dwarf versions of those types of varieties). Red varieties get seen by animals too easily so i stopped growing red tomatoes. Then i stopped growing green varieties cause they are too hard to know when they are ripe for humans :), so settled on Black tomatoes that get that a nice brown blush the animals seem to have trouble finding be4 they get ripe so you can ripen indoors.
Somoene above mentioned Hawaiin Pineapple, that was def a tasty one I grew in the past.
I was likewise going to comment that Barry’s is probably the most productive I’ve grown but likewise I’ve found it pretty uninteresting flavorwise.
I’ve also found Green Zebra extremely productive – in my plot with borderline excessive P and K each single stemmed vine pumped out 4 or 5 trusses of 6 to 10 tomatoes in the 3 oz to 6 oz range. But going against the grain here, I find them a bit bland and much prefer Azoychka as a sharper tomato despite it being pretty average production wise.
I’ll echo what others are saying re San Marzano – it was my only tomato of 20 varieties last year with severe BER. So I’ll try a dozen more canners/pasters next year.
Any dwarf tomato varieties that standout? Added some extra gardening space this fall so I’m looking to trial about 10 dwarf, 10 intermediate trellised this year. Had a pretty boring lineup the last few years as space was limited and selection at local greenhouses and big box stores was limited.
Also looking to add a paste for cooking this year as my sauce from my slicers was overwhlmingly sweet for our liking. I’ve read that San marzano is also a sweeter tomato but zero expierience growing any paste/sauce varieties. Any nice flavor but not so sweet that can be recommended?
Also worth mentioning- I am ordering all mail order tomato plants this year since I have limited indoor space- hopefully next year I can get some kind of setup going- we’ll see. Tasteful gardens has a decent dwarf selection and chileplants.com has a good amount of non dwarf varieties so that’s most likely who I’ll be using.
Plan is to have a nice mix of colors for beef/slicing and cherrys. And a paste or two. I’ve noted a lot of the recommended varieties above.
If you are ok with hybrid, try growing Legend variety, its a determinate tomato good in flavor, productivity and does well in grow bags with bush growth habit.
I grow a mix of thirty tomatoes here in the mid south. My favorite tomatoes of the heirlooms are Amish Paste, Mortgage Lifter, Cherokee Purple, and Brandywine Red. Black Krim is also great but I haven’t grown any in the last four seasons. I did nothing else last year but to re-establish my raised bed soil with only a healthy amount of good compost and the garden really responded well. We got more of everything we planted than in the last five seasons. The onions, for example, were the biggest I’ve ever grown. So my advice? If you haven’t amended your garden soil in a while get some good compost and get it in there early…like February or March. You will definitely see a difference in output.
For those who have suffered through blossom end rot, I save all my egg shells and grind them in a dedicated blade type coffee grinder and add it to the planting hole of each tomato. Works like a charm by adding calcium carbonate to the plant.
I planted my own strain of a Better Boy- Brandywine hybrid in July as pretty large plants from my greenhouse in 3 different locations. One in the ground out in the open, one in a 25 gallon container on top of a cement driveway and one in rich soil against the southside of my house. They bore from least to most in that order with the one against the house providing much later and cleaner tomatoes right into first frost in Oct. The others got earlier eastern sun but the white cement block wall trumped that by far. I probably got at least 3X as many tomatoes from that as the other two combined.
I didn’t plant cherry or grape tomatoes by the wall, but they were relatively productive regardless.
San Marzano, Bull Heart, Cherokee Purple and Black Krim, Kellogg’s Breakfast in that order. For tomato count per plant. Prairie Fire did amazing too. I’m in a hot dry climate 9b.
I grew alot of black/chocolate dwarfs couple years ago from Victory Seeds:
Tasmanian Chocolate Tomato
Rosella Purple Tomato
Chocolate Champion Tomato
Maralinga Dwarf Tomato
Kookaburra Cackle Dwarf Tomato
Dwarf Velvet Night Tomato
Dwarf Numbat Tomato
Aussie Drop Tomato
Boronia Dwarf Tomato
Purple Reign Tomato
Dwarf Mary’s Cherry Tomato
The best for me were: Tasmanian Chocolate, Chocolate Champion, Kookaburra Cackle and maybe Rosella Purple (and i’ll add maybe Purple Reign was also good)
I grew Rosella Crimson and Chocolate Lightening last year. Neither impressed or compared to my go to heirlooms although they did produce smaller tomatoes and were in a 7g. I want to try Rosella Purple and Tasmanian Chocolate next go.
Pretty neat how many varieties of dwarf there are out there. I’m excited to give a good handful of them a try next summer. I’m all for getting more variety in a smaller space.
I have choc champion, rosella purple, kookaburra cackle on order for next year among others so I’m glad to hear you’ve had good luck with these varieties! I also was able to find and order Perth pride as recommended by Darrell.
In the last several years I’ve grown Barry’s Crazy Cherry and found it to be very productive and sweet, but pretty bland. There’s only so many of them that my family will eat, and the rest get dehydrated, mixed into other stuff, or some go to the chickens.
Prairie Fire (from Baker Creek) was a hit at my house. They are pretty productive, sweet and flavorful. They’re not a great size though. They’re almost too small to use on sandwiches and such, but they’re too big to just snack on like a cherry tomato. When dehydrated they’re really good but almost too sweet. It’s almost a little off putting to get one in a mouthful of food.
One of my usual seed sources started carrying Eva Purple Ball recently, so it’s on my grow list for this year. @Fusion_power has talked it up enough for me to give it a whirl in my garden. I’m going to mostly lean on EPB and PF as workhorses while planting some big beefsteak with great flavor types for BLT nights.
Also, if you’re not doing Florida Weave, you should try it. It’s the easiest way to keep tomatoes trained that I’ve found so far.
Last year we tried a few new heirlooms, and the most productive was Durmitor, a large red cherry variety. I planted 3 of them, and put them inside 5ft tall cages and they went well over them. The flavor was very good, the fruit was distributed on strigs of 6-10 fruit. It seemed to be fairly disease resistant and produced well into September, rare for here.
It’s a Russian variety which I got from my usual tomato seed seller
Another new variety was Brad’s Atomic Grape, which produces some of the most interestingly colored Roma type fruit. It has streaks of purple, green and gold, and had a nice tart, smoky flavor. It has a weepy type habit, is moderately productive, and decent DR.
Prairie Fire has a very unique flavor one of everyone’s favorites. Barry’s Crazy Cherry was pretty intense and very good here on a hot long summer. Just too much of a pain to pick when there’s so many. And bland early but seem to pick up a great taste later.
There’s levels to their ripeness and flavors with them both. When my Prairie Fires hit a certain point people said raspberry candy flavors I could taste that too.
I grew prarie fire for the first time this year and agree they have a certain fruitiness about them. Unfortunately, most of mine split terribly. Less water next year.
