Okiedawn,

Thank you for the input. I have looked on the internet and it says that Celebrity is an older hybrid but some of the reviews say it is bland while some say different and it is supposed to be a good tomato for canning. I was a little disappointed about the bland taste but since I will be making most of them (that is if any are made) into juice I was hoping that canning them would be alright. I really like Big Boys and Better Boys as I used to grow them all the time. Since Celebrity is so disease tolerant I wonder why someone hasn't crossed them with some heirloom to improve the disease resistance.

Thank you for your information.

Auther, You're welcome. I don't really consider Celebrity all that old. Well, it isn't old compared to my age. I think it was an AAS winner in 1984. Big Boy, which I do tend to think of as one of the older hybrids, was introduced in 1949, making it older than me (grin).

Celebrity has bland flavor some years and not so bland other years, so I think its flavor fluctuates quite a bit depending on growing conditions. It tastes better to me in really dry years. Soil can play a role in flavor too, so tomatoes grown in really good soil might taste better than tomatoes grow in a different kind of soil. Also, remember that flavor is subjective, so two people can eat a slice from the very same tomato and one person's taste buds will love it and the other person's taste buds won't. That's why you really have to try the different varieties for yourself to see what your taste buds like, and I like to give a variety that is new to me at least 3 different chances in my garden because even the amount of rainfall or irrigation strongly influences flavor---excess moisture gives you bland tomatoes with poor flavor and a mushy texture, but those same varieties grown in a hot, dry year or dryland style can taste incredibly different.

Tomato breeding is a lot more complex now than it used to be, but there is a lot of work being done with crossing some heirloom OPs with other breeding lines, and someone is doing a lot of breeding "marriages" by crossing two (or more) heirloom OPs with each other. Some of it makes me shake my head. A commercial breeder will cross two tomatoes....let's use an imaginary Brandywine crossed with Cherokee Purple and come up with a "new" tomato variety. Sounds good? Perhaps. They will patent it, promote the heck out of it as a cross between those two beloved OP heirlooms and make money off of it, but in the world of heirloom tomatoes we know that we already have OP tomato varieties that are a result of people crossing Brandywine with Cherokee Purple. So, do we stay faithful to an OP child of BW x CP we've grown and loved, or do we drop it to try a hybrid that also is a child of BW x CP. Call me old-fashioned, but I'll stick with the OP variety I'm already growing.

I do appreciate that breeders are able to locate and use the genes that bring various types of disease tolerance into the tomatoes they are working with, but for me it is always going to be about flavor and texture. I don't care what tomato has tolerance of Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus (which I have seen exactly once in my garden in all these decades)---if it is as overly firm (i.e. rock hard) as most hybrids with only so-so flavor and texture, I'm not growing it. A tomato can be something like Super Tomato VFFFNTtswvLbEb tolerant but with bland flavor, hard as a rock and mealy texture, and I'll ignore it and take my chances with Cherokee Purple. CP may not be labeled with tolerance of 6 or 8 diseases but it makes my taste buds sing.

Happy Growing! (And, for what it is worth, other than pastes and oxhearts that are low in juice, I think any tomato you grow will make adequate tomato juice. If it tastes bland, just boil it down some more to concentrate the flavor. I'd probably use a lot of pink, black and purple types of tomatoes. They have superb, complex flavor and lots of juice.)

Dawn

Okiedawn,

I understand what you are saying. I was looking at JD's Special Tex orgin and it is supposed to be a (I think) an Brandywine/Early Girl (original EG) cross as the EG has disease resistance & is an earlier tomato. Not to be nit picking on one of your favorite tomato's, I just thought it interesting that they would cross a hybrid and an heirloom. Same way with Cherokee Purple I really have to wonder if a Cherokee ever even saw this tomato. I have to wonder if it is not a cross of Black Krim and a pink tomato variety, with the Cherokee history added on to get people to plant it. I was told that in the late 1950/early 1960's the University of Arkansas experimented with a lot of black tomato cross's in an attempt to get people to try the black tomato's which at that time no one was willing to try as the tomato growers in Arkansas were solid pink tomato growers. I don't know if this is so but it is interesting.

I usually can tomato juice because it is easier for me than canning whole tomato's and we make a lot of chili and red soup during the winter, plus my better half likes to drink a glass of tomato juice ever so often.

I would like to see a picture of your back yard, it must really be a wonder with stuff planted every where. I can't imagine where you get all the energy to take care of so much and to pick so many hundreds of tomato's. I planted about 100 big cherry tomato's a few years ago and thought I was never going to get done picking those stinking little buggers. I have since limited my tomato planting to 12/25 regular size tomato plants and it is just about right for me. My daughter built a 8/10 raised box garden in her back yard, which surprised me as she never showed any interest in growing anything before, and grew a Cherokee Purple and just couldn't say enough about how good it taste. So last spring she sent me 4 little CP potted plants to try, I planted them and was never so surprised at the flavor.

So I can see why you are sold on any black tomato. Thank you for all the help and information that you post on OK. Gardening Forum.

While the history of many open-pollinated types of tomatoes is unknown or widely debated, we do have a known, documented history of both Cherokee Purple and Black Krim.

Black Krim has a very interesting history. It first appeared in the 1990 Yearbook of Seed Savers Exchange in 1990, being listed by Lars Olov Rosenstrom of Bromma, Sweden. He described it as a black tomato from Krim (an island in the Black Sea in Russia (actually Krim is part of Ukraine). Someone in the USA obtained seed from him, and it spread person to person, largely through Seed Savers Exchange, before some seed company obtained it and began making it available to the public. I first found seed of Black Krim probably in the SSE catalog in the late 1990s or early 2000s. It has a very unique flavor, and we also have many other black tomatoes that have come to us from parts of Russia and former USSR nations, particularly from the Ukraine and Black Sea areas. We also have some black tomatoes that, historically, seem linked to the southern US and, of course, for all that we know, those black tomatoes might have arrived here in the USA with immigrants many decades ago.

Cherokee Purple came to us from the USA's south. Seed of CP was sent to tomato afficianado Craig LeHoullier by J. D. Green of Sevierville, TN, in 1990. It arrived as tomato seed with no name. Mr. Green had received the seed from a woman he knew. That woman obtained the seed from her neighbor, who told him that the neighbor's family originally received seed from the Cherokee people, and said her family had grown CP for over 100 years. Mr. LeHoullier grew it and liked it, so he named it Cherokee Purple, based on its history and color, and he listed it in the SSE Yearbook the following year. It spread from there. Later on, Craig sent seed, first to Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and then later on to Johnny's Selected Seeds, and CP made it into the commercial market that way. I found it in SSE's catalog in the early 2000s. By the way, Craig LeHoullier and Dr. Carolyn Male both have been instrumental in saving and sharing the seed of many (probably hundreds if not thousands) heirloom OP varieties of tomatoes over the decades and both have written books about heirloom tomatoes. I recommend their books highly and we owe them a debt of appreciation for all they have done to save heirloom varieties and keep them in circulation so that those varieties have survived to this day.

There's another tomato from a part of Arkansas known as Indian Stripe that may be about the same as Cherokee Purple. The growth habit and flavor is about the same, but there is faint green and purple striping on Indian Stripe. It may be IS is the same as CP and that the striping is just a genetic mutation or something. (I've also grown a an Indian Stripe-Burson from Marianna's seeds that is a little different from the IS sold by other seed companies. I think I'd liked the Burson one better. ) During subsequent years, some skin changes have resulted in some Cherokee Purple descendents that are not purple, so now we have Cherokee Green and Cherokee Chocolate, both of which taste the same to me as the original Cherokee Purple.

When I first started growing the dark-colored tomatoes in the late 1990s, they were pretty rare and you didn't see many of them and the seed was available from a very limited number of retailers. Then they exploded in popularity and suddenly we had dozens of "new" black varieties to grow. I haven't grown all the dark colored tomatoes by any means, but have grown enough to know that the great black tomatoes all have that same incredible flavor similar to Black Krim, and all the purple tomatoes I like have a flavor not that different from CP's flavor. Every now and then I find a black or a purple that is completely different and unique in flavor, but not often, so it seems like there is some sort of genetic link between the color and the flavor. Black Plum is one that is really different from other blacks, at least to my taste buds!

Okiedawn,

For a lot of years I use to grow Big Boy & Better Boy tomato's and still like them. Then a few years ago there was an article in National Geographic Magazine about Seed Savers and how they were traveling around the world trying to save as many OP & Heirloom plants & vegetables as they could find as all of the old seeds were being lost and replaced with hybrid plants and that the world was at the point of having only a very limited number for food source and if some catastrophic disease was to get started it could wipe out our food sources as we know them because all of our plants are becoming hybrids with so small a gene bank. The article stated that open pollinated plants carried many more genes than hybrid plants do and could survive some diseases. Hybrid plants grow just fine if they have good rich soil and plenty of water and all other conditions are met. But if the weather should change for some reason and get dryer or other factors come into play they could not adjust with the changes. Where as open pollinated or heirloom plants with their larger gene pool could adapt to climatic changes. That started me to thinking about open pollinated vegetable seed. The article stated that open pollinated & heirloom seed planted over several generations in a climate or poor soil could adapt to that particular soil & climate and would produce something where as hybrid seed could not. Plus I just kind of like the idea of being able to save seed from my own plants. I think some of the best tasting tomato juice I have made was from some San Marzano tomato's that I grew from seed. But to me San Marzano tomato's seem to have Blossom End Rot worse than any other I have grown.

Another new tomato I am thinking about trying is one called Stone Tomato is reads that it is a good canning tomato plus it is open pollinated.

Okiedawn,

I also agree that the soil and water has a lot to do with the way tomato's taste. I think that sometimes when a tomato is bland or has no taste it may be because there has been to much water in the growing and ripening process. I also think soil has a lot to do with the taste of a lot of garden vegetables & fruit. I know that it can affect the taste of watermelons and cantaloupes. You can tell a watermelon that has been raised on dirt natured soil as it wont be as sweet as one grown on sandy soil. To much water can also cause a watermelon to not have any flavor.

Seed Saver's Exchange has a wonderful history and what is so unique about it is that its members have saved so many varieties over the last several decades just because individual members took it upon themselves to save varieties, multiply the seed supply and share those seeds among themselves.

You can obtain seeds from SSE in two ways: 1) through their public catalog that offers just a tiny portion of what is available; or 2) by paying a membership fee and joining SSE, which then gives you access to all the varieties listed by members in the annual yearbook. For those varieties, you contact the member directly and obtain the seeds from them for a small cost. The thousands and thousands of varieties that can be obtained that way is mind-boggling. They have participated in the international seed bank (Svalbard Global Seed Vaul)t, an effot to bank some of each kind of seed in the world in order to save/preserve all varieties for the future.

In recent years, SSE has had some issues, most noticeably a bad marital breakup between the founders of the organization, which led to one member leaving----and he did not go in a quiet and peaceful manner. That was an unpleasant part of their history but shouldn't diminish the important of the work the SSE has done for decades.

Our own George (MacMex) and his wife, were involved in the SSE for a very long time and now their work with the Green Country Seed Savers carries on their work in seed preservation at a regional level.

Many modern hybrids (of all types, not just tomatoes) do require more nutrient inputs in order to produce well. They often need more nutrients and water in order to thrive and produce well, and I guess the trade-off for that is that most of them have more disease tolerance (often incorrectly described as resistance). Often, the breeders are focused primarily on other factors when breeding---shelf life, shipping, heavy yields, disease tolerance, pest tolerance, interesting colors or patterns, etc., and seem to forget that some of us are more focused on flavor, texture, nutrition, etc. That's my main issue with some hybrids----they look like the veggies we expect but don't necessarily taste all that great. If you look around and try a lot of hybrids, you eventually can find some that were bred with flavor in mind, but they are few and far between. I happen to like Big Boy and Better Boy and usually they are two of the early plants I buy in the stores in winter. I don't like them enough that I raise them from seed myself and plant several of each variety in the garden though.

Don't even get me started on those sort-of-round, sort-of-square, orangeish-reddish and generally bland, flavorless bags of water sold as "tomatoes" in modern grocery stores. They normally are harvested green and artificially turned red (but not actually ripened) with ethylene gas exposure, and we are expected to somehow think we're eating tomatoes when we eat them. Ha! Those are poor excuses for tomatoes, but I guess if we picked our home-grown tomatoes while they are still green and as hard as a rock, and if we turned them red in that manner by using an artificial gas, then ours might taste as bad as the tomatoes sold in stores. I willingly forgo most grocery store tomatoes in the off-season because they aren't worth buying. I just try to preserve as much of our crop as possible so we are eating real tomatoes with real flavor in winter and early spring, even though the texture of preserved tomtoes is not the same as fresh tomatoes. Sometimes I buy the little containers of bite-sized tomatoes, and some of those can almost taste like a tomato and aren't too bad in salads, though I don't sit there and eat them like a bowl of grapes or anything.

One thing I've noticed is that when people tell me they don't like tomatoes, the primary reason is that the only tomatoes they've ever eaten are grocery-store tomatoes. Once you talk them into eating a fresh, ripe, juicey home-grown tomato, they often discover they love tomatoes. The most common comment? "I never knew tomatoes could taste like this."

The link between moisture levels in melons and tomatoes (and peaches and some other fruits) is well-known, as is the influence of heat and soil. Often, people who are new to growing their own fruits and veggies are unhappy with the flavor and texture of their melons and tomatoes (and sometimes peaches and plums) because they have overwatered and overfed them and the flavor and texture suffer accordingly. Once you can convince those folks to stop the overwatering and overfeeding, it is amazing how much better their produce tastes. I try to grow my melons and tomatoes as close to dryland style as possible. Some years it is impossible to grow them without irrigation because we are so hot and so dry that the plants won't survive or won't produce, but I carefully give them only the bare minimum in terms of irrigation. There's nothing that tastes better to me that melons grown dryland style in some of Love County's deep sandy soil. This once was a major melon-producing region. Now we mostly have horse ranches and some cattle ranches where the melons used to grow, which is a shame.

I've always grown my melons at the sandy west end of the front garden, or in recent years, in the new back garden's sandy soil. I also get better cucumber and winter squash production from the back garden, and the figs that grow in the sandy soil are superb as well. While clay soil, once amended, is fine soil and highly nutritious, there's a lot of veggies and fruits that also thrive in sandy soil, including all the southern peas. It really makes garden planning easy---I generally put the sandy soil-loving plants in the back garden and everything else in the front garden. For the sake of crop rotation, though, I occasionally shake it up and grow some things in the front garden that normally grow in the back. I did that last year, but not by choice.

Due to the 24" of rainfall that fell in May and left a continual river of water flowing through both gardens, I didn't even plant the back garden in 2015. The front garden has a lot of raised beds, so those beds were largely useable all year even when tons of water was standing in the pathways between the beds, but the back garden is grade-level soil and couldn't be used. Well, maybe I could have grown water cress and rice back in the back garden, but I didn't.

Last year's weather was hard on the back garden. The fruit trees, comfrey. garlic and some perennial flowers back there survived all the water, but I don't think that all the coneflowers, penstemons and artemesias did. I guess I'll know more about that over the next couple of months. Eventually I'd like to build raised beds back there, and indeed, the voles that plague the softer, sandy soil make it imperative that we build hardware cloth-lined raised beds to protect the plant roots from the pine voles, but we just haven't done it yet since that garden is only a few years old. I guess I need to start adding one raised bed per year back there like I did with the front garden. I'm a lot older now than I was when we moved here in the late 1990s, and those harder tasks like building raised beds and filling them are not as enjoyable to me now as they once were. I do need to get the back garden into better shape though, because the front garden is in a clearing in the woodland and the tall trees encroach upon it from the north and west more and more every year. It is a fight now just to keep it sunny enough to use as a garden plot, and I've given back tons of former garden space to the shade already. My growing area of the front garden now is probably half of what it once was and I don't really want to lose any more of that growing space, but saving what is left is going to involve cutting down part of the woodland, and I always have tried to avoid taking out large trees just because they are becoming inconvenient.

There's also the issue of herbicide contamination via the air killing plants in my front garden, though there was only the tiniest bit of damage last year. I did notice that my ranching neighbor carefully watched the guys who sprayed his pastures this past year....he sat on an ATV at his fenceline (the part of his property closest to ours) and watched every move they made. I think he was doing everything he could to prevent herbicide drift from hitting my garden and I greatly appreciate that. In recent years, too much herbicide drift damage has hit my tomato plants, often multiple times per season, and I've been extremely unhappy about that. It has come from multiple sources. The back garden is more sheltered and never yet has been damaged by herbicide drift, and that's one reason it exists....I knew I needed a better place to plant a garden where the risk of herbicide drift killing plants would be lower. Having two garden plots is wonderful, but I struggle with finding time to plant and maintain them both. It'd be better if I had an extra gardener just to handle the back garden. (grin) That seems unlikely to happen. My son and husband like eating from the garden, but they don't really garden themselves, though they do stroll out to the garden to harvest something if they want to eat it. They also are available for heavy lifting, shooting snakes and varmints in the garden, and taste-testing all the salsas, jellies and jams.

Okiedawn,

Do you have a preference for a plum tomato? One year I had 2 Roma type tomato's volunteer in my garden. So I set them out in a row and worked them just like the ones that I had planted. Those 2 volunteers made over 100 tomato's by frost and the last one's were picked and put in a bucket in the kitchen corner and they ripened later on and were just like the vine ripen one's. I have tried to grow Roma's since but have not had any luck. My wife likes the taste of the Roma tomato's to me they seem rather bland.

My favorite Roma type is Heidi. It produces like mad. I also like Speckled Roman. For me, Heidi is more resilient in the usual summer heat and drought, but Speckled Roman makes very large fruit. I also like the flavor of San Marzano a lot, but have largely dropped it to grow Heidi and Speckled Roman instead. This year, I was in the mood to grow something different, so I'm growing Rocky. Another Roma type I used to grow a lot was Viva Italia. It is much better for fresh eating than most Roma types, which I generally just grow for canning and for making sun-dried tomatoes.