Best heirloom tomato varieties
Five
years ago, I went hog-wild and started about 35 different types of
tomatoes. Every year since then, I've been whittling our
selection down to the varieties that taste the best, produce the most,
and are least blight-prone. Here are the eight varieties we'll be
growing in 2011:
- Martino's roma ---
delicious and a copious fruiter. Was more
resistant to the blight than our other roma varieties (San Rodorta and
Russian), partly because the
vine is a bit less vigorous.
- Yellow
roma --- mixes with Martino's roma to make a very unique
sauce.
The vine grows like crazy, so it has to be pruned a lot, and the fruits
do tend to crack on top, so they require a bit more preparation than
Martino's roma.
- Ken's red --- an un-named
but delicious big, red slicing tomato that we got from my friend Ken.
- Japanese black trifele --- this was given to me as "Brandywine", but the fruits are shaped like a drop of water and a search of the internet suggests my tomato is actually Japanese black trifele. Purple slicing tomato with great taste, although you have to cut off a woody top part.
- Blondkopfchen --- extremely productive, small yellow tommy-toe.
Stupice
--- red slicing tomato that's just a bit larger than the biggest
tommy-toes. Our
earliest tomato to ripen, listed at 52 days.
- Early Pick --- another
red slicing tomato that's very early.
- Crazy --- large, red tommy-toe that produces nearly as early as Stupice. Somewhat blight resistant.
We grow one plant each
of the last six varieties for eating in the summer and about
twenty-five romas
to keep us in spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, ketchup, and dried
tomatoes
all year. I had actually forgotten which tomato varieties I
wanted to focus on this year, so I was very glad I'd made notes on my
seed-packets when I packaged up the summer's seeds!
Our chicken waterer never spills
or fills with poop.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I'd never heard of that name for cherry tomatoes.
Unfortunately, the Colorado Front Range is not an ideal climate for growing tomatoes by any stretch of the imagination. Getting recommendations from someone in SW Virginia probably isn't any better or worse than from any other part of the country.
You got me intrigued about where the term "tommy-toe" came from. Searching the internet suggests that I may be the only person to use it as a generic term meaning cherry tomato --- I got that description from my mom, who got it from who knows where! There is a variety of cherry tomato known as Tommy Toe, so perhaps some people (like me) use it the same way we use Xerox. I guess I'd better shape up!
I was also intrigued to see that "tom-toe" is an old term for the big toe, so "tommy-toe" is probably a reference to a tomato about the size of the big toe.
I don't know anything about your climate, but it sounds like the challenge would be a short growing season. In that case, I might add Stupice to your list of tomatoes to try --- it ripens even earlier than our cherry tomatoes and has fruits midway in size between cherry and slicing tomatoes. Tasty too!