A Matter of Taste – A Guide to Growing Delicious Homegrown Tomatoes
By Chase Smoak, Clemson University Cooperative Extension
Tired of losing tomatoes to unwanted garden pests? Worried you’ll need to sacrifice excellent taste for improved yield?
Take a deep breath and relax—this year, you can have your tomato and eat it, too. With the help of a few new varieties and field-proven tactics, you’ll be on your way to growing the best tomato crop yet.
Growing tomatoes can be a challenge, especially if you are new to the game. Even seasoned gardeners are caught off guard from time to time, and that’s OK as long as we learn in the process.
If you want to grow delicious, homegrown tomatoes this year, simply focus your attention on these three stages of gardening:
1. Planning
With so many choices, be sure to choose the right varieties for your needs and wants
2. Preparing
Where and how you plant your tomatoes matter
3. Protecting
Pests and insects are a part of gardening, you can use Integrated Pest Management (IPM) to tread lightly on the environment and minimizes the use of garden chemicals
Step 1: Planning
Planning for a successful tomato harvest starts with choosing the right varieties to grow in your garden.
Many gardeners claim that if you want great flavor, you’ll need to plant heirloom varieties. People selected these landrace tomato plants long ago for traits such as shape, size, and taste, so the claim has a basis. In pursuit of a better-tasting tomato, however, significant factors like resistance to insects and disease were overlooked.
If you’ve grown heirlooms, you know how challenging the process can be. This bittersweet truth has left many gardeners wondering if the old-timey taste is a thing of the past.
Well, there’s good news. Consumer demand for resilient, flavorful tomatoes has not fallen on deaf ears. Plant breeders have brought us a number of improved tomato varieties.
With so many new Tomato Options, how do you make the best choice?
Nonprofit organization All-America Selections (AAS) may have the answer. The group tests new varieties before they hit the market, and their trial notes will tell you everything you need to know.
How does it work? Professional horticulturists across the country volunteer to grow test plots of new tomato varieties and compare notes on disease resistance, yields, and taste alongside established varieties.
“Our judges rate taste and texture first, then everything else second,” says Diane Blazek, executive director of All-America Selections and the National Garden Bureau. “You can have the most prolific, cute, unique new tomato, but if it doesn’t taste good, nobody wants it.”
Here are some AAS-winning tomato varieties to consider growing this season.
For seed suppliers and garden centers that carry these and other AAS-winning varieties, visit all-americaselections.org/buy-winners.
Tomato Apple Yellow F1
Apple Yellow offers incredible garden performance, a uniquely dimpled apple-shaped fruit with a sweet citrusy taste and firm, meaty texture. Up to 1,000 fruits per plant.
Tomato Buffalosun F1
Buffalosun shone with fruits that have a great texture, a higher yield, and are disease-resistant with less cracking. The unique yellow with red/orange flame color results in a marbled interior and exterior.
Tomato Celano F1
Celano is a patio-type grape tomato with a strong bushy habit. This semi-determinate tomato is an early producer of sweet oblong fruits weighing about 0.6 oz. each. Plants have excellent late blight tolerance.
Tomato Crokini F1
Crockini has a very sweet (Brix of 8.5), light acidic taste The round fruits are small and firm with a crunchy texture and good flavor. Fruits do not crack on the vine, yielding up to 10-12 fruits per cluster.
Tomato Early Resilience F1
Early Resilience is a fantastic Roma tomato for canning. This determinate plant will produce roughly 25 tomatoes with excellent flavor and displays high resistance to blossom-end rot and numerous diseases.
Tomato Galahad F1
Galahad is a high-yielding, great-tasting tomato with a high level of Late Blight resistance that grows on a strong sturdy plant. AAS Judges agreed that the sweet, meaty flavor is delicious and crack-resistant.
Tomato Pink Delicious F1
This early maturing tomato supports the trend of an heirloom look, flavor, and texture with hybrid disease resistance and improved germination meaning it is much easier for gardeners to grow.
Tomato Purple Zebra F1
Purple Zebra’s fruit is firm and tastes more sweet than acidic. This variety has high resistance to tomato mosaic virus, verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, and late blight and produces 150–200 green-striped, purple tomatoes.
Tomato Zenzei F1
Zenzei is an early-maturing, high-yielding Roma tomato for the Midwest. This winner produces a great yield of fleshy plum tomatoes that are perfect for canning. Neat and tidy plants produce fruits on bushy yet indeterminate plants.
Tomato Chef’s Choice series
Never before has an entire series of tomatoes won a series of AAS Winner awards. Two Chef’s Choice varieties are National Winners (see right) and the following are Regional Winners:
Tomato Chef’s Choice Green Zebra F1
Tomato Chef’s Choice Green F1 produces beautiful green-colored fruits with subtle yellow stripes and a wonderful citrus-like flavor and a perfect tomato texture.
Tomato Chef’s Choice Orange F1
This hybrid is derived from the popular heirloom Amana Orange which matures late in the season. Now you can experience the wonderful flavor of an orange heirloom tomato in only 75 days from transplant. Its disease resistance too.
Step 2: Preparing
Proper site selection and planting techniques are vital to tomato gardening success.
- Your tomato garden needs access to full sun (6–8 hours a day) and should have good drainage. Tomato plants hate wet feet and often succumb to root rot when left in waterlogged soils. They do, however, need regular watering throughout the growing season, so select a spot with easy access to water. Irrigating deeply but infrequently strengthens plants and encourages deep, healthy root systems for hot summer days.
- Avoid using a place where tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplant, and other solanaceous crops have been grown within the past three years. Many pests overwinter in the soil adjacent to plants and will terrorize unsuspecting gardeners.
- Once you’ve selected the right spot, make sure to test your soil and amend the ground as indicated. Your local extension agent can help you arrange a test and interpret the results.
- Tomatoes are nutrient hogs that require a good supply of nutrients from start to finish, so you’ll likely need to fertilize before and during the growing cycle.
- Adequate moisture is necessary for nutrient uptake. Drip irrigation works well and doesn’t soak leaves, which often leads to disease issues.
- Don’t forget to deal with weeds. They are an often-overlooked source of tomato pests. After clearing the site of any weeds, spread mulch 3–4 inches deep and keep it a palm width away from the bases of tomato stems.
- Planting should only begin after the last frost date for your area. If you’re unsure when it will be safe to plant, reach out to your local cooperative extension office for help.
Step 3: Protecting
Like the rising of the sun, pests—insects and diseases—are to be expected in every garden.
The good news is: They can be controlled or even avoided using a process known as Integrated Pest Management (IPM), a commonsense approach to gardening that treads lightly on the environment and minimizes the use of garden chemicals.
- Monitor and identify. Get to know your garden and what lives in it. Talk to your local extension agent for a precise understanding of the insects and diseases to watch out for.
- Remember that beneficial insects like praying mantis and lady beetles naturally keep damaging insects in check. Don’t resort to pesticides at the first sign of something that flies or crawls.
- Make an evaluation. If you do spot harmful pests or damage on tomatoes, evaluate whether real damage is being done to the landscape. They may be annoying, but small pest populations can often be tolerated. Set thresholds to guide your treatment decisions. For example, You may decide there’s little benefit to treating a pest problem if there is less than 10% damage to the plant.
- Choose a wise treatment. If treatment is necessary, use the least toxic measure first. Cultural methods such as proper watering, plant spacing, and fertilization can help prevent or reduce the number of pests. Mechanical means are another option that requires the physical removal of pests and can be useful for small populations. For example, hornworms are easily removable by hand-picking, and aphids are often washed away by a good squirt from a water hose.
- If these approaches fail, reach out to your local extension agent for advice on pesticides and follow all label directions. Pesticide labels are the law, and many chemicals may be unethical or even illegal to use on fruit-bearing plants. Err on the side of caution.
Enjoy the pursuit
Gardening should be an enjoyable escape from the fast-paced world we live in. It’s an opportunity for us to serve as good stewards of the land so that when the time comes, we pass on something a little better to the next generation.
If you really want to experience all that gardening has to offer this summer, focus on using it to produce memories instead of a crop. If you do, you’ll find everything begins to taste a little sweeter along the way.
Chase Smoak is a Clemson University Cooperative Extension agent who specializes in plant propagation. He writes gardening columns for multiple publications and frequently appears on South Carolina Educational Television’s award-winning program “Making It Grow.”
AAS Winners
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