Erika,

Trudi is incredily knowledgable about tomatoes - if you want a particular type she should be able to direct you to some good ones. I found that the plum tomatoes are great roasted. The smaller size globe shaped tomatoes I like for salad and/or salsas. This is obviously only my opinion about what I like. Good luck!

Ann

Rutgers is a classic 3R tomato, it's round, red, and reliable. It's been grown for nearly 70 years, making it an heirloom type simply because of its longevity as a favorite for home growers and farmers too.

Any tomato can be cooked but choosing them are based on your preferences. DETs are varieties which have an expected or determinable height, they crop the majority of their fruits all at once, flowering and fruiting drops dramatically after that and so, just for convenience, you can yank the plants after you crop them and give the ground over to another plant. INDs have an indetermined length, they just keep growing and growing and flowering and fruiting along their stems until the plant is killed by frost or disease.

Pastes and beefsteaks generally are meaty fruits, not as juicy, drippy, slurpy as others and do quite well for sauce or slicing. Globes or Oblates (slightly flattened fruits) are all-purpose and do well for salad, slice or stuffing--baked or fresh.

Small fruited tomatoes are nice for salad or tossing into a saute pan. They can be cooked whole or just slice in half to prepare them. Hubs likes cherries, they're convenient snack-sized tomatoes, juicy and sweet. He's also fond of tomato salad made by chunking up something ripe off the vine and stirring in just a dibdab of mayo.

Heirlooms or heritage types can be red, but a good many are not. They come in all colors of the rainbow--the purple or black types aren't really purple or black, but are shades of brick. White tomatoes aren't white, they're cream to pale yellow in color. There are GWRs--which are Green when Ripe--they don't have a color gene and just ripen to green hue, some, like most tomatoes, will develop a rosy blush as they ripen and sweeten. And there are bi-colors too, which may have more than two colors, like Berkeley Tie Die, Black and Red Boar, or Striped German--to name a few.

Shapes are varied. Currants, cherries, grapes, saladettes, round, oblate, beefsteak, ruffled, pear-shaped, plums (which can also be elongated). Some tomatoes have shoulders, some have nipples (giggety), some have a few cavities where seeds develop and some have more but smaller cavities where their seeds develop, and some seem to be all wall--and these are nice for stuffing--that's a trait called Puffiness.

And then there's different foliage types--there's one called Silvery Fir Tree which makes really odd leaves which you can gather from the name. Strangeness is part of the passion of growing heirlooms--they're not all 3Rs, and flavor is part of the love.

If you're new to growing tomatoes from seed then selection of what you want to grow can be overwhelming. It's akin to walking into a wine store and wanting something that tastes good but you don't know where to begin. So, because of the overwhelming amount of choices I am happy to select for people--I understand that it's tough to decide if you're new to the hobby. At WinterSown.Org there's an order form which you fill out with your choices and defaults--people who want me to choose for them just send in the blank form. I look at the address that the seeds are going to and I use locality as a guide for beginning the selection process. If someone lives in North Dakota then it doesn't make sense for me to select a tomato that will mature in 90 days after being set out into the garden--they need a tomato which will ripen before their first freeze in later summer or very early Autumn. And conversely, people who live in the deep hot south will also need fast maturing varieties because hot, hot summer weather causes malformation of blossom and fruiting is very, very difficult until the cooler weather comes along. If you're in zone 6 and 7 and 8 you can grow just about any tomato in your climate and expect a success, you may still have your local disease pressures, but growing season nice and long. Zones 9 and 10, Zones 5 and 4, are going to need fast cropping tomatoes.

I make a lot of sauce and also can tomatoes. Some types that are good for both sauce and canning are opalka, san marzano, roma, and amish paste. They're meatier which means less time spent cooking them down.

Caryl

Wow, so much info! Thanks guys! I'll send in my order form.

Thanks again!
Erika

Hello Caryl! Caryl is the auther of the a Winter Sowing article which just came out in the paper! And I love that video too. There's a paste which I shared with a friend some years back which she is dleighted to see reseed in her garden every year, it's called Striped Roman, and has three inch long pastes with gold streaked skin. And it is as awesome a tomato as you can find, great cropper and excellent sliced or cooked. In honesty, each time I've grown them not a one wound up in the pot, they all were eaten fresh. Yum yum.

T

I grew rutgers last year. Almost all of them went into the pot and were stewed. Great tomato. Very prolific producer, at least until the heat of summer took them away from me.

Erica,
To each their own -
but I suggest you taste a Rutgers tomato, Ramapo, for instance, before tossing it into the pot. :)

some of the Rutgers tomatoes put NJ on the map for great tasting tomatoes.

I grew up in NJ with the tomatoes that my mother grew in the back yard. For 40 years I longed for that taste, which has returned w/the Ramapo.

just sayin'....

It's rare for NJ to be famous for something besides the smell of the NJ Turnpike!

ellen

Ellen, it's greatly improved. The NJ Turnpike now smells like McDonalds, Starbucks and Cinnabon ;-)

T...yummmm, Cinnayums.

lol

Trudi,

Thanks, I'm so glad you liked it. One of my coworkers told me she was going home Friday to put some seeds in a jug, so maybe another convert :)

I'll have to look up the Striped Roman and keep it in mind for next year. Never heard of it, but then again I've never heard of most of the types of tomatoes there are. Such variety. I've got 18 different ones this year thanks to you and totally tomatoes.

And after Ellen's post I'm so glad one of the varieties for this year's garden is the Ramapo. Can't wait to taste it.

Caryl