What You Should Know About Tomatoes

What You Should Know About Tomatoes

There are some facts about tomatoes that you should know before growing one of them. It could be depend on their varieties or their descents.

1.      Determinate vs. Indeterminate

 

Determinate tomatoes are varieties that grow to a fixed mature size and ripen all their fruit in a short period, usually about 2 weeks. Once this first flush of fruit has ripened, the plant will begin to diminish in vigor and will set little to no new fruit. It’s also called as “bush” tomato. If you’d like to make tomato sauce, you’d probably choose this kind of tomato because it produces large amount of fruit.

Indeterminate varieties tend to grow longer vines and will require more support in terms of staking or caging over the course of a season. Determinate varieties often (but not always) tend to be more compact and manageable. Indeterminate tomatoes need pruning action to make the growth better.

What variety would you choose for your garden?

If you have a large garden, and would like to have heavy crops of tomatoes, you might want to plant some varieties of indeterminate tomatoes. If you want to grow it in pots or containers, you'll probably want to stick with a few different determinate varieties. They are more well-behaved and better suited to container culture. You can certainly grow indeterminate tomatoes in containers, but be prepared to be vigilant about staking or caging, as well as pruning the suckers to maintain compact growth.

2.      Heirloom vs. Hybrid

Heirloom tomatoes, or open-pollinated tomatoes, are stabilized varieties that produce true seed every year. You can save the seeds from an heirloom year after year, and the seeds will produce the same variety every year. Many heirlooms are known for their outstanding flavor, and come in many colors - red, orange, yellow, pink, green, purple, and black. Some say that in order to be an heirloom, an open-pollinated tomato variety must be at least 50 years old. The definition of heirloom tomato is highly debated. I prefer to keep it simple and refer to all open-pollinated tomatoes as heirlooms, regardless of age or whether or not it was passed down through a family.

Hybrid tomatoes come from the seeds produced by plants that were crossed with other varieties to achieve certain qualities. Hybrids are known to be bred mainly for production, disease resistance, and other qualities that don't include flavor. The tomatoes you see at the supermarket are a perfect example of complex hybrid fruit that have every desired quality except for the most important ones: flavor and texture.

So, if you want to store your tomato seeds or plant it again, you’ll be recommended to plant heirloom tomatoes.