Are you considering growing from seed?

I have heard that Eva Purple Ball is pretty easy to grow for the beginner. It's a pink with good taste and perfect round medium-sized maters.

Depending on the weather, Septoria can be dealt with by removing all the lower (infected leaves) throughout the growing season. It also helps a little if we remove the leaves below the truss and especially any leaves that might touch the ground and transmit disease up the plant. It also helps to mulch the plants.

Others will have to help with ideas about your insect problems.

Linda

I am considering seed. I tried last year and it worked out ok. But I started it about two weeks too late so it was a smaller plant early in the season. This year I will start by seed sooner.

I know this is off topic but what do you use for mulch in your garden? Do you have to remove the mulch every fall?

All 3 of the issues you list are not related to any specific variety. They can happen to all tomato plants and require active gardener plant monitoring and intervention to prevent. The grower has to learn the early symptoms, watch for them, and then intervene.

And purchased plants are by far the most common method of growing tomatoes so that isn't the source of your issues either. It is all part of the learning process, research into the problems and learn about the controls for each. In other words, gardening is an active, not passive, activity.

So unfortunately there are no varieties that are immune to or even resistant to any of the issues you have had. It is a painful lesson to learn I know but we all have to learn it. You could buy some Better Boy plants (for example) but you will still have to learn about the causes and methods of controlling septoria (one of the 2 most common tomato diseases), and how to recognize, prevent and control aphids and the various worms. So Google all 3 and begin to learn about them.

Sorry, not what you wanted to hear I know.

Dave

Hybrids tend to be more resilient, grow faster, and produce more.. they can be pretty tasty too. when i first started growing tomatoes that is primarily what i used to grow, and while i can't say i didn't have issues, the plants did fairly well.

It depends on the hybrid. Much of the disease resistance breeding focuses on soil/root disease and viruses, not the foliar fungal and bacterial diseases that are the most common headaches for the home gardener. There are some now that have resistance to common fungal infections, but I believe the available repertoire is still a bit narrow.

Also, foliar resistance is usually not immunity. Often, the resistance is intended to work synergistically with a disease control regimen to delay and lessen the severity of the disease.

Also, there are quite a few heirlooms that have decent disease resistance to various things--it's just that these qualities are not well documented as they are in hybrids marketed for those purposes.