Get Daniels, Lynnwood, and Prudens Purple if you want a few just to play with flavors and production. The sweetest tomatoes I have grown are Sungold and Momotaro, both hybrids. I personally don’t like the flavor of Sungold but most people find it irresistible. Momotaro is a medium size pink slicer that really tops up a salad or sandwich.
Tomatogrowers, Johnny’s selected seed, and Sandhill Preservation are a few places to shop.
I like sun gold and have tried sun sugar and did not care for them. Think I have to have the acid with the sweet.
Now for a BLT tomato… pink brandywine is sure hard to beat… bacon and brandywine a match made in heaven.
Bacon and big beef is a good pair too.
TNHunter
just had a blt with some beef bacon (which you gotta try lol, I like it more than pork bacon but im not a big pork fan) with some chocolate stripes.
as for tomatoes that are sweet: Bountyhunterseeds tastes hundrends of tomatoes, and this is his top 5 cherry from a few years ago. can try emailing him and just asking for his sweetest tomatoes of other categories?
@snarfing… I love pork bacon… and I am sure would love beef bacon… if we could find it. We are in a small town surrounded by small towns.
I have never seen beef bacon in any store around here.
I do have a local BBQ place that has some very good smoked sliced brisket and some of that has very nice fat strips in it. It looks a little like bacon but taste way different and is very delicious and smokey.
TNHunter
I bought a packet from Gurneys called Artisan Blush that are supposed to be sweet with very low acid. Reviews look good. Something different. I’ll do a couple of plants.
Fred Hempel developed Blush and Maglia Rosa several years ago. I highly recommend both as they are very good tomatoes. However, both are elongated tomatoes IMO better suited as saladette types.
Yeah I’m working on something like this. This is the 6th year. My goal is to eventually release varieties with different flavor profiles once those flavor lines get stabilized. Mine, at their best, is probably what you’d be looking for. Cantaloupe, grape, cinnamon, etc. None of that sharp, grassy acidity.
Since mine aren’t available I’d recommend Orange Paruche and the Super Sweet 100 types. Especially the Super Sweet 100 types; my neighbor grew one of those types one year and their flavor would be a check 
in my selection process; good flavor, sweet, not sharp, but not the very best. Orange Paruche I think are just a tad below but it’s been so long I don’t remember. They aren’t sharp like the SunGold.
I wouldn’t worry too much about finding a Brix 12 or 14 tomato. We don’t taste with refractometers. When you don’t have that sharp grassy taste you can get away with a lower Brix because there’s nothing conflicting with the sugars.
Awesome! Are you using the wild Tomato species that have very wild flavors? Joseph Lofthouse has made some good progress towards this direction with promiscuous landrace style tomatoes.
By stabilized, you are selfing them right? just keeping the flavor the same/stable but everything else different to take benefit of the wild adaptability genetics?
This is fantastic! By Cantaloupe, something like Pepino Melon (Solanum muricatum) which is very closely related to Tomatoes & Potatoes. Cinnamon is good! I’ve noticed I don’t like acidity much in fruits (Granadilla vs Passionfruit for example), sure it adds nice contrast but just like with spicy peppers, it shouldn’t be to a point of painful.
True! but know imagine you keep the Brix the same + remove the acidty? OOH! 
“Sugar Overload not such concept” here we come!!! 
Joseph Lofthouse had his first tomato success with an unusual tomato named jagodka. It was a variety I sent him about 15 years ago. Why did it work where others did not? It was selected specifically for the ability to produce medium small fruit with a 60 day very cool growing season. He crossed it (or let bees make crosses) with other similar varieties that could make a crop in his climate. Fun fact, he does not like tomatoes.
Not deliberately but it’s possible the original parent had more wild ancestors, as some modern cherry tomatoes do. Whatever the parent’s parentage is, it must have been fairly diverse considering I have eight different flavor lines I’ve been developing + a few extra I haven’t done anything with.
But it’s not like what Joseph is doing with bringing different species of tomato together.
I don’t deliberately self, the plants will self with a breeze or shaking the trellis. I let the bumblebees cross-pollinate for me, and I just select fruits that maintain the same flavor year after year. Most of the effort is just managing the growth because tomatoes are weeds here and they’re growing in a foot of compost to boot.
I will probably need more land to get the lines sufficiently stable for release because of the bumblebees. They gave me a cocktail tomato once with pollen from my neighbor’s better boy plant a few hundred feet away.
The other reason I don’t self is some of my flavor lines came from multiple ancestors, eg Cantaloupe came from one plant called T1, and another called OP11. Allowing their offspring to cross if the bees make it so increases the chance both parents’ genes survive basically for free. It also allows for diversity; T1 lacked a knuckle, while OP11 had one.
I’m glad I did it this way because it allowed new flavors to emerge. The cinnamon came from offspring of OP11 for example. Would never have known had I only grown out seeds from the tastier T1. The cinnamon so far seems like a simple recessive trait.
Tolerance to septoria has increased over the generations. They aren’t resistant where the plant hardly catches it, but the disease doesn’t take out my plants before the frost anymore. 2025 was pretty septoria favorable. We had 21” of rain in May-July, which made the tomatoes put on a lot of tender growth (non-lignified tissue is extra vulnerable). My plants were also spaced extra tight since I oversowed, only 12” apart. And I wasn’t home a lot so they got really wild. Extra seedlings had grown in the beds, the tomatoes were growing into the aisles and even across the aisles. Had that circumstance been a few years earlier my plants may well have died before fruiting.
They seem immune to early blight in my area, which is awesome. Early blight is an issue with my potatoes.
I’ve never had a pepino so IDK if they taste like those. From my mind, my cantaloupe tomatoes taste like a non musky eastern-type cantaloupe.
I don’t have a refractometer, but this is the idea. Of course, sugar gets affected by the weather. Dark, rainy weather during fruit ripening washes out the flavor, and a cool fall cuts the sugar dramatically. But when the weather is warm and the sun is shining, that’s when the sugar is high.
odd… perhaps I don’t as well??? idk I’ve grown to like them but at one time I’ve hated them cuz they didn’t taste like blackberries, guavas or peppers. But I think this has more to do with Grocery Store tomatoes being my only tomato experience.
I like this, the lazy style gardening by not doing extra work you don’t have to do!
That’s crazy! Is this because of Solanum pimpinellifolium genetics? I’ve heard that species actually grows like a crazy weed. Or… are these simply volunteer tomatoes?
wow! Bumble bees can pollinate quite faraway… now this makes me concerned a bit about the GMO Purple Tomato people are now starting to grow in Gardens. Even tho Norfolk encourages people to make crosses with their tomatoes, they still own the patent & therefore can revoke rights whenever they feel like (Not that they will but the chance is never 0%). But I can imagine this be concerning for someone who doesn’t want potential patent infrigements or GMO plants at all.
Awesome! This is exactly what I want to do with my tomatoes, effectively create a landrace while just keeping traits I care about “true to type” (Like flavor or size).
WOW! This gets me excited as I got some seeds from Solanum peruvianum which I heard had melon like flavors!
WOW! again this is super useful! Making tomatoes easier to grow only makes the whole process more rewarding. I wonder if the Tomatoes are more disease resistant than the potatoes, maybe you could try grafting them together?
Or… do you also do the same style of breeding with potatoes & saving their seeds? I’ve heard Potoate berries have Melon like flavors but sadly without lab testing for alkaloids, there’s no way to gaurentee safety of raw consumption. But what’s even more crazy is Poatoes came to be from an ancient hybridization of Tomatoes x Etuberosum. Perhaps potatoes got the melon flavor from wild species of tomatoes after all? Pepino Melon (Solanum muricatum) is also closely related to all 3 sections of Solanum.
wah??? Oh you are missing out! Especially a fully ripe yellowish Pepino melon is so delicious! It taste like a tomato x tomatillo trying it’s hardest to be Honeydew melon. very delicious mild honeydew flavor with pretty much no acidity. In someways they are exactly what I want a tomato to be!
Meanwhile Brassicas laugh as the cold makes them taste sweeter (Sugar just happens to function as a natural anti-freeze).
OOh! why not just harvest tomatoes green & ripen them at home off the vine? that way no cold weather/frost can ruin the flavor. I do this with Mayapples & tomatoes (I don’t notice a difference from vine ripened flavors).
Lucinda. A carrot leaved small tomato.
I don’t know the parentage of the very first seeds, so I don’t know about S. pimpinellifolium genetics in my plants. It could be somewhere in the unknown ancestry since it is used in modern cherry varieties. Well, go far enough back and it likely is somewhere just because domestication happened.
When I said they grow like weeds, I just mean tomatoes in general.
The biggest thing here is just that our environment is conducive to growing tomatoes. The soil has enough nutrients to support their entire life cycle year after year, and it retains water yet drains well (clay loam over schist). The growing season is 180 days long, most of it is warm, with daytime temps in the 70s and 80s. Rainfall is usually high enough to keep soil moist at all times. The compost I use is mainly a bonus and nitrogen reserve. It’s easy to grow tomatoes here in southcentral PA/northern MD. I hardly sell mine at the farm stand because many grow their own already and they don’t want more tomatoes. Some people don’t even plant, they rely 100% on volunteer cherry tomatoes. Being out in the country kinda sucks in that regard, go to the city and more people don’t grow tomatoes.
My tomatoes specifically are fairly quick to flower. I typically start in February & am plucking off flowers in April before they can go out. Some people think it’s stress from root binding but then I show them the roots and they’re like…oh, those roots are totally normal.
I wouldn’t call them a fast grower though. I’ve grown Brandywine alongside them to give to friends & Brandywine is much faster growing. But it flowers much later. Mine are starting to grow faster and faster though. I blame the wildfire smoke in 2023. That smoke and the almost complete lack of rain the whole summer cut my germination to 50%. But that 50% was really vigorous.
In the first couple months my tomatoes grow as a narrow vine that I have to stake up. Then after they go in ground with their trellis they develop the so-called ‘suckers’. The suckers (really just flowering branches) usually form at wide angles. I leave most of them to increase production. Then the plants really take off and get big. The biggest probably grow 10’ by the end of the season.
Volunteers grow like squash vines on the ground. On unamended soil they get a few feet long. In compost they’ll grow 6’ easily.
It’s a small probability. Because my tomatoes are so different from what’s common on the market virtually any cross is easy to detect. And there’s only been one faraway cross out of around a thousand plants over the years. The bulk of cross pollination is within my tomato growing space, which is only a few hundred ft2. That’s why I need more land. (I grow a lot of other things here already).
I’m much more concerned with someone taking my seeds and filing a patent of their own to steal my work.
To be clear I didn’t breed in the EB immunity, that’s just how the plants started out. I’m just confused why the original plant isn’t listed as resistant. Could be a strain thing.
Grafting is a cool idea but I grow way too many potatoes to do that.
Potato fruiting is infrequent. I save the seeds I do get and try to grow them out but I’m fairly new to it so my success rate isn’t that great.
I’m talking about longer bouts of weather where you couldn’t do that approach even if it worked.
But it doesn’t work. I’ve tasted tomatoes that have fallen off the vine prematurely and ripened on the ground and they’ve always been less sweet. I think the differences are masked in the more normal tomatoes by that sharp flavor.
‘Several metabolites were in significantly lower amounts in fruits ripened off-the-vine compared to fruits ripened on-the-vine (fructose, glucose, sucrose, formate, alanine, asparagine, aspartate, glutamate, phenylalanine, threonine, and tyrosine). Major quantitative differences (with more than 30% reduction) were observed in the contents of fructose, glucose, aspartate, and glutamate of fruit ripened off-the-vine.’
The idea that the tomato stops receiving nutrients from the plant at the breaker stage is a myth, it seems.
Wow! You are too close to home 
, I live in Maryland Montgomery County. Good to know Tomatoes are easy to grow where I live too.
Wow! sorry to burst your bubble but tomatoes are also the most popular plant to grow in containers where I live. Even people in apartments plant tomatoes. Even I grew 2 tiny cherry tomato fruits (But mostly because my local groundhog eats the tomato plant, not a fair assessment of how tomatoes can grow here but annoying none the less). Technically they were unripe before frost (No help from groundhog) so I ripened them indoors over 3 months.
Oh yea! I remember that year, felt apocalyptic. All the more reasons to breed better tomatoes.
I’ve heard so many gardeners recommend pruning these “suckers” because they suck energy. True but they also generate more energy. Perhaps this is more common practice with disease susceptible varieties that need lots of airflow to not die from fungal diseases?
Nice! What other things do you grow? And you already use vertical height with plants climbing trellis right?
That’s evil! 
yikes, shit like that actually happens??? Perhaps this is why the OSSI exists, to prevent this?
You’ve seen the epic Cultivariable blog about growing True Potato Seed right? I’ve learned most of what I know about potatoes there. https://www.cultivariable.com/instructions/potatoes/how-to-grow-true-potato-seeds-tps/
I’ve never got a potato to fruit, but that’s also because I’ve never planted true potato seeds either. Only a grocery tuber in ground in the woods & pray groundhog & deer don’t notice is my whole experience.
Interesting… perhaps the sharp flavors do mask the lack of sweetness. Granted I still never tried a vine ripened tomato in my life… so perhaps It’s not fair to say yet. Damn it, groundhog & deer 
.
I’ve thought it was the other way around. Maybe the truth is half-way in the middle. Granted if the goal is purely seed saving, this is okay. I’ve even fully ripened not full sized tomatoes with viable seeds too (took 6 months of ripening on my shelf).
this is very interesting… what happens to the toxic alkaloids tho? they all go away compleatly during the ripening process no? it’s just reduced sweetness… perhaps this is why so many gardeners swear by vine-ripened tomatoes?
A lot of different vegetables and fruits. The primary goal is feeding ourselves & breeding the vegetables to do so without any sort of -cides or barriers. The sales come second. (I tried doing it the other way around but there weren’t enough reliable buyers). I also have chickens.
The tomatoes were how I learned the power of seeds. They were originally on string trellises but in 2024 they grew too big, weighing them down and causing them to collapse. Now they are on cattle panel trellises.
At ultra high densities (under 12” apart) and in greenhouses with the string pulley system it’s the most common. Pruning this way also keeps all of the harvest visible, cutting down on harvest time.
I only prune to remove diseased foliage and increase airflow, if I have time. Since septoria attacks the low, non-lignified (woody) leaf branch first that’s most of what I remove. It does seem to help.
I’ve bought TPS from him. As Bill says, he ships whenever he gets to it. I waited a year I think before getting seeds. His seeds are better than my saved seed.
Some varieties will set seed from tubers on occasion…three of the grocery store yellow potatoes have for me. Red Gold is decent, especially if you manually pollinate. It makes a lot of pollen. But as I said it’s not an every year thing. We’ve been blessed the last two years with cool spells during the season. Planting at a variety of times increases the chance you’ll get flowering & seed during a cool period.
You’ll like this. List of fertile potato varieties
I’ve never had animals eat potatoes.
The alkaloids go away. I think the plant still transmits sugar from the leaves to the fruit during ripening. Probably to encourage the fruit to be eaten or ferment faster if it isn’t. But yes this is why vine-ripened is the ideal. Tomatoes should be bred to sustain the process instead of avoid it.
The only downside is that juicy vine ripened tomatoes have no shelf life. 5 days is the very most you’ll get. If I sell more cherry tomatoes in the future, I’ll have to build special shelves for them.
Sure but the numbers aren’t the same. That’s why farmers markets can charge $10/lb for tomatoes in high-income urban areas. Plus there’s restaurant owners.
Don’t have any surefire advice here. Lofthouse would probably put out a bunch of tomatoes and just save survivors. There are so many dogs where I live that most animals aren’t a problem. There are just as many dogs as there are houses in the neighborhood. There are also cats.
I can’t find a source at the moment but I’ve read one of the major global seed companies tried to patent a couple heirloom beets.
But the law is what you can get away with. A megacorporation knows someone like me can’t afford to fight them. If they lie, say they invented something they didn’t, or file to patent a trait, they’re not legally obligated to tell anyone with proof otherwise. So you would have to periodically scan new patent applications to see what’s happening to hopefully protest the application soon enough.
On the other side of the patent office, trademark abuse is a business model. ‘Trademark protection’ companies get hired by Fortune 500 companies to threaten anyone associated with someone using a name they trademarked, even if the use is 100% legal. (eg a trademark for lending doesn’t cover optical lenses). These companies then pad their numbers to say they stopped so many trademark violations.
OSSI exists for these reasons, yes. I’m not a fan of their approach because it also forces a paper trail onto the would be plant breeder and locks you into their bet that they will prevail against large seed companies if there’s a conflict. But I understand their reasoning. There shouldn’t be utility patents on living things to begin with.
There’s also shadier things from the pesticide industry that I won’t mention here.
That makes sense! Lower leaves with close soil contact are from what I’ve seen are the common vectors for disease.
That’s some good advise, I’ll take mental note of that & try it the next time I get. Thank you for the list of fertile potato varieties.
I 100% Agree! First time I learned about this, I didn’t think it was real. Been a doomer ever sense but with optimism .
hmm… I wonder if you pick tomatoes early when green & ripen off vine, will you eventually reduce the days to maturity? I remember this is what Lofthouse did with his Squash landrace because of early frost in his climate, his Squash started to mature 10 days earlier (Almost like the selective pressure for faster ripening worked). Surely the same can work with tomatoes since like squash they can ripen fruits off the vine.
And then once you get the Days to maturity low enough, then you let them vine ripen in your climate (or close to it).
That’s probably why grocery store varieties get picked full size green + also bred for firmer skin & longer shelf-life at the cost of flavor. Altho I did have some really tasty grocery store tomatoes so they definitely are improving in that direction (I even saved seeds to use in my landraces!).
Here’s some of the best tasting tomatoes I got from grocery store, Tiki Tomatoes, Some Green Xmas Cherry Tomato (No Sourness, just super savory), Zima Tomatoes & Kumato. All of which contain F2 seeds but I just want their genetics present in my landraces (I don’t care about strict true to type like Pure Heirloom seed savers).
True! Still it’s cool to see so many other people growing tomatoes. I think it makes more sense to sell seeds if everyone is growing them instead of selling fruits.
The way I see it, 1 tomato can contain $40 worth of seed or it can be sold as a fruit for $1-2 at a grocery store. Same logic applies to Melons ($6 Honeydew contains ~$30 worth of seed).
This is why I want to get dogs! What I’ve learned from all my limited experience is Location Matters! It will break or make your garden. It sucks as I don’t have any good places to garden. I might try planting super poisonous Edible Chochos Lupine since the toxicity ensures animals don’t eat it 
.
On another note, my orange tomatoes seem to be B-type, meaning they contain a dominant allele that produces beta-carotene instead of lycopene. This is why red fruit sometimes pops up among my orange seed rows. This allele usually was bred from S. habrochaites but it could be from other species. So it’s very likely that this isn’t just heirloom lycopersicon.
No idea. DTM is variable right now so if I wanted to I could select for earliness later on.
My DTM is fine for me. I usually start getting a decent amount of fruit in mid-July, with larger crops in the second week of August. From then, the plants just fruit all the way to the first freeze.
So naturally, in cool weather, they’re less sweet. Just like some apples get sweet in when grown in Southern California, but not up here. My tomatoes are still sweet when it’s cold, and they always vine ripen. Once they hit that mid-August production, my fruits ripen fast enough that if one wave isn’t as sweet because of rain or clouds, another is coming soon (except for a freeze).
There’s also delayed ripening & long life genes in these tomatoes.
I think this is a utility patent for Kumato. It should expire in two years. I doubt Syngeta would care if you just saved the seed for yourself.
At some point it might be something I do.
WDYM? Because of the animals, shade, infrastructure?
Some farmers might let you grow on land they aren’t using. Others let gardeners rent plots.
Very interesting… does the beta-carotene dominant trait make tomatoes taste more like orange sweet potato, carrots or cantaloupes? Or just like typical orange tomatoes?
I’ve heard this is why UK gardeners grow their tomatoes in a green house, for the additional heat not adequate in their climate.
Well good! Thanks for the heads up.
I don’t own land, live in apartments surrounded by HOA. There’s a small forrest nearby but too many herbivors. Tried gardening on abondened parking lot in a more urban area, worked fine until someone had a problem & sprayed the whole thing with herbicides.
I hope to find & work with those farmers eventually. I’d gladly trade them some of what I grow or make their garden look nice if it meant a place for me to grow things for me + do some serious plant breeding work Finally (After 5 years of waiting & studying).
