Guess what. Roma is Open Pollinated, which means that it will grow true from the seeds that you saved!

It may not be the best choice for taste, but you will get determinate plants that aren't too tall. A large cage or stakes will hold each plant and prevent it from blowing over. Of course the fruit will be edible :)

What is more, Roma is said to have some natural disease resistance which might be useful in your zone :)

Here is a link: http://tatianastomatobase.com/wiki/Roma

Linda

Most of the round type tomatoes won't come true so you can never tell just what kind of tomatoes you will get. BUT! A few years ago I had some store bought Roma volunteers come up in my garden and they grew just fine and made a crop of Roma tomatoes just like the original tomatoes. So I think you will be all right. They tasted just like Roma's.

Thank you both! This gives me hope that I'm not just spending all this energy on plants that won't yield anything!

All Roma tomatoes are open-pollinated??

There are a number of Roma type hybrids grown commercially. Second generation F2 hybrids do fine as long as you just want tomatoes somewhat similar to the ones from which you collected the seed. Most modern hybrids come from inbred breeding lines so F2 does not deviate as much as older varieties. In any event they grow and produce tomatoes, just not the pure bred original hybrid. Mochoma, Monticello, Optimax, Picus are popular commercial Roma types.

They are OP yet some seed sellers claim that they are hybrids - grrrr! I researched this a while ago, and that was the conclusion that I came to.

Linda

Roma's are OP. But those sold in supermarkets and other mass outlets are hybrids. Commercial growers need maximum production under all conditions.

Actually, now I'm not sure if they're roma! Here's the link to the page from the supplier: http://www.muccifarms.com/products/tomatoes%20%20on%20the%20vine

Every other tomato on the site has some kind of name or variety but these just say "on the vine." I'm not very family with tomato varieties so would these just be some random hybrid? I really don't care that the tomatoes I plant come out exactly like these I just want them to be edible and taste like tomatoes (not necessarily amazing ones, I'll settle for average).

Yeah, I think farmerdill and labradors have covered it, but the difference lies in the labeling. When commercial varieties are labeled for sale, they usually are not named by variety. Roma is a name of both a variety, and a common name for a type.

So, when you buy 'roma' tomatoes in a supermarket, as farmerdill describes, it's doubtful that it's the Roma variety. Rather, while also known by other monikers, 'roma' (small 'r') is being used to describe the type.

ETA: vivisgarden was typing at the same time... ahhh... ok, the ones 'on the vine' are a different thing entirely. Both the Roma variety, and the type are often oblong - however, that too is not always the case.

Since the plants are growing so well hopefully the fruit will too! Will definitely post the results!

Years ago I planted seeds from store-bought Roma tomatoes, and boy, did they do well! They grew loads and loads of tomatoes that as far as I could tell looked and tasted just like the fruits they came from. Oddly enough the vines were indeterminate, suggesting they weren't actually the Roma variety.

The two (Roma) volunteers that I grew had over 76 tomatoes on them. They looked just like the parent tomatoes and tasted the same. I had a water bucket full of tomatoes and didn't care.

Well were they edible or not? Tonight, I planted half of a tomato on the vine in a container, hoping it will grow true to seed. I put the entire half in potting soil. Fingers crossed. This isn't the first planting a whole or half of a tomato.

While it is really somewhat questionable to plant seeds from what are almost certainly hybrid tomatoes, since what you get may be a formally edible but unexciting fruit, it should be understood that planting seeds straight out of a plant is not optimal for germination.

Mature seeds should be fermented, by placing them in water with some of the pulp and left in a warm place for a week. Then wash off the icky stuff and dry. Tomato seed harvesters know this strategy well. Here's why. When seeds mature, they are naturally encased in a protective gel coating. This is the slippery coating around seeds when they come out of the fruit. That gel coating has a hormone called abscisic acid that actually inhibits germination. That's why when you crack open a mature fruit, the seeds aren't all already sprouting! Microbial fermentation is an easy way to break down that gel, metabolize abscisic acid, and allow germination.

Not all seeds have this protective gel. Solanacea and Cucumis commonly do.

Some may say that, hey, I can plant mature seeds without fermentation, and they grow fine! That's because sitting moist in soil, especially anaerobically, the gel will break down naturally, But it will require more time, and may not work completely. That gel is natures way of making sure that new seeds don't sprout in the winter, but will wait a while, ideally until spring. FWIW, fermentation can also kill off disease spores.

I've planted seeds from inside hybrid tomatoes, and got tasty fruit but it wasn't ideal and I'm not planning to do it again. One year, I grew a variety I liked called Estiva F1: resistant to the apparent fusarium wilt in my greenhouse, tasty, and productive. The following spring, a couple volunteer tomato plants sprouted in the spot where the Estiva had grown the previous year, so surely they were from a fruit that had dropped and rotted on the ground. At planting-out time, they were much bigger than the seedlings I'd started indoors, so I left two of them in place. The resulting fruit was just as tasty as the parent, but one had weird radial cracks, and the other had an odd lobed shape. Both were susceptible to the wilt disease and died off after a first flush of fruits.

On the other hand, the same years, I let some volunteer cherry tomatoes grow, and they did great, and I liked the results as much as the parent, even though the parent was also an F1 hybrid.

Tomatoes are usually self-pollinating, so planting seeds from inside an open pollinated (ie not hybrid) tomato is very likely to produce true to the parent.

People in other countries often don't ferment their tomato seeds and don't seem to report major trouble. I do it mainly so that I can separate the seeds, rather than a stuck-together clump or stuck on a paper towel.

High Cold, I’m growing the last of 19 year old Estiva seeds, although I got less than 50% germination. That variety and a similar variety, Dafel, never impressed me very much and I just didn’t plant them for a few years. Anyhow I never thought about saving seeds of those. Over the years there are a few hybrid varieties for which seeds were very expensive that I saved seeds and although the fruits look identical I often wonder if some of the disease resistance is gone.

With some of these things I feel you may never see any difference unless you have certain disease issues. Interesting that you had visual fruit differences. I would expect flavor, fruit size or plant vigor differences but just never saw those.

I planted 2 tomato plants the last year not sure what kind of Roma they were I bought them at Lowe's and the label just said Roma tomatoes so this year I had a seed come up from the pot for the Roma was planted it was a beautiful plant and it started growing jumbo cherries 2 to 3 times the normal cherry tomato so anyway it is a beautiful cherry tomato but a jumbo cherry tomato it is and I plan to keep seeds from it and see if I can continue growing it is an F2 Roma tomato seed growing it is a variety of cherry that I have never seen before and quite beautiful.