Our cohort in all things tomato, Don Shor of Redwood Barn Nursery in Davis, got into a lot of helpful information for tomato gardeners besides just talking about tomato varieties in Episode 317 of the Garden Basics podcast, The 2024 Tomato Preview Show. The mini-podcast (above) highlights four tips we discussed that can make you a more successful gardening tomato-head.
Among Don’s tips:
• The first thing you should do when you when bring that tomato plant home from the nursery.
• And, if you are growing tomato plants from seed, what you need to do before you plant it outdoors.
• How to save tomato seeds from open pollinated varieties for next year.
• How to save your tomatoes when it gets really, really hot.
• How to improve the flavor and texture of supermarket tomatoes.
• Plus, I threw in an extra tip on growing fruit trees in containers for a longer fruit production life in tight quarters.
The Tomatoes of the 2024 Tomato Preview Show (with links for more info)
Purple Tomato (a GMO variety)
A sampling of our comments of each of those tomato varieties (listen to the full episode for even more tomatoey details)
Fred: the big winner last year for me was Rugby, based on your endorsement of that tomato over the last couple of years. And Rugby is just a wonderful tomato.
Don: it grows very, very well and a very good producer here. So yes, you and I definitely agree on Rugby.
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Don: I still highly recommend the Chef's Choice series and I strongly recommend Chef's Choice Orange based on previous years. That's still in my top ten.
Fred: Several of the Chef's Choice tomatoes have been All-America Selections winners, as well.
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Don: I have to say every year I have one plant that just grows incredibly robust compared to all the others. It's never the same one, of course, and it produces really, really heavily. And in 2023 for me, that was Juliet. Now I recommend Juliet very highly for a lot of reasons. I did a quick count, just trying to figure out how many fruit my Juliet plant produced. It was something close to 400.
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Fred: One that you have recommended over the years. And I finally broke down and tried it and it was actually it was successful the second year I tried it. And that's another Don Shor rule about planting tomatoes. Give them three years, plant them for three years and see if you still like it. And Bodacious did quite well for me in 2023. It was the the last plant to give up, and I harvested the remaining green ones in November and I finally finished the green ones as they ripen slowly in the garage. I finished those off in late February.
Don: Yeah, it's been a very good performer. If you're looking for something in what we sometimes call the beefsteak category, a large slicing tomato with good connective tissue that you could use in a sandwich, Bodacious is probably your best bet here in the Sacramento Valley. Bodacious has great flavor all as well, has taken heat very well for me. Continues to be a good performer for me.
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Fred: Another one of your perennial favorites - and I've been planting it now for like three or four years - well, I finally ran out of the seed. I'm going have to get some fresh seed. The New Girl tomato.
Don: Yes, New Girl has been out yielding Early Girl for me for the last two years.
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Don: There's another one out there called Tough Boy. Some people are doing that one and have had very good results. Tough Boy is another one where they're trying for that same 4 to 6 ounce fruit size, nice round red tomato, good flavor, a good all-purpose tomato. That's another good one.
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Don: There's one that I've been recommending and it's going to be a hard one to find unless the nursery start it themselves. It’s Blue Ribbon. It doesn't crack, it doesn't split. It didn't get blossom and rot. The fruit is always 12 ounces or so, a good size all the way up to a pound. Sometimes it didn't get sunburned. It just performs really well. It's not just attractive. I mean, the Blue Ribbon refers to the fact it's a very, very good looking tomato. It also has really good flavor, and holds well on the vine.
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Don: So here's my big surprise from last year. Every year there's one variety that surprises me. Pineapple. The name refers to the rather tangy flavor. This year I got 14 very large fruit on the one plant, each of them about one and a half to two pounds.
Fred: An oldie but a goodie.
Don: I don't usually tell people heirlooms are going to be your highest yield, but the Pineapple really, really surprised me how much it produced. Great quality. I recommend if you have room for four or five tomato plants, try Pineapple.
Fred: You're right, it's beautiful, with sort of a golden orange color.
Don: And red striations in the flesh. It slices great, it cooks great.
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Fred: How did Champion perform for you last year? You seem to plant it every year.
Don: It was just fine, as usual. You know, I got a lot of fruit on it. It's a really good red tomato.
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Don: There's a whole group of tomatoes I'm getting pretty fed up with, and that is the purple, blue and black tomatoes, Black Beauty, Blue whatever. We're just finding some of them really, really don't soften. And the flavor is, in my opinion, rather astringent. And I don't know what it takes to get them to have good flavor. If someone out there has come up with a new hybrid purple or blue tomato with good flavor. I'd love to know what it is because so far, I'm not impressed.
Fred: I did ask the Facebook people who follow the Get Growing with Farmer Fred page, “What tomato did you really like from 2023?” And I did get a reply from one follower whose opinion I respect. He's a high school horticulture teacher and he said he loved Purple Boy. Said it was very productive. And that's good enough for me. I'll give that a shot. So I've got some Purple Boy seedlings coming up.
Don: I'm writing it down as we speak.
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Fred: I have actually picked for 2024 an oldie but a goody container-sized tomato, called Bush Early Girl. It produces fairly good sized tomatoes, but on a plant that only gets 18 inches tall.
Don: The dwarf tomato series varieties are becoming very popular. I have grown some of these. I haven't grown that particular one. You'll find the yields are okay for what they are. This is a small plant. There's a bunch of little miniature tomatoes, Little Napoli, Little Sicily. One of my growers handed me a Mini Marzano. The plant grew 16 inches by 16 inches. Produced about 12 fruit, each of which was about one ounce. You know, if you're in an apartment and you have a balcony, that's a fun thing to do. Many of these are not going to give you the yields you're expecting.
Fred: The Bush Early Girl, by the way, is a compact determinant, which means it's going to set most of its crop once and then you can pull it out. But it ripens in only 54 days.
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Fred: I think the seed catalogs especially the specialty tomato seed catalogs like Totally Tomatoes are getting wise to me because they're starting to throw packets of other tomato seeds in with my order, things that I didn't order. Because they think, “he'll plant anything, just send it.”
Don: They did that to us, what, two or three years ago? They sent this one out. It was just a number at the time and I remember sending a note to the owner of Seeds ’N Such. “What is this one? We need to know. This is really a great performer. It stayed firm late in the season. It produced well. It was a compact plant.” He goes, Oh yeah, we're going to send that out next year with a name, It’z a Keeper. And that turned out to be an outstanding variety and I really do highly recommend it. It is really firm. It's one of those tomatoes that you just wonder if it's ever going to ripen. It is ripe. It's just very, very solid. The name, “It’z a Keeper” refers to the fact that it can sit on your counter for awhile. Pick it in mid-October, three or four weeks later, it is still just fine and still has very good flavor. Again, you're going to have to find it yourself, because hardly any retailers are going to have that one available as a plant. But It’z a Keeper is an interesting new variety that I think has a lot to recommend for it.
Fred: I’ve got a couple of those questionable freebies growing now. One is called Super Fantastic and the other is called Jetstar. if you live in Canada, you would like Super Fantastic, even though I’ve started that seed. It produces ten ounce tomatoes, an indeterminate. According to West Coast Seeds, which is based in British Columbia, “Super Fantastic tomato seeds produce hearty, vigorous vines that adapt well to a variety of climates, immensely popular and an excellent producer on the West coast of British Columbia. These rich, meaty beefsteak tomatoes are very versatile.”
Don: the West Coast of British Columbia is a pretty wet, cool place. Wherever your live, look for particular varieties that are recommended by your local garden centers.
Fred: The Jetstar one that I'm growing that I know nothing about is advertised as being “a prolific producer of big globe shaped fruits that ripen all the way through.”Well, that's good to know. “Excellent flavor with low acidity, nice compact habit, indeterminate. It gets 3 to 5 feet tall.” It does not state the size of the tomatoes though. So I don't know.
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Don: We mentioned compact varieties. There is one that I find myself recommending more and more year after year and I think you're going to grow it this year. When I first read about it, it was described as the classic tomato for sun drying and it is very, very good for that. In fact, I started growing it just for that purpose because one of my staff people just loves to take them and cut them in half and dry them. It's Principe Borghese.
Fred: Yeah, you wore me down on that one.
Don: It also happens to be very good for sauces and salsas, things like that. And it's a very compact variety. So people who are limited for space that really like a rich flavored, almost gourmet quality tomato, look into Principe Borghese.
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Don: Late last year I remember we talked about a very strange tomato that I was growing and I told you, I'll give you a report card on this one again. Riesetomate. It looks like a bunch of grapes. It's a single tomato with numerous lobes. They look like, as I say, a bunch of red grapes, all one fruit with all these lobes on it. It produced at least 80 fruit for me. These are very, very rich flavors. It's the kind of thing where you just break off a piece and eat some fresh. It made amazing salsa and it was one of the strangest looking tomatoes I have actually ever grown. So if you have room in your garden and you want to grow something truly weird, look for the Riesetomate tomato.
Fred: I just went online to see what a Riesetomate looks like and there are all these other Riesetomate types. There's a Riese that I'm looking at from Rare Seeds that looks like a very deep red cluster of grape sized tomatoes.
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Don: Sungold is still the most popular cherry tomato that's out there, beating older more established varieties such as Sweet 100, Sweet Million, that whole category. Kids seem to really like Sungold.
Don: one group of cherry tomatoes that you might want to look into are the ones that are being produced by Brad Gates, who you've had on your show many times, from Wild Boar Farms. His cherry tomatoes are phenomenal producers and very, very sweet, including Barry’s Crazy Cherry, which produces hundreds of fruit. I always plant Sweet Carneros Pink. I always plant Pork Chop, that's a very good yellow tomato. Another reliable producer is Michael Pollan, named after the author. It's a very good producer. Very interesting. I do recommend trying some of his. They're different.
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Don: you mentioned Gardeners Delight. Usually that is a very reliable tomato and I have customers that swear by it. So I want to see a new gardener getting some that we know are going to do well for them.
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Don: One that I was reintroduced to a couple of years ago was Big Beef. We talked about not doing beefsteak types. Well, Big Beef can go in early, it sets early, makes a really good size, good quality fruit and seems to be very well adapted. It was an All-America selections winner in the 1990s. So I've added that to my top 20. And I have customers that swear by it now because they've gotten very good large fruit as early as the first week of July.
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Don: Here in Yolo County, UC Davis’ Dr. Robert Norris, who has been advising Master gardeners here for decades, strongly recommends 4th of July as an early ripening, very good fruiting tomato. And that's done very well for a lot of people. So that's a case where it's a local variety that has a lot of people that have tried it. It's a tried and true in our region. Wherever you're listening, there probably is one like that.
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Fred: So to recap, this year I will be planting the Principe Borghese, Rugby, Gardeners Delight, Bodacious, New Girl, Purple Boy, Super Fantastic, Bush Early Girl, Jetstar and one of my favorite cherry tomatoes, Sweet Million.
Don: We'll have Rugby. I'm doing a second year of one called Super Sauce, which was extremely good producer, bigger than Rugby, very similar. And I'll have my usual red and yellow and orange tomatoes from Chef's Choice series, and I'm going to do Orange Wellington next to Chef's Choice Orange, because I've had both and they're both very good. And I'm curious if Orange Wellington, which I found in the Burpee catalogue, is as good a producer as they say it is, and good flavour as they say it is.
Fred: I still like Dr. Wyche’s Yellow. It’s one of my favorite yellow-orange beefsteaks to grow.
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Don: there is one other blue tomato on the horizon you've probably been reading about. It's the Purple Tomato, the first genetically modified plant that the public can buy. It is a purple fleshed tomato. It got a lot of publicity. All you do is Google “purple tomato”, and the information about this will all come up. It costs about two bucks a seed. You're not going to find that a whole lot of garden centers, but some of your friends will probably be growing it. It should be interesting to see what it's like. And my first reaction was, why do they do a purple one? Those are terrible.
Fred: Now wait a minute. It’s a seed.
Don: You can get seed of this purple fleshed tomato, two bucks a piece and they're out there. You can certainly buy them. It is the first in the United States. There was a genetically modified tomato introduced in Japan last year, which has enriched nutrient status. It has higher something, vitamin A probably. This one is purple, not just purple skin, but vivid purple flesh all the way through. And I can't remember right off the top of my head the name, but you can find it quite easily. Yes, you can buy the seed, as I say, two bucks a seed and you can grow yourself. And so for years I have I have customers who don't want GMOs. They have customers who think they're interesting. Never was an issue. They would say, Are any of these GMOs? I would say there are no GMOs in the nursery industry or in the garden industry. That's no longer true. This one is out there, but you have to buy direct from the supplier. So this purple fleshed tomato, there is going to be certainly a lot of conversation about it. I would be great if someone would grow it and let us know how the flavor is and who knows? It might actually get into the trade, as the price comes down. But for two bucks a seed, you're not going to see a whole lot of plant growers jump into that one.
Fred: I just looked it up. It has a very clever name. Purple Tomato.
Don: Quite interesting looking. And I'm guessing some people have already bought the seed. So we'd like to hear your reports on it.
Fred: The Purple Tomato, as described by its developer, who is Norfolk Plant Sciences, the Purple Tomato contains high levels of antioxidants and anthocyanins normally found in fruits such as blueberries and blackberries.
Don: Yes. And so far my experience has been that makes them taste pretty astringent. But we'll find out with this one. Maybe they've figured a way around that problem.
Thank you for also listening to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast! It’s available wherever you get your podcasts. Please share it with your garden friends.
Fred Hoffman is also a University of California Cooperative Extension Master Gardener in Sacramento County. And he likes to ride his bike(s).
2024 Tomato Preview