How was your season and which tomatoes did you like most?

[AKgardener]

@Cornelius_Gotchberg you betcha I got me a new pack of seeds to plant outside. But no pots next year taking your advice and planting in the ground

[wykvlvr]

New beds, bad weather, and just plain laziness contributed to my tomatoes not getting planted out until July... So yeah not many plants had time to really start to produce but we did have a few standouts.
Black Krim - commercial seedlings there were 2 plants and they were really starting to produce large ripening tomatoes when I had to pick them due to freeze warnings and predicted snow. From those I picked that day I got 4 1/2 pints of yummy tomato sauce.
Gandalf - a dwarf with variegated leaves and yummy bicolor hearts that can turn completely red orange as they ripen. A late starter but wow what production from the 4 seedlings I put out. Most of the green tomatoes I picked came from these. Both ripe and green tomatoes ended up in two kinds of Salsa and in tomato jam. AND I still have enough green ones for another batch of salsa! It will return next year.
Alaskan Fancy seeds came from the swap and only 2 plants made it into my garden but the flavor was outstanding according to my husband. I agree and it will return next year. And I think I saved enough seed to send some in to the swap...

So my 2024 list is started.
Alaskan Fancy
Gandalf
Puck (saved seeds from 2022)

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

you don't understand,

its the physical act of having the books, feeling the books in your hands, looking at the pictures
many many times, getting all those endorphin hits.
eh.


keith

Yeah Buddy!

The Gotch hasn't, nor will he ever...do Kindle!

The Gotch

[eyolf]

Outdoor tomatoes pretty good. They got septoria early in the season but recovered well. Early Blight arrived in July but didn't affect them too badly. Late blight has been around for a few weeks but hasn't affected any fruit yet.

Greenhouse tomatoes very bad. Poor growth on half of the 8 plants and together they've produced 1/3 of the weight of fruit they did in 2022.

It's not been a great year for taste in general but my favourites are probably True Colours, Daniel Burson and two hybrids Pink Honeymoon and Rose Crush (may be sold as Damsel and Medium Rare in the US).

My daughter pores over all the websites and gives me a list she wishes to try. "Damsel" was on the list. Since it's just as easy to start 5 or 6 as one, I grew 3, gave one to a neighbor, and she took her two
Damsel was a delight. The fruits themselves were almost as tasty as a dehybridization project I completed 20 years ago and it is more uniform and more productive.

I had 42 varieties, and will not even try to copy my notes, but there were a couple of clear winners from the MMMM swap.

Buzau 22 delivered loads of gorgeous 9-14 ounce blemish-free globes. Taste only average, but they filled lots of canning jars, and always disappeared first from the free tables at the senior centers in the area.

Kitayskiy Oksamitovyi was interesting and extremely productive. Gray fuzzy foliage, pink globes a bit larger than a tennis ball, but it was the most disease resistant tomato of all I grew.

Someone shared "Siberian"...which I have grown in the past, probably from poorly-maintained seed stock. It might have been the dry summer too, but this year was amaze-balls.

I generally grow three or four off this list; Kotlas, Kimberly, Stupicke, Johnny's 3570, Imur Prior Beta, Lycoprea, Glacier, etc.

This year one of the Glaciers delivered an orange rather than red slightly-larger-than-cherry globe and delivered two or three at a time until frost, like red glacier. I'm definitely growing that out again next year.

[Stitchingmom]

My favorite this year was by far Mikado. Inciardi Paste and Green Zebra were also yummy. Lots of meh varieties, too.

[maxjohnson]

Like most other, difficult at the start with lots of heat and wet, starting from September was dry so overall still a productive year.

Rapunzel, 3 plants, each in their own Earthbox. Harvested well over 100lbs. Insane productivity. If I was a market gardener it would be one of the top cherry to grow.

[rossomendblot]

Outdoor tomatoes pretty good. They got septoria early in the season but recovered well. Early Blight arrived in July but didn't affect them too badly. Late blight has been around for a few weeks but hasn't affected any fruit yet.

Greenhouse tomatoes very bad. Poor growth on half of the 8 plants and together they've produced 1/3 of the weight of fruit they did in 2022.

It's not been a great year for taste in general but my favourites are probably True Colours, Daniel Burson and two hybrids Pink Honeymoon and Rose Crush (may be sold as Damsel and Medium Rare in the US).

My daughter pores over all the websites and gives me a list she wishes to try. "Damsel" was on the list. Since it's just as easy to start 5 or 6 as one, I grew 3, gave one to a neighbor, and she took her two
Damsel was a delight. The fruits themselves were almost as tasty as a dehybridization project I completed 20 years ago and it is more uniform and more productive.

Damsel/Pink Honeymoon really impressed me too, I was not expecting such a good taste. So far I've only grown it outdoors but next year it will be in the greenhouse so it will be interesting to see how productive it can be. I'm assuming they are the same variety, they are very similar in looks and description, but the penchant for seed companies to rename varieties for the UK market makes it confusing!

[Shule]

This year, I liked the following tomatoes the most (when considering traits overall):

1. Cilantrovaya_B (second favorite for flavor; consisitent heavy production; earliest variety; very sweet, both the flesh and the skin; everyone really liked it)
2. Brandywine Pink (Productive; decent taste; it did have lots of cracking, though; it was easy to start from seed with my method, and worked well with my new fertilization method)
3. Cherokee Purple (I liked this because it got lots of big fruit; very juicy; cracking here, too)
4. Amana Orange (third favorite for taste, at least; large good quality fruits; no cracking; if it produced more, I would have ranked it higher than Brandywine Pink and Cherokee Purple)
5. Roma VF (just one of the plants; the others had issues, like they either didn't produce, or most of the fruit had BER or something, but the one plant did great and produced well; the plant did get a virus, but not severely, and it wasn't noticeable on all the fruits)
6. Carolina Yellow (favorite for flavor, which is why it's on the list, but several fruits had BER and/or were undersized; I didn't have those issues last year, but more fruits were ealier this year, and the taste was significantly improved, even though it was already great last year)
7. Galapagos Island (it's a great variety on all accounts; so, I don't mean to snub it by ranking it at number seven, FYI; it did just fine; these grew on their own as volunteers)

Canning lots of tomatoes is generally our goal; so, that goal does affect the rankings. Galapagos Island is great and prolific for canning, but it takes a while to harvest, since the fruits are small, and sometimes the new growth gets in the way of the fruit (it didn't used to do that until the last couple years). There are always ripe tomatoes on it, though.

There's still time in the season for me to potentially rank Carolina Yellow higher. Plus, I haven't harvested nor evaluated this year's storage tomatoes as of yet.

With regard to disease-resistance, the standouts there (against Verticillium, some foliar disease, and viruses) seem to be Galapagos Island, Amana Orange, Early Cascade, Cal Ace VF, and I think Carolina Yellow. Cherokee Purple was a standout against viruses and foliar diseases.

Verticillium actually didn't obviously kill anything this year, but I think that's because the tomatoes had plenty of fertilizer from the pre-fertilization, and I was diligent about watering everything until the heat subsided. If I neglected watering during the heat, I noticed increased disease symptoms pretty quickly (that was true for the cucumbers as well as the tomatoes). The plant to suffer most from Verticillium was one of our cucumbers (I didn't water it on time one day and yeah, it suffered, but did survive).

Well, we've got our first frost in the morning. Now that we're done with the harvesting, I should say that Cal Ace F1 has impressed me more. Even though it got a fair amount of BER earlier on, I got a lot of nice big green tomatoes for storage from it (or from what I believe to be it, rather; I didn't label it, but I don't know of another variety I planted that might be this). We got more ripe ones from it, too. The flavor is good. If you like Cuostralee, Matina, and Burpee Gloriana, you'll probably like this. It seemed fairly disease-resistant.

Carolina Yellow had a decent amount of storage tomatoes on it, too. They're not big, this year, so I wonder if it's a cross.

Cilantrovaya_B has continued to do well to the end. It seems to be overcoming the diseaes that have been attacking it.

[MissS]

@Shule I'm surprised that your Cherokee Purple did so well against disease. This was the first plant to show symptoms in my garden and it collapsed very quickly. Everything that I have read has it listed as very prone to disease. You should keeps your seed going since it is holding up so well.

[Moth1992]

Alaskan Fancy seeds came from the swap and only 2 plants made it into my garden but the flavor was outstanding according to my husband. I agree and it will return next year. And I think I saved enough seed to send some in to the swap...

That sounds like one that would do well in my climate! Adding it to my list

[slugworth]

Early boy,a big 2 gal store bought plant that is probably approaching 10 months old at this point.
A determinate type, but had 2 crops and is trying to start a 3rd with 1 new blossom.
Like umbilical cord it reached the end of it's lifetime,and I took cuttings today.
The remainder of the plant has green tomatoes turning red but has aphid woes.
The cuttings are indoors under lights on a warming mat.

[Shule]

@Shule I'm surprised that your Cherokee Purple did so well against disease. This was the first plant to show symptoms in my garden and it collapsed very quickly. Everything that I have read has it listed as very prone to disease. You should keeps your seed going since it is holding up so well.

It had pretty severe drought-intolerance (which may or may not have been a Verticillium symptom; or it might have just been a thirsty variety of tomato). The initial wilt never recovered (although the stems seemed healthy still, fortunately), but the new growth was good, without wilt, once I started watering it vigilantly more often than my other tomatoes. My bicolor Cherokee Lime cross had a similar problem.

But yeah, other than that, it had no disease problems, and there were other diseases afflicting plenty of plants (including one with a foliar fungal disease next to it). Maybe Alternaria or something. There was TSWV a ways away on the paste tomatoes. We had some kind of new mold that looked like feathers, which spoiled tomatoes pretty quickly if we didn't harvest them on time (especially if they were covered in leaves). That did afflict the Cherokee Purple fruits, too (but I didn't count that in my assessment, since it didn't hurt the plants, and we still had a chance to use the fruit before it spoiled). There was a tiny bit of anthracnose post-harvest on some paste tomatoes.

I saved seeds from four big Cherokee Purple fruits. I'm curious if they'll still be super thirsty next time. I had Cherokee Purple in the historically best spot in the garden, so that might have had something to do with it. I really wanted to give it a chance, since the last time I grew it before that, they really struggled (probably because I wasn't watering them enough).

[Cranraspberry]

The biggest surprise for us was Momotaro. It was the saddest seedling going in to the garden (almost didn’t plant it out), but once it got going it was unstoppable. Everything struggled with fusarium, even resistant varieties like Big Beef and Jet Star, but Momotaro was green and lush and bearing healthy abundant fruit right up till the first frost. It outlasted Sun Gold! We’ll be planting two next year!

[habitat-gardener]

Year 2023 was about the best tomato season I've had in the six years since I moved to this hot hot dry climate, mostly because the leaf-footed bugs (which ruined the tomatoes by early September most years) were scarce. I think that's because people in the neighborhood have been picking up old pomegranates, the favorite overwintering spot for LFBs. As a result, I was picking tomatoes into November! I tend to pick cherries when ripe and other varieties somewhere between first blush and almost ripe. Out of about 50 varieties, the following were outstanding.

Benevento F1 and Polaris were once again the best large tomatoes. I grow tomatoes mostly for tomato sandwiches every day, and these two varieties (2 plants of Polaris, 1 of Benevento) supplied enough tomatoes to share as well.When I pulled the plants at the end of the season, the Benevento roots were riddled with nematodes, yet the plant had been healthy, vigorous, and productive all season -- the most vigorous tomato plant in the whole garden, in fact. At the end of the same garden bed, the roots of only one of the Polaris plants had possibly a tiny nematode knot. They were also healthy. Both of these kept well after ripening on the table.

Another repeat variety, Purple Boy F1, churned out many small to medium tomatoes. I liked these better than the Cherokee Purple, which didn't produce a lot, and the Japanese Black Trifele, which did produce a lot, but both of the latter had a relatively short shelf life.

I hadn't grown Green Gables in a few years, but it was once again a winner for flavor and productivity, far superior to Cherokee Green. Both had some root-knot nematode evidence.

Of the cherries, I liked Rosella cherry the best, with Black Cherry and Chocolate Sprinkles F1 in a close tie for second place. My partner liked Artemis F1, which had a very short shelf life but was a huge, productive plant. All the cherries produced until frost.

Green Tiger was the best-tasting **tomato** this summer but production was much lower than expected.

For productivity, the winner was Bush Early Girl F1. It was early and produced steadily until frost. It had a good shelf life, too, and was pretty much uniform size and unblemished. So whenever we had visitors, this was the prime tomato to give away in quantity. (Red and round: met expectations for "tomato." And I still heard rave reviews from recipients!) It also ended up being the tomato that was used most for cooking, since there were so many of them. But I don't recall the taste; not sure if I ate any raw!