No other crop embodies the summer bounty on the Farm like fresh tomatoes! Delicious and versatile, they are always a favorite among students and staff. In years past we have leaned heavily on several workhorse varieties of tomatoes, particularly ‘mountain merit,’ which are all determinate, or bush, tomatoes. This means that their growth is limited to about four feet, and, while they don’t produce as many tomatoes overall, they are dependable and easy to support, such as with a simple trellis or cage.
This year, however, we wanted to celebrate tomatoes by growing a wider variety of colors and flavors, focusing on heirlooms and more unusual varieties. All the new cultivars we grew were indeterminate tomatoes: they have a vining growth habit, requiring support structures to produce well and remain clean and disease-free. Because of their vining, we have to frequently attach the vines to the trellises.
We selected ten traditional tomato varieties: ‘Cherokee purple,’ ‘Woodstock,’ ‘Barnes Mountain orange,’ ‘carbon,’ Radiator Charlie’s mortgage lifter,’ ‘Brandywine,’ ‘yellow Brandywine,’ ‘harvest moon,’ ‘lemon boy,’ and ‘golden girl.’ We also grew six varieties of cherry tomatoes: ‘sungold,’ ‘Matt’s wild cherry,’ ‘indigo cherry,’ ‘white currant,’ ‘bumblebee sunrise,’ and ‘queen bee.’ All in all, we grew a total of 19 varieties.
This extended variety is allowing us to perform a trial to determine which kinds of tomatoes grew best in our hot and humid climate. A second wave of tomatoes is still coming in, so the results are still out! Early spring and late summer were a real test of tomato resilience because of how much rainfall we received, since excessive wetting can hurt the tomatoes.
But we also wanted to see which varieties were the best to eat, so we held an informal blind taste-test of all our tomato varieties. Several students and Project Horseshoe Farm volunteers gathered for this event and voted on which tomatoes had the best flavor and texture. Among the traditional large tomatoes, standouts were ‘Woodstock’ and ‘harvest moon.’ For cherry tomatoes, the favorites were ‘sungold,’ ‘bumblebee sunrise,’ and ‘white currant.’ With all this new information, we are already looking toward next summer when we can focus more on these robust favorites!
In other farm news this summer, we grew for the first time a Native American heirloom corn called ‘glass gem.’ It is a dent corn variety (not sweet corn), so its culinary use is limited to grinding the dried kernels into hominy or grits. However, once dried, the ears are gorgeous and herald the coming of autumn!
