Thanks for the tip Drew about Sun Green. I’ll pass that along to my buddy.
@mrsg47 I knew there was probably a different method to eating green tomatoes. My buddy likes them right off his plate. Maybe he’s adding cheese and stuff though. I don’t know.
I’ll stick with the red tomatoes, yellows, & oranges. He brought Helsing Junction Blues that were completely red. He said that’s when they’re really good. Looks like my plant has a ways to go for them to turn red.
Dax
I like dark tomatoes best, but the blood red ones are awesome too.I just not have found one that produces well here. I don’t really care for the yellow or oranges either. I’ll eat them! Just prefer dark.
Right in my book too. I wouldn’t plant a yellow or an orange one over any red ever.
I ate too many last night. Tonite I’m going to try a few and one is Nebraska Wedding (a yellow). I guess I’ll see then what I think.
SunSugar that my friend brought yesterday is excellent, however. Worth planting as a cherry tomato.
Dax
I trialed this year a pink called Seek N Further Love Apple. A small beefsteak. Fruits seem uniform on the outside and various degrees of meatiness on the inside. taste is tangy, not sweet or tart. Not bad!
Production is average. Mid-season.
This is what my bud brought to me and another mutual friend.
Monkey Ass I tried last night and wouldn’t grow again. It’s a very mediocre beefsteak. Not a lot of flavor and more meaty without enough juiciness.
Dax
Funny how we are all so different. My two favorite tomatoes this year are Mr. Stripey and Big Rainbow, both yellow and red striped varieties. After sampling 9 new varieties this year black krim is my least favorite. It’s prolific and early but something in the flavor just isn’t as good as the other beaksteak types.
I’m only going to start commenting on the ones I like after this circus I’m participating in with my buddy.
I will tell you that personally I would not walk across the street to eat a Nebraska Wedding or a Mortgage Lifter. Mortgage Lifter is okay, but I continuously go back to Better Boy in my mind.
It’s like the Hark pecan. All my friends up here in zone 5b midwest think they outta be crossing into Hark to create the next best thing. Well, we have the best, it’s Hark.
Why mess with perfection. I don’t know. These are just my thoughts on Better Boy.
It’s fun. I’ll say that! No doubt about it. But so far I’ve found one I would plant and that’s Bear Claw. The problem with Bear Claw is you get about 3 tomatoes per plant so you need more space. The tomatoes are huge. I got a small one off my buddies plants. The others he has to hold with two hands and he forecasted them to be more than 3 pounds on the vine. We will see when they hit the scale.
Dax
Weather conditions and soil can make a difference each year. I decided not to grow Black Krim again because in my garden it only produced a few tomatoes and they were mediocre. Maybe another year they would be better.
Many give plants two years, depending on the problem. I put up with the problems of low production and disease susceptibility for the flavor of heirlooms. Also though so I can save my own seeds and don’t have to keep buying seeds. Some hybrids are fantastic, even better. Part of the fun for me is saving and comparing years, it’s a hobby for me, besides everything else. If certain hybrids work for you, great! I grow them too, from time to time. Also my needs are small, I mostly use tomatoes for sauce, and well most of the ones I like for sauce, don’t taste all that great fresh.
I grew Cow’s Tit this year, and I’m liking this plant, it is a producer of medium pastes. It produces well, and has made the cut. Now to see how good a sauce they make. I usually make mixed sauces and in future years I will just grow a lot of one variety, to really test each variety better. I have enough candidates now.
Our San Marzano are going nuts as per normal, and they’ll always be in the mix here. Early Girl is producing like a cherry tomato! So far Black Krim is just a slow poke, while Big Beef is kicking them out at a pretty good pace. NAR & BW are about average production wise. But the one that has my attention is that Romeo… I mentioned above that the jury was still out as far as the taste goes for us, but we cut the big one last night and she even put some chunks in our cottage cheese. I was impressed! I was looking forward to a bland nothingness, but it was actually pretty darn good.
Wish I’d have taken a shot of it sliced, but I cut up another one today just working up some toms for freezing. Plus I was wanting more seeds to save, the first one hardly had any!
Not a lot more on the 2nd one.
Here’s a picture of 5 of the “smaller” ones on a plate, plus the insides of one I cut into. The lighter orange skin hides a darker pink/red meat.
But I commented to my wife that if someone just walked in and saw the plate they might mistake it for watermelon 
So far my wife is exceedingly impressed with the “meatiness” of this paste tomato, and how quickly they fill the freezer bags, that she’s already making sure I have a spot for them next year.
But again, we need to do some cooking to make sure we like the cooked up flavor, but out of the gate it’s looking good!
It does look like watermelon! Yes let us know, good or bad how they are cooked. I had them twice cooked, but both times with some others, So not positive but fairly sure it’s decent, Although I need to grow more to test by itself. Yeah the San Marzano will be the last one I trial. I only grew one plant of Romeo this year. Mostly for seed this year.
Another Italian tomato group used for sauce are the Costoluto or ribbed tomatoes. They have a lot of seed and gel, but easy to remove and the flesh is firm. Some say they are the best. Regions in Italy have their own versions. I have three of them, Di Parma, Fiorentino, and Genovese.
Monkey Ass looks like an Oxheart. Those are good for canning, spaghetti sauce, and salsa. Not good for fresh eating. We grow some of the neighbor’s extra oxheart seedlings every year. Russian tomatoes and brandywine are, to me, great types for fresh eating.
Thanks for teaching me something. I didn’t know Oxheart was its’ own group of tomatoes.
And I agree… it does look like an Oxheart.
Thanks, Joe.
Dax
And there are two types of ox-heart. One is heart shaped, the second group looks like a wrinkled sack of money.
I’ve learned so much here in the few weeks I’ve been a member, I’m glad to be to contribute. I’m by no means a tomato expert.
Thanks for the review. I have one Bear Claw grafted and one on its own roots. They are making HUGE tomatoes…I hope some actually ripen, between turkeys snacking on green ones and some kind of brown rot on the botom of some I’m not holding my breath.
Blossom end rot caused by a lack of calcium absorption. This is usually caused by uneven watering, Too dry, too wet. Not keep just moist to dry. Some varieties get it quicker and some not at all.
We’ve been getting heavy summer rains. It grows feed for the sheep but the hail last night shredded the squash and cucumbers, and dented the few apples on the trees. Hopefully next year we will be on solar water and won’t mind if we get less rain.
Greenhouse tomatoes in a controlled environment are sounding nicer all the time!
Edit: hybrid determinate variety Front Runner. I can’t find the seeds for sale anywhere except Amazon and I assume they are left over seeds since they are no longer listed on the Burpee site.
I have a few seeds left so I can grow them next year even if they are no longer sold.
First time I had a tomato plant that needed to be thinned. Too many large tomatoes in clumps caused them to push each other off the stem before ripening. Also some stems collapsed from the weight. Some tomatoes were 16 oz.
A lot of our plants have just about blighted out due to all the rain we’ve had in the last month. Because of that the fruit has been rotting on the vines due to them splitting, and with no foliage, they’re also getting sunscald. Oh, and it looks like deer have got into the patch, but not as bad as previous years. Same old story as before. Plus, the plants had gotten so high above their stakes, a lot of them have tumped over. It didn’t help that I didn’t weed hardly any the last month either, but it became an impenetrable mess.
Saying all that, this evening i picked about 30lb of tomatoes, and we canned 7qt of them in the water bather. There’s still some more fruit on the plants, I just hope we’ll have enough to make some salsa when our peppers finally ripen up. We have 6 other plants down in the corn/bean patch, and they look decent, so we ought to get some off of those (3 Brandywine, 3 Orange Ky beefsteak).
Our best producers were in descending order: Chocolate Cherry, Dr Wyche Yellow, Jaune Flammé, Russian Queen, Gordost Sibiri and Boxcar Willie. Siberian Pink, Watermelon, Abe Lincoln, Paul Robeson set quite a bit of fruit, but they’ve either rotted on the vine, or are getting burned up by the sun. My two Romeo plants have set some huge Roma type fruits, but not one of them are ripe yet.
Here’s a pic of a basket of the toms I picked today.
Next year I’m going to have to do something different as this scenario plays out every year. Namely, I’m going to really have to reduce the number of sucker branches, and figure out a way to support them better. Plus, we’re just going to have to grow some hybrids, as these heirlooms tend to struggle in this environment. Maybe it won’t matter, but we ought to try. Oh, and I’m not trying any more purple/black varieties (other than Chocolate Cherry) as the plants are way too diseased before the fruit has a chance to properly ripen.
