Tips for selecting the best tomatoes for your garden
Whether you enjoy tomatoes sliced, sauced, or cooked in your favorite recipe, they taste best when grown and harvested from your garden or container. With more than 10,000 varieties available it can be difficult to select the best ones to grow in your garden.
Start by looking for those varieties best suited to the intended use whether for slicing, cooking, preserving, or snacking. Most seed catalogs and websites, as well as plant tags and garden centers, provide recommendations.
Bite-sized tomatoes are great for salads, relish trays, and snacking. Trailing varieties like Lizzano, Tumbling Tom, Litt'l Bites Cherry, and Red Robin also grow well in hanging baskets and even window boxes.
Paste and sauce tomatoes have meatier fruit making them perfect for sauces, soups, and preserving. Roma is the traditional favorite with an egg-shaped fruit that has thick walls and few seeds. The All-America Selections Early Resilience Roma has excellent disease and blossom end rot resistance and does not require staking. Use paste tomatoes during the growing season for sauces, chop and add them to an omelet, can or freeze them for future use.
Grow a few slicing tomatoes to enjoy on sandwiches, grilled, or on their own. Beefsteak and Better Boy are longtime favorites while Iron Lady, Galahad, and the colorful Chef's Choice series are more recent additions to this category.
Perhaps you are looking for an heirloom tomato, one that has been grown for more than 50 years and maintained its original traits and popularity. Cherokee Purple's rich flavor constantly rates high in taste tests. Brandywine, Black Cherry, Chocolate Stripes, Amana Orange, and Black Krim are also gardener favorites.
Coax reluctant veggie eaters of all ages to give tomatoes a try with some of the sweeter varieties like Sunsugar, often called the candy of the garden. Consider having a taste test after growing a variety of super sweet tomatoes like Sungold, Super Sweet 100, Suncherry, and Sunrise Bumble Bee.