What tomatoes will you grow in 2019?

I must preface this by saying I prefer intense bold tasting tomatoes: sweet, sweet-tart, savory, (not tart only) etc… Big Beef F1, as a reference point, is too close to an average grocery tomato for me to enjoy.

If you’re just looking for a must try at least once in your life list… I think this thread is pretty good.

A lot of the “black” aka “purple” tomatoes I think are fairly complex like Black Krim, Carbon. They aren’t really low-acid persay, but they have higher glutamate content.

Polish Ellis comes to mind for sweet-tart intense high brix and acid.

Cherries… probably Ron’s Carbon Copy, Brad’s Atomic Grape, Matt’s Wild Cherry, Sweet Aperitif, a LOT of the F1 hybrids like Sungold, Super Sweet 100, etc…

Craig Lehoullier’s dwarf tomato project: sweet sue, sweet scarlet, blazing beauty, summer sunrise, Uluru Ochre, wild fred, the rest of the dwarfs are rather bleh to me.

However, I don’t mind mild or subtle palettes if they are complex. Like Wapsipinicon Peach is a lightly flavored tomato that I really enjoy.

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I really forgot how teeny tiny (not being cute either!) the blossoms are on my currant tomatoes, they look like they belong in fairyLand! The tomatoes start out at about 1/16th of an inch. Very silly, till they are full grown and sooooo sweet.

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I got my tomatoes in. I have to check the names. One is Pineapple Pig. I got Matt’s Wild, and I found Sweet Baby Girl, but I cannot recall the exact names of the other. I think was a relative of Consulto Genovice (SP.)

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Think you mean Costoluto Genovese or Costoluto Fiorentino.

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Rather than potting them up I put them in the ground this past sunday. They had outgrown their containers and decided to risk putting them out early. As mentioned, I went with mostly hybrids this year. Mainly to get a comparison of how they taste and how the improved disease resistance is versus the heirlooms I planted last year. We shall see.

The latter! I checked the tag.

Also in addtion to the above, I planted Mark Twain, it’s leaves are getting too yellow.


And Sungold, was given a little Early Girl, she looks dark green.

Tomato growing has not went how i expected this year! Much of the time the tomatoes spent the year with 5 gallon buckets over their heads because of all the unseasonably cold weather. Ive added cages and pulled them up to add the buckets back twice. Its May and im beginning to wonder when tomato season starts! Normally April 15th is early and May 1st is late to plant tomatoes.

Anything with S. pimpinelliforum parentage can be pretty hardy/vigorous in my experience; surviving and producing even in low 40s. Most of the heirlooms not so much. Hybrids can be a mixed bag. Some hybrids are more cold hardy than others; mostly to take advantage of a short growing season. These were usually developed in Canada or NY. On the other hand, there are hybrids bred for high heat tolerance like Heatmaster F1, which makes sense since it was developed in Texas by Seminis (i think)

Taste is a mixed experience. I think some hybrids can get close, but they never quite hit the mark for me relative to heirlooms. However, IMO, it’s a matter of personal sensitivity, much like other fruits. For some people, you give them dozen different white peaches and they can’t taste the difference. Other people find all dark cherries to taste the same, or blackberries, etc… etc…

Forgot to put this in my other post. Breeder is Tokita. They have bunch of new cherry hybrids out that’s interesting. [Not really “new” as in this year, but new in the sense of available to the NA market.] SunChocola, SunPeach, among other Sun- prefix releases. Trying a few of those new ones out this year.

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Same here but i had the opposite problem. Weather has been absolutely perfect but I blew my chance to get an early start because of some 2-4-d drift that got on them. Likely set me back several weeks.

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Ouch!

So far this has been my best tomato year by far, I had a great seedling growing setup (thanks Dimitri) and planted out early in a warm spot. I ate my first ripe SunGold today, yum!!

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I’d love to see some photos of how far along your plants are, if you have the time.

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Going to try to get our tomato starts in the ground this weekend. They looked pretty puny when I put them in cups last week, but mostly seem to be doing nicely now. Seems for whatever reason, we don’t get our 'maters out until the last week of May/early June. Got to find a place for about 38 plants. Lots of Brandywine (pink and yellow), and Strawberry beefsteaks, and about 10 different other herlooms and a few hybrids.

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Sure, here is a picture:

The tomatoes are as high as 5’ already. The peppers are still pretty stubby. I planted a few more tomatoes than I had planned, I had a bunch of nice plants and had to put them somewhere :grin:

The fence in front is my deer fence, its so much more pleasant not having to worry about that.

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My tomatoes have barely flowered. I will share as they grow.

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The tomatoes im growing are growing fairly fast given the cold spring we have had. They spent much of their life under a bucket when the temperature dipped. We did not do anything special just through down cardboard and paper around them and half a dozen of them already have blossoms. Hopefully the cold is gone because fitting them back under those buckets as you can see would not be easy. I caged them and pulled the cages several times so i could get buckets over their heads when it got cold


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While we have no space for starting ourselves, I am super lucky to have a friend who has a great starting setup and is willing to share. Typically, I just take whatever he has left over but did put in some special requests this year due to how happy we were with a few specific ones:

Golden King of Siberia, super early, tasty and prolific. A total winner for us
Thornburn’s Terracotta, not huge fruit, but some of the best flavour ever and started early and kept going
Mennonite Orange, these are amazing and I take all he will give me every year!

He gave me a few other’s that we’ll see how they do:

Brad’s Atomic Grape
Plum Regal, he got incredible production from his last year and said the taste was very good so my fingers are crossed!
Meme de Beauce, we had a couple of these last year and while they were tasty and very large, ours had very deep folds and both cracked and had problems with earwigs. We’ll see if this one does better.

We also got some from a local farm that does it’s own heirloom starts and filled in with a few from an independant garden centre so it’s a broad mix:
Bogus Fructa
Gardener’s Sweetheart
Black cherry
Pink Passion
Old German
Sunny Boy
Golden Oxheart
Galina’s Yellow
Mountain Magic
Sweet Millions

Last year one of the 2 Mennonite Oranges turned out to be a Lucid Gem. While it produced the biggest tomato I’ve ever grown, I was still disappointed since they weren’t as tasty. Here’s the 2 pound, 8 ounce monster!

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Have you grown that one much? I decided to try it this year for the first time.

So far this year I am most excited by Amazon Chocolate, it is setting much better than all my other full-size tomatoes, and the plants are extra vigorous. Of course its still in the early innings, it had better taste good to be a winner!

That was my first Lucid Gem. It had been labelled as a Mennonite Orange so it took a check in with my supplier to find out what it was. He’s done them a few years and had similar experiences to mine which was that each plant produced one HUGE fruit and then several more smaller ones. We didn’t find the taste that interesting but it was low acid.

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I am such a sucker for nurseries. I just wanted one Lemon Boy tomato to fill out my color palette of tomatoes this year. But nooooooo. I came home with two peach tomatoes that I love and two Cuore di Bue Heart shaped tomatoes as well. A couple of eggplants and French marigolds. Oh well.

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Finally got our tomatoes in the garden today. I started about 3, it was 85 and the sun was beating down on me and no wind, so that didn’t last long, I was getting loopy headed from stooping down to plant and then standing back up to go get another plant. Did 10 and stopped, said I gotta go in and chill a bit. Guess I’m getting old or something.

Felt better after we had our taco supper, so we were both back out there about 6:30, and with the sun over the west hillside. We got 35 put in the ground, some still look kinda puny, so I buried them deep and piled the dirt up around them. Good to finally get that out of the way.

Here is what we planted:

Yellow Brandywine (3)
Watermelon (3)
Better Boy (3)
Black Brandywine (2)
Pink Brandywine (2)
Jaune Flammé (2)
Chocolate Cherry (2)
Hillbilly (2)
Sister Miriam (2)
German Strawberry (2)
Boxcar Willie (2)
Aunt Ruby’s German Green (2)
Omar’s Lebanese (2)
Gordost Sibiri (2)
Girl Girl Weird Thing (2)
Dr Wyche Yellow (1)
Azoychka (1)

She planted a Watermelon tomato in a big pot for the deck. We haven’t had a lot of luck with container tomatoes, but tried a mix that doesn’t tend to hold too much water.

A couple weeks ago she also planted a couple more 'maters, I think one was a Watermelon and the other pink BW. And, we still have a couple left over, so those will have to go somewhere. So, looks like we’ll have 40 plants this year. Usually have issues with Brandywine’s not producing a lot, but last year they did pretty well in the same plot as this year’s, so we’ll see.

Our peppers are still under the lights indoors, so hope we can get those in the ground soon. That’s what I get for starting them so late (April).

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