What To Grow in 1995?
A Tomato Enthusiast Out of Control?
So, when one has hundreds of
varieties of tomato seeds sitting out in little glass vials on the shelf of the
garage, what happens in late winter when it becomes time to think about the garden?
What kind of selection process do I use to decide what to grow in the coming
summer’s garden, and which will have to wait another year or more? For many of
you, deciding what to grow may be an easy process, but not for me! I can always
seem to come up with a good reason to grow any particular variety of tomato,
but with such a large collection, discipline and planning is a must! Here is
the reasoning process that I have struggled with this year in planning my
tomato growouts.
I guess that the first thing that I
do is mentally divide the tomato varieties that I have in my possession into
several categories. The two major priorities are what will taste best (since it
can be argued that the most important reason to have a garden is to eat of its
bounty), and what needs to be grown for seed purposes. There are many factors
that contribute to this second priority, such as how many people are
reoffering, if any, in the SSE annual, the age of the seed (meaning, how long
has it been since it was last grown), what is the priority if it has yet to be
grown, etc. Often, such as in this year and, I suspect, all years hence, it
comes down to how much room I have for tomatoes in my garden, and how close do
I dare space them! Usually, I then start looking for friends and remote gardens
in which to inject my varieties.
Rather than to continue to explain
the process, I will use actual details that are in progress for my 1995 garden.
This year, my original goal was to concentrate on those varieties that have
performed best for me over the years. There is interest from a local grocery
store to market heirloom tomatoes, so I was going to grow several plants of
these “best” types to sell to the store. First in priority are the potato leaf
pink tomatoes, since most of the best that I have tasted are in this category.
For this purpose I selected
This year, I acquired 41 varieties
from the USDA germplasm collection in
Last year’s growouts of the USDA
varieties left some unsolved mysteries. I will try growing one more time Acme, Queen of the Purples, and Mikado
in hopes that they might be true to the description. A few of the USDA
varieties did not germinate last year, and will get a potassium nitrite
treatment and another chance this year (samples of Beauty and Alpha Pink are in this category). A few
of the USDA collection will be grown for the first time, such as Mikado Ecarlate, or regrown to get
another look at the variety, such as Abraham
Lincoln and Magnus.
Now we come to varieties that come
from seed savers and need growing out for seed and observations about
performance. In this category are Big
Yellow, A. C. Red, Mennonite, Orange Strawberry, Potato
Leaf Hillbilly (I am dying to see a potato leaf bicolor), Southern Night, Yellow Brandywine and Brandywine
from a fellow in Ohio, Italian Giant,
Indische Fleische, Bull Heart, Russian Persimmon, Snowball,
Azoychka, Cosmonaut Volkov Red, and Orange.
(These will be grown in my home garden). Finally, the experiments, such as my
search for the regular leaf bicolor of Nina’s
Heirloom and F3 growouts from Sun
Gold, round out the list.
Does this represent everything that
I would like to grow? Not by a long shot. I have hundreds of varieties that I
will need to get to within the next 3-5 years, and there will be renewal of
seed of other varieties. And, I suppose, more people will send me their
favorites, and there are a host of other interesting varieties sitting in the
USDA collection, or somewhere else in the world waiting to be grown. What fun
this is!