Homegrown Tomatoes

Posts Tagged ‘hybrid’

Should you buy tomato plants or grow from seeds?  There are some good arguments both ways, and I sometimes do both.  Let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Buying Tomato Plants

There are two main things you need to be concerned with, when buying tomato plants for your garden.

• First, how do the plants look?  Are they rangey and tall, shorter and bushier or somewhere in between?  The taller rangey plants are not as desirable as the stockier plants.  The taller plants may have been fed a bunch of fertilizer, or haven’t been given enough sunlight, producing the rangey growth.
• Can you see any roots showing at the bottom or sides of the pot?  If so, the plant is very likely rootbound and will have trouble getting started in your garden.

Also be careful of the following when buying tomato plants:

• Do not, no matter how tempting, buy plants that already have open blossoms or tomatoes.  These plants will be shocked moving into your garden and very likely will have setbacks (take it from someone who knows).
• If the plants come with little removable plant labels, you may (or may not) get the variety that you’re expecting.  Charles Wilber tells a story about thinking he was buying Better Boy plants (beefsteak tomatoes) and ended up with cherry tomatoes — someone had either mislabeled or switched labels.  (However, with those cherry tomatoes, he captured a Guinness world record for the largest tomato plant, so all ended well.)

The main advantage to buying tomato plants is that the early work is already done.  If you decide late in the season that you want to grow tomatoes, there may not be time to start from seeds — and the plants fill in nicely.  Also, some people don’t want to be bothered with starting seeds.  These are cases where buying tomato plants works well.

Planting Tomato Seeds

Planting tomato seeds gives you the most variety and control over your tomatoes.  In general, tomato plants are available in maybe a dozen varieties.  Tomato seeds, on the other hand, have thousands of varieties from which to choose!

Sometimes you’ll find heirloom tomatoes as plants (I found Tigerella at the local Home Depot garden shop), but most plants available are hybrids.

If you want a wide range from which to choose, you can try (of all places) .  Yes, I do buy some of mine there, thus far with great success.

The biggest disadvantage of planting your own tomato seeds is that you have to do it well before the time you need to put them out in the garden — in general, 4 to 6 weeks ahead.  Also, you need to have a warm dark place to germinate the seeds, then some place to put them where they will get adequate light after they’ve germinated.

I tend to germinate far more seeds than I do buy tomato plants, partly because there isn’t enough of a variety available locally for the plants.  I also like to grow organically as possible, and it’s highly likely that store-bought tomato plants will have been fertilized chemically.  On the other hand…sometimes a plant just calls out to me and begs to be taken home!

Tomato colors are kind of tricky; red isn’t the only color in the pallet.  If you’ve spent any time with seed catalogs or read any books on tomatoes, you’ll see references to yellow, pink, orange, bicolor, green, purple, chocolate, white  and black.  About the only color I haven’t heard of is blue!

Still, the colors aren’t necessarily obvious.  Nor do the same varieties of  tomatoes grown in different climates have the same color.  What’s a home gardener to do?

Notes on Color

In general, tomato fruit colors are more vivid in warm climates than the cooler climates.  While it doesn’t always hold true (many reds, pinks and yellows are bright no matter where), others need warmer weather to color up.

Conversely, tomatoes like the white varieties need cooler weather to retain most of their white/ivory color.  Grown in the sunny South, they’ll end up more yellow.

The shades that really need warmth to reveal their depth of color are the purple, chocolate and black tomatoes.  If you grow these in the cooler climates, you may be disappointed as to the paleness of the colors of the ripe fruits, compared to what you see online or in catalogs (which tend to be grown in warmer climates).

Tomato Colors

The fruit colors are as follows:

• Red:  No real need to explain this, as it’s what you see in the grocery store.  Red tomatoes have red interiors and yellow skin.
• Pink:  These are tomatoes with a red interior but clear skin; therefore, they appear pinker than the reds.
• Purple:  Generally a richer, dusky pink, both skin and flesh.
• White:  I have yet to see a white tomato (in my climate anyway) that stays white when ripe.  They start out that way, but then develop ivory to light yellow tones.  The best chance for a white tomato to stay almost all white is one grown in a cooler climate.
• Yellow:  A clear, lemony yellow, both inside and out.
• Gold:  These are the tomatoes that start out as yellow, but turn a richer gold color when ripe.
• Orange:  These are really orange-colored, although some are brighter than others.
• Green:  The skin is mostly green when ripe, with an amber blush on the blossom end.  The interiors tend to be an almost neon green.
• Chocolate:  A dusky purple.  If you’re not used to darker tomatoes, you might think these look very strange when ripe.
• Black:  A much darker purple.  Some people are put off by the color of the skin and flesh of a black tomato, but they really are very good!
• Bicolor:  Generally these refer to the red and yellow colors.  The skin is striped and the interior is generally mottled red and yellow.  Visually stunning!

Quite a few choices, wouldn’t you say?  As a special note, the more exotic colors are generally heirloom tomatoes.  Hybrids tend to be in the red-pink-yellow range.

Do the Different Colors Taste Different?

There are no hard-and-fast rules as to correlating tomato color to tomato taste; it really depends on the tomato variety and the growing conditions.

That being said, some people think that:

• Green tomatoes taste “zippier”.
• Yellow tomatoes are blander (although not necessarily bland).
• Pink and purple  tomatoes have the richest tastes.
• Black tomatoes have a deeper taste, less sweet.

But like I said, it really does depend on the variety you grow.  Not all tomatoes of a different color are alike!

I don’t have anything near to ripe at the moment, but I am growing tomatoes of a few different colors.  As they ripen, I’ll take photos of them so you can see some of the differences, grown in a home garden, and taken by an amateur photographer.