I grew about 50 tomato varieties last year, and it wasn't enough.
I've grown green-when-ripe, purple, pink, yellow, orange, red, black, and brown tomatoes. The sizes have ranged from small cherry tomatoes to pound-plus beefsteaks. I've grown globes, flattened globes, ruffled squat fruits, pear-shaped tomatoes, lemon mimics, tomatoes that look like long Italian peppers, fig-shaped tomatoes, ovals and elongated ovals, and heart-shaped tomatoes. The flavors have ranged from spitters (too bitter or too tart) to the rich luscious ones and the sweet fruity ones that keep me looking for new and different flavors.
And every year, I find my list of want-to-grows grows longer.
I haven't grown striped tomatoes, such as Berkeley Tie Dye and other tomatoes bred in the Bay Area by Brad Gates at Wild Boar Farms. I'm still looking for a great-tasting, productive early tomato. (The best I can say about Early Girl is that it was productive later in the season.) My top candidate is a tomato I'll grow from seed that was shared by a fellow tomato grower in Slovenia. The one remaining color I haven't tried is white tomatoes, such as Super Snow White. Russian and Siberian tomatoes do especially well at my windy garden site, so I'm trying more tomatoes with names such as Minskiy Rannij and Lida Ukrainian.
Carolyn Male, author of 100 Heirloom Tomatoes for American Gardens, has guessed that 15 to 20 thousand tomato varieties exist.
So, let's see, assuming I have 50 tomato-growing years to look forward to, if I wanted to grow them all, I'd have to grow 240 to 400 varieties each year. But new varieties are developed or discovered every year!
Finding them all would be a chore. Although commercial seed catalogs offer hundreds of varieties, it's the amateurs who keep the most obscure varieties alive. One of the biggest individual catalogs of tomato varieties is maintained by Gerhard Bohl in Germany. Another source of thousands of varieties is Seed Savers Exchange, which gives members access to a mind-boggling array of vegetable varieties. Seed preservationists such as Sand Hill Preservation and Tatiana's Tomatobase offer hundreds of interesting varieties, and the latter is an especially good source of interesting varieties that can be grown in containers.
If you don't grow from seed, local nurseries carry a nice selection of seedlings. For more unusual varieties, try Love Apple Farms in Ben Lomond (mid-March to mid-May) or next year, Master Gardener sales in early April.
Finding the best-tasting ones is a more manageable task than trying to grow them all. Each summer, tomato enthusiasts around the country hold tomato-tasting events. In addition, various internet forums dedicated to tomato growing collect individuals' opinions on the best-tasting varieties. So it's not hard to compile a list of the hundred or so most-recommended varieties. The next step is to figure out which varieties will do well in my garden.
My top recommendation, if you've grown only red globes, is a green-when-ripe tomato. I've grown Aunt Ruby's German Green, and I love seeing the expression on someone's face when they bite into a green tomato for the first time. No one expects it to be sweet and spicy. Other tomato growers are partial to Cherokee Green, Malakhitovaya Shkatulka, or Grub's Mystery Green.
© 2010 Tanya Kucak