 |
| Variety of Cherry Tomato |
Tomatoes are some of the easiest plants to grow. They are delicious and it can cut down on your grocery bill to grow your own. However, growing the right variety for your garden is difficult when you have no clue what will work. There are so many to choose from. Here is what I found out from the experiment I did last year for tomatoes.
Name: Indigo Cherries Type: Indeterminate Cherry Hybrid Days: 80 days Cost: Low
Pros: Very prolific fruit; there was fruit everywhere. The plants are hards and easily propagated. The clippings and seeds had the highest survival rate of all the tomatoes grown this year.
Cons: It’s very difficult to tell if they are ripe. They are incredible sour when they are not completely ripe. They need a cold snap to ripen which was not a good thing during the hottest summer on record.
Conclusion: Perhaps, if I had grown these plants outside instead of the greenhouse I would feel differently about them. However, they put on lots of fruit all during the summer but they were not edible until the fall when they started to ripen. Given It was difficult to tell when the tomatoes were ripe I got a mouth full of gross sour flavor. Overall it put me off them. I will not be growing Indigo cherries in my greenhouse and they are unlikely to make it into the 2018 garden.
Name: Bumble Bee Cherry Type: Indeterminate Cherry Heirloom Days: 80 days Cost: High
Pros: Delicious!
Cons: Hardly any fruit. Needs chill to ripen.
Conclusion: If I were growing just for myself I might waste a bit of space on these but I doubt it. I got the equivalent of one of those little 8 oz containers for the whole summer. I had other tomato plants on the system give pounds and pounds of fruit in comparison.
Name: Golden Nugget Type: Indeterminate Cherry Days: 70 days Cost: Medium
Pros: Prolific fruit. Sweet flavor everybody who tried them loved (save a person who doesn’t like tomatoes).
Cons: The fruit is sweet so sometimes I feel the flavor is a bit much sometimes. However, I don’t like sweets that much so I was the only one to feel this way.
Conclusion: Despite its high sugar content the production and reviews were the best of any other tomato I grew. One plant produced 15 pounds of fruit by itself. I will be using Golden Nuggets for the farmers’ market.
Name: Brandywine Rainbow Type: Indeterminate Heirloom Days: 90-110 days Cost: Low in a variety pack
Pros: Awesome flavor
Cons: These were susceptible to disease and pests. Grasshoppers loved these so much we only got two or three off the plants.
Conclusion: I can see why heirloom large tomatoes cost so much in the stores. The production isn’t really there. My Mortgage Lifters were better in production and the flavor was still there.
Name: Stupice Type: Large Cherry Indeterminate Days: 50 days Cost: low
Pros: Prolific fruit with tomatoes that are large enough to taste. Can withstand extreme weather; hot or cold.
Cons: Green core that is sometimes unpleasant and too hard to eat. The fruit will rot before the core ripens.
Conclusion: There were a few people that were willing to overlook the green core in favor of flavor better than the store-bought tomatoes. These were my first bloomers and I might grow a single plant for myself or for customer’s to plant their own Stupice. I will not be selling the fruit though as people will expect top quality.
Name: Mortgage Lifters Type: Large Heirloom Beefsteak Indeterminate Days: 70 days Cost: low
Pros: Prolific fruit with tomatoes that are large enough to can. Great flavor only an heirloom has. Grew well in hot Phoenix Metro, and cold Wyoming.
Cons: prone to cracking and splitting.
Conclusion: If I did to do a large heirloom tomato, I would grow this. Will be selling plants. Still not as much fruit as a hybrid but I think the flavor makes up for it.
