The TOMATO thread

[meizzwang]

In my teens, I had a closet beaming with powerful lights, and I was probably one of the few who could legitimately say, "but mom, I'm just growing tomatoes" because....well, that's what I was growing! Who would waste such precious space and lights on weed anyways? LOL

Any of you Sarracenia Fanatics (besides homie Almightydolla) grow tomatoes? Figured there's gotta be a few tomato heads around here! If so, feel free to contribute to this thread!

I'm growing a few of the latest and greatest new cultivars, and so far, some of them are absolutely delicious, while others are...mealy and nothing to talk about! However, they're all pretty amazing looking! Most of you may not even be aware of the leaps and strides that have been made in tomato breeding in the past 10 years, so allow me to give a little photo tour!

Brad's Atomic Grape-that blackish anthocyanin is only in response to tomatoes exposed to direct sunlight. Still too early to judge flavor, but I picked one accidently and it was very flavorful despite not being fully ripe.


Isn't this an amazing looking tomato?



Candy Sweet Icicle-definitely a winner here! Needs many days in a row with temps over 80F to get the sugar content, but this has not only a high sugar content, but also some savory aspect to it! Best to let it sit on the vine for maybe a week after it turns color, gets better with a longer hang time:



Candy sweet Icicle again: they tend to ripen in batches. Once this batch is done, another batch is already starting to turn color, so there will be a consistent harvest for possibly a few months:







Candy Sweet Icicle plant to the left, sweet cream to the right (sweet cream has candy sweet icicle as one of its parents). Notice the whispy foliage and incredible production!



Sweet Cream: another winner: relatively low acid with great depth of flavor, although I'm probably favoring CSI a bit more at this time. It may just be too early in the season: as the hot August months roll in, the plants tend to produce their best tasting fruit. Such a beauty:



Maglia Rosa-under my conditions, the fruit are mealy and not that great tasting. Might improve as the season progresses, but if other tomatoes under the same exact conditions already taste amazing, I don't have high hopes for this one. Nevertheless, a beautiful tomato with huge, early yields! Plants are very disease prone due to the low bush growth habit:



Blush - Maglia rosa is one of the parents, and I have to say, this is definitely an improvement! The one I tasted wasn't yet ripe and didn't yet have the full sugar content, but man, it was still flavorful! Can't wait to see what these taste like when at peak maturity:


Close up of Blush:



Pink Berkeley Tie Dye: another eye popper! Was very bland for me, maybe it was the seeds, or maybe it's the environment here. Others have reported oustanding flavored fruit from this variety:



I know some of you guys have tomatoes in your garden, don't be shy! Post them here!

[hcarlton]

Those first three and the last, I want them...probably obvious since I'm a CP nerd like everyone else here, but I'm a sucker for odd and novelties and tomatoes are no exception. Haven't grown any recently due to time and space limits (no longer really have a proper garden space set up, too much work for right now), but I used to grow all sorts of unusual forms and still have seeds saved of most waiting for the time I can get back to gardening properly. I'm particularly fond of the 'Indigo' cultivar line, for both the colors (that anthocyanin purple-black on red undertones in every one) and the great flavor.

[sidorian]

More of a pepperhead but my family has grown a fair share of tomatoes over the years including plenty of heirlooms. Honestly, I rather dislike the taste of tomatoes, except for Sungold... that is a wonderful orange cherry tomato that I grow every year. Also, I love looking at the Tomato Growers Supply catalog or others...just unbelievable diversity.
meizzwang Have you tried any plants grafted onto rootstock? My dad was always interested in that and was beginning to experiment with those until he passed away. Seemed to have really improved performance of heirlooms, such as Brandywine

[bogman]

Interest-clonal Mike, I'm also growing Pink Berkeley Tie Dye! Last year, and the year before, I grew Blush. Tomato flavor has a lot to do with: Water supply, Calcium, variety, day temperature, exactly when it's picked, whether or not you use diluted sea water to irrigate(?!=true), solar flux, night temperature, amount of leaf cover, soil type and a gazillion variables. So, each variety will have a range of flavors and intensities. Berkeley PTD has a reputation for going bland and spoiling soon after harvest, which is odd. Try picking it slightly less red (background) and see if it's better. Here, the Indigo varieties usually perish-they can't take the heat, sun and humidity. Usually, the foliage rots off.

I'm growing about 50 tomatoes this year, most have been grafted onto superior rootstocks (Maxifort & DRO141TX), which I did months ago. On two varieties where a lot were planted (Opalka and Super Red Pear from Franchi, Italy), I left some on their own roots. Now, it's clear the grafted ones are larger, healthier, and withstood the rain and floods better. I'll try to get images up, beginning with the grafts. In addition to the previous types, this year's planting includes: Beam's Yellow Pear, Cosmonaut Volkov and Pineapple.

I cycle through about 26 varieties of tomato, in the seed bank. The rarest is Bilera; I'm afraid I may be the last person growing it. One of the best flavored eating, paste and canning types I've come across. When I grow that one, I grow nothing else so seed can be saved. Need to get it into the Seed Saver's Exchange before I croak!

The subject reminds me of a kinda funny story about when I first started working at Barboursville Vineyards. Since I was keen to grow for the fancy restaurant there, a new garden was installed, with deer fencing, to produce crops. It wasn't huge, having 5 50-foot rows. So I ask the chefs, "What do you want me to grow?" Answer(>): "Heirloom tomatoes, lots of them." "OK", how much do you want me to grow; I have five fifty-foot rows?" > "We can use all you can grow, plant them all in tomatoes; we use cases of them."

I said." I'll grow four rows and something else; what do you want second most?" >"Yellow podded string beans; we can't buy them here."  "No problem". Meanwhile, I have no idea how much the restaurant used, so I plant the four rows with four tomato varieties, Russian Heirlooms known for flavor. At peak harvest, I was picking over 200 lbs. per week, WAYYY more than the chefs needed! Everyone at the place was bringing home tomatoes. We sold some in the gift shop/tasting room. Tomatoes everywhere!

Then, when I came in with 22 lbs of yellow Marvel of Venice Beans, one of the chefs said: "You gotta be shi _ _ ing me!" Never again did they ask for all I could grow. In fact, when they asked me to grow Basil: "We need fresh Basil for certain months, but we don't need trashcans full; we don't need giant leaf bags full, just a few gallon bags per week."

So Mike, looks like you're using the FL Basket weave for staking. Isn't that the bomb? So fast and effective. Email me if you're interested in 1000' spools of white poly twine, which is what I use/reuse. Instead of paying retail $11, I found a source for $2.80 each, so I bought ten rolls. I've got about 80 peppers growing, too. So, they get the basket weave, as well.

Man, you're in CA, of course you didn't/don't need to closet-grow weed, even back then! A decent tomato during the winter-now that's hard to find.

[meizzwang]

Sidorian-yes, I have grafted them and grown them on maxifort rootstock back in the day, and I can't say there was much of a difference under my conditions because other than having resistant genetics, nothing stops late blight. However, they did seem to produce more and have more vigor in general.

bogman: great write up, thanks for adding all that info to this thread! I definitely have the salt concentration and water stress dialed in on this side: So far this year, I can firmly say candy sweet icicle is the most flavorful "oh my god" tomato I've ever had in my life! Beats sungold by a long shot! There's a few others that were surprisingly good (in my past experience, the number of varieties that had poor flavored fruit far outweighed the good). All of the tomatoes are in full sun, and many are staked so that the fruit are exposed to light to maximize flavor.

I've dug pretty deep into tomato cultivation: right now, the focus is breeding wild tomato relatives! I bet there are so many amazing flavor profiles out there that we haven't ever experienced that are hidden in wild tomatoes!

Photos taken 7/14/18:

Solanum peruvianum. Okay, to me, tomato leaves smell pretty good, but not delicious. In contrast, the leaves on Solanum peruvianum smell mouth watering, like cinnamon buns with that orange glazing on top! Very unexpected aroma from the foliage:


Very beautiful flowers, they close up at night and open only during the day:


If you look carefully, check out the exerted stigmas, which are positioned such that cross pollination is required. There's a reason wild tomato relatives have much more genetic diversity than self pollinating domesticated tomatoes:



Solanum chilense-this is where the blue or black anthocyanins come from! The leaves on this particular plant smell like anise or licorice, it's a really nice aroma! Check out how different yet similar the leaves and flowers look compared to a domesticated, cultivated tomato:


Solanum chilense flower-notice the exerted stigmas, which prevents self pollination:




Solanum lycopersicoides-the leaves on this one smell savory yet like chemicals! My friends wife said it smells like a car shop! So this is species is sort of like a tomato, but slighty different (anytime you see the "oides" at the end of a latin name, it means "looks like"). Solanum lycopersicum is the cultivated tomato, so this species by definition looks like a tomato, but not quite: the anthers are rather different, and so is the big old stigma!




Plant overview: this species is found at very high altitudes and can possibly be used to create tomato plants that can grow in cooler climates. The fruit are black, so they also can contribute anthocyanins:

[hcarlton]

Ooh, wild species! There are a couple of species that I'd love to source in the genus (particularly S. lycocarpum, aka Lobeira or Wolf Apple, but there don't seem to be any seed sources...), and edible black fruits would also be at the top of the list.

[sidorian]

meizzwang your posts are straight up dangerous as now I'm totally intrigued about the wild tomatoes and what kind of concoctions you can whip up with them. I love the smell of tomato leaves (often, much more than the fruits taste), can be strong but always brings a flood of summer memories. Now, as always I just need to negotiate some more space at the homestead to grow more plants

[meizzwang]

hcarlton: solanum chilense, Solanum lycopersicoides and Solanum peruvianum all have some populations with black fruit, but not all individuals from the aforementioned species are black fruited. I'll find out in a few months, but many times, the individuals that produce anthocyanins on their stems during cold weather tend to have anthocyanin production in their fruit as well.

A scientist at Oregon State University produced the very first black tomato ever, but the claim is that they used Solanum chilense and crossed it to a Solanum cheesmaniae (galapagos wild tomato) that carries the genes to express anytocyanin in the fruit. There's lots of claims that S. chilense won't easily hybridize with the cultivated tomato and a "bridge" hybrid is needed in order to get those chilense genes into cultivated tomatoes. They have all kinds of technical genetic explanations and tests to "prove" why things don't work directly, but after reading a technical paper on leucophylla population genetics, it's clear to me that plant genetics aren't always so black and white. In other words, what they conclude in a scientific paper isn't always universal: there's almost always exceptions to the rule, and our job as enthusiasts is to figure that out! Well, I'm doing a bunch of crosses and will find out what the real deal is. The biggest barrier is probably the amount of time it takes to do the crosses, and how difficult it is to work with such tiny flowers (ie. even if you have perfect vision, it's hard to tell if the pollen in fact covered the stigma...everything is so tiny!). Fortunately, I'm driven by fascination and passion, not by deadlines and pressure to get published in scientific journals.

[bogman]

Tomatophile Mike, Amazing how many side projects and hobbies you're juggling! Bet you dream of Bananas, with Wasabi-flavored leaves, or tomato-bearing Wasabia.

I've spent a lot of time around Italians, who have been passionate about tomatoes ever since they were brought to Europe. When everyone in the US thought tomatoes were toxic, the Italians were breeding. Now, Americans, Italians and Russians seem to be churning out the best flavored types in quantity. In Italy, brackish water has been used to irrigate tomatoes. A halophyte, Agretti (Salsola soda), has been used to remove salt from sea water. this provides an edible green and lowers the sodium levels enough for tomatoes. The region in Italy using lower sodium sea water has the reputation for producing the best tasting tomatoes in Italy.

Taste, of course, depends on what a person likes. Many like sweet tomatoes. I like the more acidic, full-flavored types a tad more than the sweet ones (my Italian genes). Many of the Russian types have insane production, with complex, almost smoky flavors. The L. cheesemaniae I grew a couple years back defied blight. Branches would die with blight and new, productive ones would sprout, bear fruit, get blight, and new growth popped out again! Wild seedlings kept coming up for years.

A good friend of mine, the late Alberto Vazquez, helped introduce L. pimpinellifolium, the Currant Tomato, to the US. He had a cultivar "Alberto Shatters" named after him. It's from Alberto that I got "Bilera", one of the best cooking tomatoes ever, and a very good fresh eating variety.

Many of the new varieties with low acid and lots of seeds are less desirable for processing. Acidic tomatoes barely fall into the "safe" category for water bath canning. Many types now need a citric acid boost to be safe. Long, pressure-cooked tomatoes are not appealing! Seeds, if cooked for long periods, can ruin a sauce; I've done it. So, the seedy ones are problematic due to the volume of seeds when straining. I use a Squeezo strainer, after a brief cook to kill enzymes, to separate seeds and skin from pulp. Crank the handle and it's like magic! You can plow through 5 gallons of tomatoes in very little time, no peeling, no seeds; the puree is ready for gazpacho, Bloody Marys, or sauce-making.

Thanks for recommending Candy Sweet Icicle; gotta try that one.

The WORST tasting tomato relative I tried was the Litchi Tomato (S. sisymbriifolium); what a spiny, poor tasting, seedy pos! Plus, it's apt to be invasive, as the seeds kept coming up for years, in a climate with subfreezing, near zero degree winters. Evil kitty.

Criminy, my Italian tomatoes are already 6 feet high Those old varieties, along with a lot of Russian ones, get HUGE.

[meizzwang]

Definitely intrigued with your deep experience with tomatoes Bogman, always a joy reading your comments!

I'll have to give a better update in the near future, but I tried a variety called Dark Galaxy(pictured below) and man, it must have been too early because it was quite acidic to the point that it can make your you know what pucker! This one might be what you like bogman, less sweetness but great depth of flavor and more acid to add some zing to it.

It's definitely one of the most beautiful tomatoes I've ever seen: there's a weird mutant that has gold specs on the epidermis, and the breeder crossed that mutant with an heirloom and one of the black tomotoes to get dark galaxy. The little specs look like stars in the galaxy, hence the name. Some of the specs look like actual physical scars, while others are literally gold colored specs! This exact seedling pictured below isn't the best example, I'll get pics of a more "ornate" individual in the next few days once it's totally ripe:

[bogman]

Dark Galaxy is beauteous. If seed can be found, and it's open pollenated,(OP), I'd love to try it. When mixed with other foods, like a burger, BLT, etc. the acidity can be a plus and is diminished by the combos. In a salad, with oil and vinegar, might be too much.

Here's the Bilera, all but extinct:


The fruit has very few seeds, rich flavor and qualities favorable for processing and large-scale growing. For canning, it's easy to slide the skins off after cutting the top off. The fruits are picked when half to 3/4 red, usually, and after-ripened in dark boxes to achieve full flavor. This allows you to transport crates from the field without bruising. Round tomatoes don't stack, in crates/boxes very well. The round shape makes limited pressure contact points and they bruise. The long shape is ideal for canning, packing into jars. The juice and sauce quality are outstanding. It has a lot of pulp, with relatively little gel-associated with seeds. Yet, it's not bland and mealy like the majority of "paste" tomatoes. A local grower supplied a "foodie" store in Charlottesville, VA, Alberto had a hand in that. Despite a large selection of other, local heirlooms, this one sold out after the shop offered taste samples. It's odd shape caused a certain prejudice, which vanished upon tasting.

There are quite a few similar looking varieties: Jersey Devil, Opalka and more. So far, none have compared to Bilera, although Opalka had a terrible year (unfair to judge) and I'm growing it again.

Like many OP varieties, Bilera has variation. I try to keep the cultivar a bit plastic by growing about 50 per grow-out season, with no other tomato in the area. I usually mix seed crop years, too. Small flower bees mix up the genes within the variety and I select a bunch of fruits from the best tasting, healthiest plants, which often get 7 feet tall, or more.

The quest for flavor never ends.

[meizzwang]

For sure I'll have seeds, only from the best tasting open pollinated Candy sweet Icicle and dark galaxy plants. I'll probably be hitting you up for a trade if you're willing My family sampled another dark galaxy fruit and they said it was slightly sweet with a wonderful, deep flavor:big shock to me! I picked it a little bit early so was expecting it to not be all that great, but they liked it.

I picked this other dark galaxy from a different plant yesterday and it's probably at peak ripeness. You can smell the deep tomato aroma on the fruit, can't wait to try this one out!


Check out those gold flecks and weird scars-those are genetic mutations!

[rmeyer]

You guys are hardcore! You even have matching wicker baskets. Lol!
Beautiful tomatoes.

[almightydolla]

If there's one thing i'm just as obsessed with as red flavas, it's gotta be tomatoes! While the pacific northwest has a wonderful climate that make my sarracenia more than happy, its not exactly known as a prime location for growing tomatoes. And since i'm a sucker for tomato sandwiches and BLT's like nobody else, and someone who really likes a challenge, I decided to figure out how I could consistently grow big heirlooms out here with great flavor.

Last year, I grew 12 different varieties all hydroponically in the greenhouse. They grew good, real good and HUGE - hitting the top of the greenhouse (11 feet!) before I trimmed them back a bit. They were so thick you couldn't see a person standing across from the row! The flavor was pretty good, better than anything I could buy locally, but I knew I could do better. So I decided to try growing the same varieties multiple ways to validate the flavors I thought I was tasting. In the ground, in grow bags with my own soil mix, and again hydroponically. The hope is that i'll be able to enjoy the same variety of tomato grown in very similar weather conditions, but different soil conditions. My real goal being dialing in exactly what I need to do to make my hydro tomatoes taste as good or better than traditional soil grown tomatoes. Hydro has so many advantages, but one really needs to dial in the flavor.


This year i'm growing 49 different varieties of tomatoes spread across close to 300 plants. All full sized heirlooms from white, to blue to black and everything in between. I don't have time to chop up cherry tomatoes for my sandwiches! I'm growing a few vanity varieties, like the variegated leaf irish variety, or the fuzzy leaved Chinese velvet & woolly Kate. I've got a lot of the deep anthocyanin varieties from Brad Gates and Tom Wagner, and a bunch of old varieties from Europe and Russia. I'm most excited about Cosmic Eclipse and Black Beauty which I didn't plant last grow season.

I've selected what I think are the top 25 varieties for the hydro - ground - potted trials (swapping in a few new varieties in hydro that didn't perform taste wise last year). Summer just got started up here in Seattle, and I didn't get an early start to the plants so i'm weeks behind all you other tomato growers, but things are humming along. I enjoyed my first tomato last night straight from the vine, and the first flush of fruit are well along their way.


In ground plants, 8" spacing. Only kinda tortured...



100 grow bags with 2-3 plants in each. Definitely being stressed pretty hard as they grow. Water is sparse and black grow bags on black landscape fabric capture some day heat. It's only now breaking 60 at night, so the tomatoes need all the nighttime heat help they can get.



30 greenhouse hydro plants starting to hit 7 feet! I didn't get them tied up early enough so they are looking a little ragged. But they can put on a foot of growth in every direction a week, so I need to prune and trellis them a lot more often now that they've taken off. 



Last year I found it difficult to really stress the hydro plants. Tortured plants make better fruit, but its difficult to remove water from these plants, so i'm still working on good timing for fertilizer concentrations that get the job done. These plants laugh at 2000ppm, and ask me whats for dinner afterwards! Tomato sandwiches is always the answer....



Still ripening Cosmic eclipse. The heavily pigmented blue/purple varieties from Brad Gates (Wild Boar Farms) look phenomenal even unripe



Stare into the heart of darkness - Black Beauty variety

[bogman]

Reckon we all know tomatoes can taste different, even from the same plant. As rain, temperatures, etc. fluctuate, so does the fruit. Many, if not most tomato fruit (not the B. Pink Tie Dye) benefit from a short after ripening in the dark. the old myth of windowsill ripening is erroneous, tomatoes being a nightshade. A warm ripening, after ripening is best, around 70-78 seems to work. Very cool conditions can ruin flavor; put a tomato in the fridge for a few days and see what happens.

Almightydolla, that's a lot of tomatoes, even for a tomato freak! You may need to seek counseling about that, LOL!  The black tomatoes, so far, have not done well here. Maybe it's too hot and humid. The Black Beauty is amazing? How does it taste?

There's a delicate balance with water, to get the most flavor: too much and the fruit can be bland; too little and you can get cracking, blossom end rot (Calcium deficiency) and reduced yield. Even with irrigation, water is applied periodically, but in a drought, that water soon dissipates into surrounding soil and one can get deficiencies.

Years ago, I experimented, finding fish emulsion and seaweed extract could improve flavor. However, raccoons, dogs, cats, skunks  were digging up the plants when I used the fish (deodorized, right)! Seaweed extract, applied to foliage has a long reputation for boosting flavor. I'm spraying Grow More extract on the foliage every now and then, to see if it'll help flavor, maybe reduce the effects of: rains like crazy for a week or three> no rain for weeks>rain for a week>no rain for two months.

By the way, I ran some tests on the Grow More Seaweed Extract (not the one with additives), and it comes out with some promising numbers for CP. At a dilution of 1/2 TBS/gallon purified water, the conductivity is around 135µS/cm, TDS is about 80 ppm, and the pH ran 4.78. This is about 1/4 the strength recommended for vegetables. The pH was surprising.

Mike, a trade would be great. I can pass along a vegetable-fiend's list of oddball veggies. Seed bank is holding about 308 varieties, plus tubers, gingers, aquatics…

Dr. Parkinson declared, "I'm not surprised to see you here. You've got weeder's back from weeding, tomato stains behind your ear. I don't know why you grow so much, it's torture on your knees. But, worst of all, young man, you've got bad Plantophile Disease."