What are your favorite tomatoes?

[booger]

As I sit here munching on some late night Kellogg's Breakfast maters...

I think Pruden's Purple would have to be my favorite. This is my first year heavy into heirlooms, though, so there very well may be some other favorites of mine yet to be discovered. Huge, tasty, beautiful, productive.

I do love Arkansas Travelers, too. I've grown those for years. Great taste and so very dependable for me. Very, very productive which is a must for us, being tomato-eating hogs. Oink!

So what are your favorites?

 

[FireDance]

Aunt Gertie's Gold (seed not commercially available as far as I know) and Green Zebra.

Something good:

One Bagle Crisp
One leaf fresh basil
Slice Green Zebra
Top with slice of mozarella cheese

Very simple and lovely. Yum... never enough tomatoes to do it. This is good with a red tomato, but the zebras are very tart and it really adds to the flavor!

 

[Gingergirl]

Fresh season is so short, I think in terms of canning. So I make most of my selections for that purpose. Have tried a few, but for production and reliablity here, its the Romas. Juice, sauce, diced, ketchup, dried...

Wish I had the time and gardening space to try some of the more exotic ones.

 

[pauldingbabe]

my fav are the ones that i can collect b4 the dear get them!

 

[goatlady2]

Brandywine for fresh eating, Amish paste for sauce.

 

[ShepInTheValley]

For eating? My favorites are the low acid tomatoes... they taste wonderful and I don't suffer from the high acidity problems. For canning? Romas mostly.

I love tomatoes!!!!! Where do you get your Heirloom seeds from?

 

[TerriHaute]

I grow heirloom tomatoes almost exclusively. This year I have about a dozen or so different varieties. I try new ones each year, drop the ones I don't like, and keep the favorites, saving the seed from year to year.

My favorite tomato so far is Purple Cherokee, it is very flavorful. A close second is Bull's Heart, which is a large, pink variety. It's very sweet. For salsa and cooking, I like Roma or Amish Paste.

Terri in Indiana

 

[gardar]

My vote is Brandywine.

Grow almost exclusively heirloom tomatoes. Just finished with 7 different varieties.

Brandywine is the favorite (either yellow or regular). Large (3-1/2 to 4" across), very tasty, but not beautiful and will take as much as 85 days till first ripened fruit. Rather resistant to virus’s (that is important in central Florida).

We grow them upside down in buckets, changing this fall to elevated trough. Seeds expensive $2.00 or so a packet, but worth it. Source, most anyplace on the net.

 

[Brooks]

A point about the heirlooms (like Brandywine). You need to pay attention to the strain. Over the many generations they have evolved, and what is a Brandywine now may not be so much like what it was before, let alone the different strains that are now available commercially. The Brandywine I like best (which is also the tomato I like best) is the Quisenberry strain that Johnny's sells.

However, the yield hasn't been great (difficult pollination) and the misshapenness for me lends towards spoilage or tomatoes that never make it inside. So, for great taste but also dependably hardy, prolific, and no fuss, I grow Burpee Big Girl. A couple summers I had folks at work help with a taste test (they didn't get any tomatoes from me that year unless they participated. Big Girl was consisently the one they liked the best.

 

[booger]

Cherokee Purple and Aunt Gertie's are on my list to try next year!

Shep, since I'm just a beginner to heirlooms, I don't have much experience with the various places yet. Many of my heirloom seeds this year came from a wonderful, generous lady I met on another board. In fact, I'm going to be blaming my developing heirloom addiction on her.

I also ordered some from Pintree seeds. They have mostly smaller packets of seeds and are inexpensive compared to some companies (because of the smaller amounts). I liked that, however, so that I could afford to try out several varieties at once.

There's also Johnny's--love them! I got some squash seeds from them.

Those are the only two I've actually ordered from so far (other than Burpee ). I have a bunch more sites bookmarked, though, if you need a big list.

Oh, a question for anyone who may know: Isn't Kellogg's Breakfast supposed to be a pinkish kind of mater? My KBs are a really bright, obnoxious, ugly, plastic-y, persimmon on LSD kind of orange. I have to close my eyes to eat them. Yummy, though!