317 The 2024 Tomato Preview Show!

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317 TRANSCRIPT Tomato Preview Show 2024

FARMER FRED

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by Smart Pots, the original lightweight, long lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA. Visit SmartPots.com slash Fred for more information and a special discount, that's SmartPots.com/Fred.

Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot.

FARMER FRED

The signs of spring are everywhere here in suburban Purgatory: the sneezing and runny eyes are becoming more commonplace, thanks to the flying pollen from the blooming acacia trees. Skunks in search of a mate are prowling about at night (and the bathtub where the dogs got an emergency bath still smells like skunk). And the Hairy Bittercress weed is carpet bombing the yard with its explosive seed cases, hence one of its common names, popseed. But for me, the real sign of the beginning of spring? It’s time for the annual Garden Basics Tomato preview show! Once again, you’re invited to easedrop on a conversation between two real tomatoheads, myself and Don Shor, proprietor of Redwood Barn Nursery in Davis, California.

We recap our tomato successes and failures of 2023, and talk about what we will be planting in 2024, featuring the tried and true tomato varieties, along with several newcomers, more than two dozen varieties that we pass judgement on and will attempt to grow. Or not grow. Plus I recently asked the Get Growing with Farmer Fred facebook page readers what their favorite tomato varieties are, and they weren’t shy about answering. And we recap a tomato trial conducted at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center last summer by the Sacramento County Master Gardeners. So, we’ll be talking about some of those.

Don also has tips for making your tomato growing efforts in 2024 a rousing success…as long as the weather cooperates.

It’s all in Episode 317 of today’s Garden Basics - The 2024 Tomato Preview Show

We’re podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in Suburban Purgatory, it’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let’s go!

2024 TOMATO PREVIEW SHOW Pt. 1

FARMER FRED 0:00

It may be tomato time where you live, but for most of America, we need to wait a while. But we can certainly think about tomatoes. And that's what we're doing with today's show. We're thinking about 2024 tomatoes. Which ones are you going to plant? What did you have success with last year? What new ones are you going to try or at least are new to you? To have a decent tomato conversation, it has to be two tomato heads jabbering. And I can't think of anybody else to bring on except Don Shor, owner of Redwood Barn Nursery in Davis, a true tomato head who usually plants, I think, last year Don, you had, what, 40 varieties?

DON SHOR 0:38

Yeah, that sounds about right. That's a lot more than I need. But, you know, you got to test them all. I'm a retailer. I got to make sure they're good.

FARMER FRED

Okay.

DON SHOR 0:46

I tell myself that every year.

FARMER FRED 0:48

All right, Well, let's do a quick recap of our 2023 tomato garden. And I know that for me, the big winner last year was Rugby, based on your endorsement of that tomato over the last couple of years. And Rugby is just a wonderful tomato. I had a lot of luck with it. I don't know how you describe it. Is it a Roma tomato? Is it a paste tomato? Is it a saladette tomato? It's bigger than your standard paste tomatoes, but it is meaty enough to use as a slicer in a sandwich.

DON SHOR 1:23

Yeah, it's a very solid tomato. So people who know Roma will be very familiar with this style. It's a very meaty tomato, which is a funny term we use for tomatoes. It is a big fruit. It's been that way every year I've grown it. It's been three or four years now, very consistent producer.  And yeah, it doesn't take very many of them to make a sauce. It's a very large fruit and very consistent, reliable producer. Rugby has quickly moved up into my top ten list from the first year that I grew it. And I recommend it highly. It is the one you'll either have to find the seed yourself or go to some little garden center where they start them for you.  But you still have time if you haven't started all your seeds yet to get that one going. Rugby has been outstanding. I can't think of a tomato that's moved so quickly into my top 20, and then into my top ten list. This particular one was originally from Bulgaria. One customer mentioned it to me then, so I ordered the seed. Now you can get the seed from your typical online vendors and it grows very, very well and a very good producer here. So yes,  you and I definitely agree on Rugby.

FARMER FRED 2:28

Yeah, Rugby is a good one. I will be planting it again. Definitely my biggest failure in 2023. And it wasn't my fault at all. It was it was the gardener's delight Tomato, which is a slightly larger cherry tomato, but it's very prolific. It's usually the first to produce in late spring and the last to croak, usually in December. But the seeds that I planted, even though the package said Gardener's Delight, what came out was a run of the mill cherry tomato. To me, it smells like jalapenogate, only for tomatoes.

DON SHOR 3:08

Oh, it was. I mean, 2023 will definitely go down in the annals of tomato history for the seed mix ups.  I strongly recommend the Chef's Choice series. For example, none of my chef's choice that I happened to bring home from my own garden center came true from the label. My Chef's Choice Orange, which is an absolute top performer of mine. It was some red tomato. I don't know what it was. It was fine. If you needed a red tomato, it definitely was not what I expected. So there was a major mix up in the industry. It was at the seed distribution level was all I can figure and it really affected a lot of this. So Jalapeno definitely expanded to all the ingredients or salsa, including, I'm sorry to say, the tomatoes. So I still highly recommend the Chef's Choice series and I strongly recommend Chef's Choice Orange based on previous years. And let's hope they've got the logistics all worked out this coming year on that whole series of what, seven or eight of them now, they all produce well, they're all very large fruited. They're really the one that I find the most useful simply because it's a little firmer texture and more consistent. Is that Chef's Choice or orange? That's still in my top ten. Just got a demerit for last year.

FARMER FRED 4:16

Chef's Choice. Several of the Chef's Choice. Tomatoes have been All-America selections winners as well.

DON SHOR 4:22

Yeah, they're introduced by a seed breeder here in the Sacramento Valley. And so that's pretty unusual. Honestly, most of the tomatoes you're looking at when you're going into nurseries and hardware stores are not haven't been bred in in a region like our Valley Heat. And this one has been and the whole series has been outstanding. So let's give them the you know, what does it sort of give them a mulligan for last year.

FARMER FRED 4:44

Yeah. Jalapenogate refers to the big mix up in the world of peppers where people who thought they were buying jalapeno peppers actually ended up with sweet peppers. And unfortunately, the reverse also was true. There were sweet peppers for sale that turned out to be a little warmer than sweet.

DON SHOR 5:01

Yes, That's a disappointment for some people there. So it was it was an interesting problem in the whole industry. So we'll just kind of play on previous years recommendations for that one. Now, I have to say every year I have one plant that just grows incredibly robust compared to all the others. It's never the same one, of course, And and it produces really, really heavily. And this year for me, that was Juliet. Now I recommend Juliet very highly for a lot of reasons. I did a quick grid count estimate of, you know, just trying to figure out how many fruit my plant produce. It was something close to 400. Ooh, yeah, yeah. And they were still producing, you know, and I went out there at the end of the season, that's like beginning of November. I'm going out there to cut the vines down and get everything cleaned up for the fall and play a cover crops. And I walk up to this thing. I said, This is ridiculous. I walked into the house, I got a great big bowl and I picked another 100 fruit and made an entire another batch of sauce from them. Juliet has been very consistent since it was introduced. It's an All-America winner, I do believe, from about 20 years ago, maybe more than that at this point, everywhere it seems to yield. Well, it's an interesting hard to describe variety because it's small, elongated, kind of like a San Marzano very firm, you know, very solid, thin skin that just cooks down immediately. So you don't really even have to peel them at a very light seed count for me. So this one just cooks down into a sauce beautifully. But I know most other people are happy to throw their salads and use it as what they're now calling a salad type tomato. Juliet just continues to be an outstanding performer. It's one of those ones where if you're looking for just one tomato and so you want to kind of an all purpose and you know it's going to do well. Juliet is definitely in that category.

FARMER FRED 6:43

One that you have recommended over the years. And I finally broke down and tried it and it was actually it was successful the second year I tried it. And that's another Don Shor rule about planting tomatoes. Give them three years, plant them for three years and see if you still like it. And Bodacious did quite well for me in 2023. It was the the last plant to give up, and I harvested the remaining green ones in November and I finally finished the green ones as they ripen slowly in the garage. I finished those off in late February.

DON SHOR 7:16

Yeah, it's been a very good performer. If you're looking for something in what we sometimes call the beefsteak category, which we can talk about separately, a large slicing one with good connective tissue that you could use in the sandwich. Bodacious is probably your best bet here in the Sacramento Valley. We need to mention, I mean, beef steak was a variety. It's now sort of a term for a type of tomato. But in general, what it refers to is one that you can slice. And that slice will hold together with enough connective tissue that you could use it just like that on a sandwich or something like that. Bodacious has great flavor all as well, has taken heat very well for me. Continues to be a good performer for me.

FARMER FRED 7:53

Another one of your perennial favorites - and I've been planning it now for like three or four years - well, I finally ran out of the seed. I'm going have to get some fresh seed. The New Girl tomato.

DON SHOR 8:03

Yes, New Girl has been out yielding Early Girl for me for the last two years. I do. I finally did them side by side to do a direct comparison to Early Girl. It really can't go wrong with it if you're a fan of Early Girl, by all means, keep planting it. But every now and then, another contender comes along for that throne. And New Girl is one of that category. And it has been a very good performer for me. People actually in an informal blind tasting liked the flavor a little better. Yeah, that could have just been that fruit was a little riper, who knows. But overall, Early Girl has been around since the 1970s. New Girl is giving it a run for its money and a lot of people want to try new ones. There's another one out there called Tough Boy. Some people are doing that one and have had very good results. Tough Boy is another one where they're trying for that same 4 to 6 ounce fruit size, nice round red tomato, good flavor, a good all-purpose tomato. That's another good one. But that New Girl has impressed me and it just might displace Early Girl from its throne.

FARMER FRED 9:04

Okay. I imagine that you've already been besieged by customers who maybe they're smart enough to know not to plant tomatoes at this time, in March. Now they still want to secure probably one or two that did well for them last year. What are your customers wanting an encore from?

DON SHOR 9:23

Well, that one in particular, New Girl. Another I mentioned many times, Rugby, as well. We're definitely going to have available. There's one that I've been recommending and it's going to be a hard one to find unless the nursery start it themselves. It’s Blue Ribbon. The Blue Ribbon tomato came out a few years ago. It's been you know, it's hard to compete in the red tomato market. There's a lot of really good red tomatoes out there. But I have to say about this one, it doesn't crack, it doesn't split. It didn't get blossom and rot. The fruit is always 12 ounces or so, a good size all the way up to a pound. Sometimes it didn't get sunburned. It just performs really well. It's not just attractive. I mean, the Blue Ribbon refers to the fact it's a very, very good looking tomato. It also has really good flavor, and holds well on the vine. That's going to be it's been kind of a dark horse here, you might say. An they only got so many good red tomatoes out there to choose from.  I would recommend people try Blue Ribbon. If you're still looking for seed, you can find the seed out there. It's a very good one to consider. iI is an all purpose, really good red tomato.

FARMER FRED 10:23

It sounds big.

DON SHOR 10:24

It's a big ish. It's not a pound plus. So here's my big surprise from last year. Every year there's one variety that surprises me. Pineapple.

FARMER FRED 10:33

Pineapple. Well, an oldie but goodie.

DON SHOR 10:36

Yeah, the old, old heirloom variety. I grow it every year, even though some years I only get six or seven fruit. But they tend to be very, very large. Wonderful flavor. The name refers to the rather tangy flavor. This year I got 14 very large fruit on the one plant, each of them about one and a half to two pounds. This is the kind of tomato where I'm walking out there in the morning going, Is this the night the squirrels discovered it? Is this the morning when the rats got there? Before I did this enormous, beautiful fruit and as I say, one and a half to two pounds apiece. I don't normally want people to count on high yields from heirloom tomatoes. And this is an old heirloom variety. It's been around for a long time. It gives me good results every year. This is kind of like Cherokee Purple two years ago, which was my top performing tomato. You know, I don't usually tell people heirlooms are going to be your highest yield, but the Pineapple really, really surprised me how much it produced. Great quality. I recommend if you have room for four or five tomatoes, try Pineapple is one of them. It would be a good heirloom for this area.

FARMER FRED 11:35

And you're right, it's beautiful, but it's sort of a golden orange color.

DON SHOR 11:40

Yeah, and red striations in the flesh. It slices great, it cooks great. It's just a really interesting variety. You know, we do recommend that people get a hybrid, get a cherry tomato, look for disease resistance, and then move on to the open pollinated ones, the heirloom varieties and see how they do for you. I don't want people to rush out and buy Brandywine. It just doesn't do well in the valley. Look for the heirlooms that are tried and true and this is one of them.

FARMER FRED 12:08

How did Champion perform for you last year?

DON SHOR 12:11

It was just fine, as usual. You know, I got a lot of fruit on it. It's a really good red tomato. And I have an interesting comment from a customer on Champion. He said, I didn't really like that. And it's kind of tart. And I thought, okay, well, it does color up before it's fully ripe. And this is true of a number of hybrid tomatoes. They are beautiful about a week to ten days before they're really fully ripe. So if you have that experience, you've had one of these new hybrids like Champion or Better Boy, and you're finding, Oh, I really didn't think It had the best flavor, experiment a little. Pick them, bring them in, set them on the counter in your kitchen for three or four or five days, squeeze them gently and if they start to give a little bit, they're actually really ripe at that point. And it might well be that you're just picking them a little before they're fully ripe because some of these hybrids were bred, in my opinion, for appearance as much as flavor. So that's something to consider, is that you might want to let it ripen a little more fully on the counter. Now, having said that, There's a whole group of tomatoes I'm getting pretty fed up with, and that is this purple, blue and black tomatoes, black beauty, blue, whatever. We're just finding some of them really, really don't soften. And the flavor is, in my opinion, rather astringent. And I don't know what it takes to get them to have good flavor. If someone out there has come up with a new hybrid purple or blue tomato, we'll talk about the GMO tomatoes in a moment. But they've come up with a good purple or blue tomato they really think has good flavor. I'd love to know what it is because so far I'm not impressed.

FARMER FRED 13:40

I did ask the Facebook people who will follow get growing with farmer Fred.

DON SHOR 13:46

And.…

FARMER FRED 13:46

And ask them, okay, what what tomato did you really like from 2023? And I did get a reply from somebody whose opinion I respect. He's a high school horticulture teacher and he said he loved Purple Boy. And so, okay, well, that's good enough for me. I'll give that a shot. So I've got some purple boy seedlings coming up.

DON SHOR 14:05

Now I'm writing it down as we speak.

FARMER FRED 14:07

I will tell you what the Parks catalog says about Purple Boy.

DON SHOR 14:11

Purple Boy.

FARMER FRED 14:12

And by the way, I believe the seed is still available from Totally Tomatoes, if you're looking for it. They say it has intriguing color and delectable flavor. Thank you very much. 80 days to maturity. It's an indeterminate. And here we go with the Playboy Playmate of the Month description. “This tomato combines all the true homegrown tomato tang flavor of the heirloom Cherokee Purple, but with an improved disease resistance package. So now where Cherokee Purple was under high disease pressure and did not grow well, this hybrid can be grown and enjoyed all summer long. The Purple Boy hybrid tomato is resistant to nematodes, fusarium, verticilium wilt and tobacco mosaic virus. It is slightly ridged and very symmetrically shaped. These stunning violet purple tomatoes combine juiciness with strong tomato tang, the type unknown to those rock hard supermarket varieties. Boy, that's a cheap shot at supermarket tomatoes.

DON SHOR 15:12

Well, of course they have. They have to harvest supermarket tomatoes before they ripe. And the one thing that you should remember, we were just talking earlier about allowing your garden tomatoes to ripen a little more on the counter. It's not a bad plan to do that with the ones you find at the grocery store, too. They are a climactic fruit. They do continue to ripen after you pick them. If you buy it and it's firm, it's not really ripe yet. And so letting it ripen a bit more on the counter would at least improve those supermarket tomatoes. But I will give that one a try - Purple Boy. I'll run out and get some seed as quickly as I can and get that going.

FARMER FRED 15:44

It does have warnings about it at the end of the description, though, it's it says to stake this vigorous plant well. And then offer a little extra help to bring in its crop of giants. We recommend pruning the plant as it grows. For extra large tomatoes, remove all but a few flowers so the plant can concentrate its energy into fewer fruit. They may need some support as they mature on the plant, their massive weight pulling them downwards.

DON SHOR 16:11

Their massive weight. Well, you know, it is a good idea to stake your tomatoes.  And it is true that if you remove all except the first fruits that form, you will get bigger fruits. Firstly, I've never done that because I'm not really too concerned about that. But there's nothing wrong with that advice, I guess, except that,  the main thing is get them up off the ground. This is really important. Stake your tomatoes,  no matter what kind they are, except for some of these brand new little compact, miniature or dwarf tomatoes, as they're calling them. All the others, even determinate types, need to be staked up to some degree.

FARMER FRED 16:42

That's why I have actually picked for 2024 an oldie but a goody in that regard. A container tomato called Bush Early Girl, which produces fairly good sized tomatoes. But on a plant that only gets 18 inches tall.

DON SHOR 16:57

Right there are there's a whole series now, the dwarf tomato series are becoming very popular. I have grown some of these. I haven't grown that particular one. You'll find the yields are okay for what they are. I mean, this is a small plant. There's a bunch of little miniature tomatoes, LIttle Napoli, Little Sicily. One of my growers handed me a Mini Marzano. The plant grew 16 inches by 16 inches. Produce about 12 fruit, each of which was about one ounce.  You know, if you're in an apartment and you have a balcony, that's a fun thing to do. Many of these are not going to give you the yields you're expecting. And in some cases, in the case of the two that I grew, I didn't find the flavor all that outstanding. But there's a lot of people that don't have garden space. Then as someone who's in a town where there's lots of people living in apartments, it's actually handy to have these for fun. They're kind of like a little bush basil plant. You can grow them in a container. Most tomatoes don’t do great in containers. These do work in containers. So look for those if you're limited for space. But don't count on very high yields and don't count on super rich summerlike tomato flavor that  you're going to get from an Early Girl out in the garden that’s had full sun all day.

FARMER FRED 18:04

Unlike supermarket tomatoes.

F1 S3 18:06

Right. All right.

FARMER FRED 18:08

The bush early girl by the way, is a compact determinant, which means it's going to set most of its crop once and then you can pull it out, I guess. But it ripens in 54 days.

DON SHOR 18:19

Yeah. And determinant tomatoes are actually really an important thing for people who are wanting to conserve water. This is an interesting aspect of this. People are limited for space or who want to water less. You can plant them, get them going early in the season, stake them up. Again, they will typically be 3 to 4 foot tall. In the case of most of the ones I'm aware of, they will flower mostly all at once. Set mostly one big crop. Yeah, they continue a little bit afterwards. But if you really want to do this and you want to have room in your garden for some of those vegetables that need early planting are limited for space. They're good at processing, freezing, drying, things like that. Then you might want to plant some determinate tomatoes. Water them deeply, let them do that one big crop, get it put in the freezer, get it put away, take the plants out, and then you can plant your brussel sprouts. So this is actually a way that you can cut back on irrigation. I mean, if it's a determinate type, then the crop is set. I mean, the farmers here in Yolo County, where tomatoes are the number one crop still, actually they bumped almonds off the top. Tomatoes are back. They do stop irrigating as soon as the fruit is set on them, you do it. This is true. You do get richer flavor. You know it even is said to be better is better for you healthwise. But you're not going to get any fruit after about the end of August. So keep that in mind if you're choosing determinant types for some of these miniature tomatoes.

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FARMER FRED 19:43

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FARMER FRED

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2024 TOMATO PREVIEW SHOW Pt. 2

FARMER FRED

I think the seed catalogs especially the specialty tomato seed catalogs like Totally Tomatoes are getting wise to me because they're starting to throw packets of other tomato seeds in with my order of things that I didn't order because they think, “he'll plant anything”, just send it right.

DON SHOR 23:03

They did that to us, what, two or three years ago? They sent this one out. It was just a number at the time and I remember sending a note to the owner of Seeds ’N Such. “What is this one? We need to know. This is really a great performer. It stayed firm late in the season. It produced well. It was a compact plant.” He goes, Oh yeah, we're going to send that with them next year with a name. It’z a Keeper. And that turned out to be an outstanding variety and I really do highly recommend it. It is really firm. It's one of those tomatoes that you just wonder if it's ever going to ripen. It is ripe. It's just very, very solid. The name, “It’z a Keeper” refers to the fact that it can sit on your counter, pick it in mid-October, three or four weeks later, it is still just fine and still has very good flavor. Again, you're going to have to find it yourself, because hardly any retailers are going to have that one available. But It’z a Keeper is an interesting new variety that I think has a lot to recommend it.

FARMER FRED 23:51

I've got a couple of those questionable freebies growing now. One is called Super fantastic and the other is called Jetstar.

DON SHOR 23:59

Jetstar. I haven't done either of those.

FARMER FRED 24:01

Well, I tell you, if you live in Canada, you would like super fantastic. Even though I planted it at ten ounce tomatoes, indeterminate. Okay, What else is new? Well, according to West Coast Seeds, which is based in British Columbia, super fantastic tomato seeds produce hearty, vigorous vines that adapt well to a variety of climates, immensely popular and an excellent producer on the West coast of British Columbia. These rich, meaty beefsteak tomatoes are very versatile. All right.

DON SHOR 24:30

West Coast of British Columbia is a pretty wet, cool place. Yeah. And it's like it's like Oregon, Oregon. There are have always been special varieties from Oregon State University that are very well adapted to those climates. And this is really important. Since your podcast is worldwide, there are regional varieties you should ask about. If you're in San Francisco, there's a San Francisco Fog variety. For my father in coastal San Diego, he’ll look for a particular one that was recommended by garden centers down there. Because if you're cooler, if you're in a climate where it really never gets as hot or warm as it does here, buy local.  Here, we have sunshine, relentless sunshine in the Sacramento Valley from about May first until almost the end of October. We can grow just about any tomato variety here in terms of the vigor of the plant and yield, as long as it isn't sensitive to high temperatures for pollination. And you don't have that condition in Fort Bragg, California, you don't have that even in Berkeley. You have particular varieties that local gardeners are going to know and your local garden center is going to know. So you do have to seek those out. Some of these