By now, your mailboxes are probably recovering from the strain of holding the endless stream of winter seed catalogs. Your eyes are likely red and tired from eyestrain as you flip through the pages. Possibly, your brain is hurting from sorting through the possibilities and making decisions. It reminds me my dilemma when deciding which music to listen to. My musical tastes are broad; I love music, and listen to it pretty much all day long. But sometimes trying to decide what to listen to brings about mental paralysis.
With thousands of choices of tomatoes available to tomato growers (especially if starting from seeds, rather than seedlings), a few simple basic considerations can provide some guidelines for narrowing the field, helping you make choices of what will appear in your garden this coming season.
Let’s start with one of the most basic attribute of a particular tomato variety – its growth habit. (In the next blog post, I will touch upon an equally important set of attributes – hybrid, heirloom and open pollinated.)
Indeterminate Tomato Varieties
Indeterminate tomatoes will be familiar to those who grapple annually with wild, tall, out of control plants that take up lots and lots of space. The central growing stem expands outward (or upward, if you tie it to a vertical stake or trellis) indefinitely – until you prune it at a particular height, or it is nibbled by a critter, or, most often, the plant dies at the end of the season from frost or disease.
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Advantages of Indeterminate Tomatoes
Most tomato varieties are indeterminate; the vast majority of heirloom varieties certainly are. The selection of indeterminate tomato varieties is therefore huge – a blessing in terms of options and a curse in terms of making decisions.
The optimum ratio of foliage to fruit provides indeterminate tomatoes the potential for the very best flavors. Plenty of foliage in relation to the number of tomatoes means lots of photosynthesis and other necessary processes for excellent flavor development. This doesn’t mean that all indeterminate varieties are delicious, but most flavor favorites seem to be in this category.
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Determinate Tomato Varieties
Determinate tomato varieties have a genetic characteristic that limits growth and tends to ripen the crop in a fairly concentrated time span. The gene for this type of growth, also known as self-topping, wasn’t discovered until the 1920s. There are very few true determinate heirlooms for this reason – the growth habit simply hasn’t been around for all that long.
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Dwarf Tomato Varieties
Dwarf tomato varieties are the least familiar of the three major growth habits. Due to the recent releases from the Dwarf Tomato Breeding Project that I co-lead, this is changing rapidly, and space-challenged gardeners can now replicate the “heirloom tomato experience” by using exclusively dwarfs.
Though known in America since the 1850s, only a few Dwarf tomato varieties were in existence until very recently. Unique because of their very thick central stem, dark green crinkly foliage (also known as “rugose”), continuous fruiting and short stature, I consider Dwarf tomatoes be similar in many ways to indeterminate types, but they grow vertically at only about half of the rate. They need no pruning, grow happily in containers as small as 5 gallon capacity, and are the perfect tomato type for those familiar wire cone-shaped 4 foot cages.
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Article source: Mother Earth News
Image source: Worcester Allotment