I like canning my tomatoes whole. So, my criteria for them: they should be small enough to fit into your mouth, but not too small (saladette size), thick-skinned and firm-fleshed which don't turn into a mush after canning and preserve their shape and firmness for up to a year in a jar.

I found for my myslef two tomatoes which are proven to be perfect for that: Juliet F1 and Mountain Magic F1.

Cool- I’m going to try Juliet this year. How do you use your canned tomatoes usually?

We can everything that we can't eat at the time. Sure there are some tomatoes better for canning......but they all can well.

Oxheart tomatoes are supposed to be great for canning. Very meaty with few seeds and gel. Less prone to blossom end rot that is pretty common with paste tomatoes. I'll be growing Wes and Livingston's Yellow Heart this year for the first time along with a couple dozen others.

Thanks- I was planning on about 30-40 tomatoes this year. I’m just concerned about enough being ripe at any given moment.

Here is my list of varieties that interest me. I’m trying some dwarfs in containers also.

Adelaide Festival

All Meat

Amish Paste

Aunt Ginny's Purple

Aussie

Backa

Big Beef F1

Bison

Black Cherry

Blush

Carbon

Cherokee Purple

Defiant PhR F1

Dr. Wyche's Yellow

Druzba

Dwarf Adelaide Festival

Dwarf Mr. Snow

Dwarf Orange Cream

Dwarf Pink Passion

Dwarf Purple Heart

Earl Of Edgecombe

Fred's Tie Die

German Johnson

Great White Tomato

Green Giant Tomato

Green Thumb

Indian Stripe

Italian Heirloom

Juliet F1

Kellogg's Breakfast

Large Barred Boar

Lucid Gem

Opalka

San Marzano II

Sophie's Choice

Stump O the World

Stupice

Sun Gold F1

Super Sweet 100 F1

If anyone has a vote for a great tomato listed above, let me know!

I don't think you will have a problem with not enough being ripe at the same time. Looks like a great harvest.

Thanks! The issue is I just have too many on my list. I need to carve it down a bunch.

I've been claiming Opalka is an excellent canning tomato for sauce. I like Stupice because it was early here in NH but it wasn't very productive. I would keep Amish Paste and San Marzano 2 on your list. It's nice to have different tomatoes but I haven't cared for yellow tomatoes to preserve. Love the flavor but except for a yellow tomato soup to freeze, I don't do much with them.

Scott, voting for best-tasting (raw) varieties on your list: Blush, Dwarf Mr. Snow, Indian Stripe (a strain of C. Purple, but more productive), Sungold F1 (better than SS100 IMO).

Linda

This is my first year doing dwarf mr snow, Indian stripe and sun gold. We love blush every year (my wife’s favorite)

My favorite for any type of tomato processing is Wessel's Purple Pride. It is prolific, they rarely get BER, they have small seed cavities, and produce until frost. They make a deep red sauce with rich tomato flavor. Perfect.

As I mentioned before, Great White is one of my "standards", as is Sun Gold (or Sun Sugar). Great White is the favorite of both my husband and my 83 year old Mother, and I've given seedlings to several of the local "old farmers", so I heartily recommend that one. It's big, sweet, has few seeds, firm flesh and is a nice contrast on a plate full of tomatoes.

Annie

Annie - I just read through this thread. After reading your first comment in the thread, NOW I understand why you seem to always be canning tomatoes (and everything else under the sun) during the growing season!

Scott - The tomatoes I have grown in the past with good success for canning / sauce making are Margherita and Supremo. I will be trying several new varieties this year.

Jack, I have a BIG garden, going on an acre and a half now, it just keeps getting bigger. That doesn't count the 200 crowns of asparagus, the 100+ garlic plants, the 36 raspberries, the apple/pear/cherry/plum/fig trees or the two raised beds of strawberries. Oh, and the rhubarb patch, LOL. I'm thinking maybe of trying some beehives now...

I just bought a huge box of last year's seeds at the on-line auction, I love a surprise. So now I have Hillbilly, Moonglow, DJeena Lee's, Old German and something called "Giraffe" which is supposed to store for 5 months. I'll believe THAT when I see it!

Annie

I recommend the Sausage tomato. It's very prolific, with large, easy-to-harvest (the stems come off easily and they're easy to see/grab), firm fruits that can ripen nicely in storage. It's great at handling heat/cold/aridity/sun-stress, too. I'm not sure how many plants you'd need, but I got as many pounds of fruit from one plant as I've ever had from anything, if not more, I believe (and that was with very little water, with black plastic).

Sausage is a little big to can whole, but it would be great canned as slices (remember, it's a firm tomato). We've been stewing our tomatoes before canning, though (and sometimes blending them up into sauce); so, we didn't try that.

A friend of mine recommended La Roma III F1 to me (for canning) last night.

As a side note, I looked into Wessel's Purple Pride that cindy_7 mentioned and it's from a cross between Sausage and Cherokee Purple, and is supposed to taste like Cherokee Purple. I'd like to try that some year, perhaps. It sounds delicate compared to Sausage, though (so may not be as durable).

Yes I noticed that {LOL}. I hated Juliet F1 (raw) when I grew it!

Linda