See what photo? None posted or linked.

Early fruit often suffer from pollination deformities due to exposure to cool temps at pollination time. Otheriwse the most likely explanation is mis-labled plants. You'll find more info on both explanations over on the Growing Tomatoes forum here.

Dave

That was my first thought as well...mis-labled. I've actually seen people at the nursery pull up labels, walk around a bit and then stick them in something else...crazy!

Val

Kids will switch labels too or someone not paying attention to where they took it from.

Well, I'd believe the "wrong label" theory, except the rest of the tomatoes further up the vine look fine, like standard big boys. As well, these first tomatoes taste really bad, not like a regular tomato of any kind I've ever tasted.

Maybe it's a poorly done cross? If the bad tomatoes are along select branches, that's what I would suspect- a cross gone wrong with rootstock that was chosen for something other than the delicious tomatoes.

I guess I don't even really know if that's possible, but I've seen it happen with fruit trees, where one branch is specifically from the grafted root-stock and produces awful fruit while the rest of the tree produces wonderful fruit.

I would remove the tomatoes that are obviously bad ones- and if you can prune off those branches I would do that as well to concentrate the plant's energy on the good tomatoes.

It does sound like it is a grafted tomato and you are getting tomatoes from the root stock.

I agree with soonergrandmom. Grafted tomatoes are usually on rootstock that produces very poor quality fruit. The particular variety is chosen for heavy production or disease resistance, not fruit quality, and the good tasting variety is grafted to it. If they are grafted, you might be able to see a funky looking place on the main stem where the graft was done. If so, you can take off (carefully!) all the leaves and suckers below the graft point.

Where did the op say anything about this being a grafted tomato??

I think I'm going to go with Dave's response at this point:

"Early fruit often suffer from pollination deformities due to exposure to cool temps at pollination time."

But I will check out the plant and see if there's any sign of grafts.

You said you planted a large plant and buried it half way down the plant. If it is grafted plant then that would make the graft point below ground level.

If it were ONLY deformity I could understand the pollination issue, but when the taste is also effected, then it sounds like more than a early developing fruit problem.

OK, sorry for being absent from this post... and also sorry about the lack of picture! I thought I uploaded one, but now I can't even find the original file! :-( Link Below.

Anyway, now that particular plant is producing like crazy and they taste just fine, in fact very good. The earliest ones were the funky ones, but there were about 5 of those, all gone now. The best reasoning I can come up with is that these plants were put in the ground VERY early (March) for Indiana and we had some cold, damp weeks in April that may have somehow messed up fruit production right when they were getting started(not blossom end rot, but perhaps something similar that disfigured them). The fruit that started when the weather finally got warm has matured, look great and all taste normal. So, the lesson here is don't put tomatoes in the ground in March in Indiana, no matter how warm it is.

Freaky warm weather planting in March = Some Freaky Tomatoes in June!

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:68454}}

PS: I looked all over for signs of a graft, but as someone earlier said, that was buried halfway, so impossible to spot. I don't think it was a graft as this greenhouse usually grows all of their plants from seed, even the large ones.

They look like Brandywine to me.

My earliest 4th of July fruits [in June!] had very tough skins and an off taste - from different vines. I finally figured it was the droughty conditions. The later fruits seem fine, now. I'm making sure to keep them watered.