My guess after a quick search is San Marzano?

I'm growing Super San Marzano this year. Yes, it does look similar. Do they grow in "bunches" of four to six tomatoes? Mine come off the vine very easily when they start to break color and redden up. You brush your hand on them... and there they go. This is the first year to grow them, and so far I have been very impressed. They are similar to the Roma in that they are meaty tomatoes good for cooking down to make sauce. They are also excellent for salads since they do not have a lot of juice.

I am growing tomatillos for the first time also. I'm not so impressed with them. Lots and lots of fruit, but not many fill out the husk. You might be better off with what you have than with the tomatillo. Let us know how they taste.

I grew Pompeii for a couple of years and they were very bad to get BER. They looked something like those.

All paste tomatoes are prone to BER early in the season when they have set a huge load of fruit relative to the size of the plant. The main cause is an issue with water flow in the vascular system of the plant. Usually, after the first bunch with BER has been removed, as long as you keep the soil consistently moist (not swinging back and forth from very wet to very dry), the BER stops occurring. It occurs because of a confluence of factors, including heavy rainfall interspersed with drier periods combined with young plants with relatively immature vascular systems. You cannot control heavy rainfall, but you can be sure to keep the soil evenly moist when the rain stops falling.

They probably are from the San Marzano family, likely plain old San Marzano, but there's also San Marzano Redorta, Super San Marzano, etc. There are hundreds of varieties of paste tomatoes, so I'd hate to try to ID any one variety based on a photo though. Just on Tatiana's Tomatobase, for example, she lists 432 paste varieties.

I'd certainly just remove the tomatoes with BER and give the plant a chance to produce more that hopefully will not have BER. I usually only see BER on the first big fruit set in May or early June on the paste types, if I see it at all.

Dawn

Ok thank you! I will wait to see what happens! I have about a dozen that are large and healthy, at the very least I will get to enjoy those.. :)

Ok thank you! I will wait to see what happens! I have about a dozen that are large and healthy, at the very least I will get to enjoy those.. :)

You're welcome. You should get a lot more as long as the plants stay healthy. Paste tomatoes sometimes (often) don't shut down fruit set in the heat as much as the slicing types of tomatoes do. I sometimes get paste tomatoes virtually all summer, although the production will slow down enough that I might have to accumulate some in the freezer for a couple of weeks until I have the necessary 25 or 30 lbs. to make a big batch of sauce to can. The paste tomatoes that have a history that reflects a heritage from a region with a hot climate don't stop setting fruit as early as those not necessarily known to come from a hot region. I grow one from Africa called "Heidi" and it is almost unstoppable in the heat. Last year it set fruit through the end of July, despite some really hot temperatures.

For me, San Marzano Redorta provides big harvests in June and July, and sometimes they carry into August. Some other paste tomato varieties I've grown and really liked (Opalka, for example) have superb flavor but don't like our heat.

If you try a paste tomato variety and find it doesn't produce heavily or for very long in our climate, there's a lot of other varieties to try.

If you need a specific number of paste tomatoes to make a batch of sauce or salsa and cannot get enough ripe ones at one time, just wash the freshly harvested fruit, put them in a zip-lock bag (I use gallon-sized bags to freeze tomatoes) and keep adding ripe tomatoes to the bag over a period of time. Eventually you accumulate enough to cook down into your preferred sauce, soup, salsa, etc. Sometimes I just toss tomatoes into freezer bags and put them in my deep freeze when I am too busy with the overall harvest of everything to have time to cook and can tomatoes.

Some paste tomatoes taste pretty good for fresh eating too, but others don't taste great fresh because it is the cooking process that brings out and develops their best flavor.

Dawn