16,949 Garden Web Discussions | Growing Tomatoes
Seeds don't go into your mouth either. And the pollution in China is not from seed production, but certainly from keyboard production. So it makes little sense to me what you say? Walk the walk if you talk the talk. I should boycott seeds, and not have them, but your keyboard is ok. Really? Wow!
Thanks Ralph for the suggestion. I will be trying Gold Gem for sure. And i won't even blame the woes in China on you.
I find the seeds labeled as "ORGANIC" just another gimmick.
It doe not matter if the seeds came from an organically grown plant or inorganically grow . Seeds carry just the genes.
One can argue about "Organic" fruit, but seeds ? Like drew said, unless you want to eat the seeds.
BUT having said all that , I have no problem with those who are organic purists.
Talking about alternatives to Sun Gold, yesterday I sow 4 different cherries from the seeds saved from store bought heirloom tomatoes. Not guaranteed that they be be better. We shall see in a few month.
Seysonn
Thanks David. Very nice plants and tasty looking tomatoes. It is amazing that those dwarves produced good size fruits.
Yeah. Like Linda said, there are very little info on most of these dwarves, as they are recent introductions. So I guess people like you guys are the best source of info.
Seysonn
Thank you all for your helpful comments. We have stared a demonstration vegetable garden in support of the Children's Program at the J C Raulston Arboretum here in Raleigh, NC. Last summer we planted a number of heirlooms tomatoes with mixed results. (Cherokee Purple, Black Cherry, Pork Chop and Mortgage Lifter did the best.) This coming summer I would like to add a number of these dwarf varieties to demonstrate what people with limited growing space might do to still have home grown vegetables.
Thank you, Dave! I didn't realize this about early blight! I'll do the fungicides, definitely. I had jumped to the conclusion it was soilbourne.
I'd considered using tiny coffee stirrer straws instead of clips. I'll order the clips, then.
Thanks to both of you.
perL
I will try this sometime, just for fun.
The technique is very simple but doing it and taking care until the joint is fused is another thin. Obviously with high humidity comes higher infection possibility. So how do you disinfect the cuts and the environment?
Seysonn
I like it so much that I got to bring this up again.
Here is a few comments from Taniana's site :
ANANAS NOIR
Tatiana :
80 days, indet., regular leaf, tri-color beefsteak which is olive-green mottled with red, 3.5x3" oblate fruits with juicy flesh and creamy texture, sweet with a mild acid overtone. Not a good keeper. Excellent flavor.
85 days, indet., regular leaf plant, good yield of 6-14 oz green purple-yellow fruit with green-pink flesh, outstanding sweet smokey flavor.
The name means Black Pineapple. This is an interesting medium to large size tomato that has a green and dark purple exterior. The interior is mostly a vivid bright green with red streaks radiating throughout the flesh. A very tasty tomato that is an excellent producer but the fruit is unusually soft and must be eaten soon after harvest. Indeterminate, regular leaf foliage. (75 days from transplant).
Here is few more pictures:
As mentioned in the reviews and I confirm, It is sweet, with right acidity and with creamy texture. I was the only tomato of my 20 or so varieties that I used to slice and eat.
Unlike Carolyn, I love multi color tomatoes. I also had regular pine apple but d this is the top one for me .
This is the largest one I had ; almost 20 oz. 
.
A side comment:
I don't understan how they name thi BLACK pineapple. There is no trace of black, brown and even purple in it. If I were to name it , I would call it RAINBOW PINEAPPLE.This has more rainbow colors in it than any tomato that I know of. It has got RED, YELLOW ORANGE, AND GREEN in a very harmonious way.
Seysonn
How much rain can really get through the floating row covers?
The light Agribon row covers I have used are a bit hydrophobic, at least on first-time use. What I did to help water permeability on these was to soak the things in water for a few hours before erecting the fabric. The stuff seems eventually to permit almost all water deposited on its surfaces to penetrate the fabric and find its way to the soil underneath.
I am in 9A in SoCal. I would be starting tomatoes known to have some heat tolerance if I were just now starting my seed. The only thing I would expect to do well for you, based on my experience with it in heat is Mortgage Lifter. I will hold a good hope for you that you will beat the onset of heat and have a good season.
Yes, your 9a comment stuck out like a sore thumb since I've lived south of you in Texas, the difference between 8b and 9b is flipping the growing seasons from summer to winter.
The first 4 varieties I gave are indeterminates, and you wanted a good list and no one had worked one up for you. Try your varieties for a practice season since I'm guessing you may have gotten them onhand already from the seed rack at Lowes or HD. Maybe you don't sweat on warm nights there and have less humidity that we do here (both of us are nearby to the 8b line), and will have better results.
Good luck with those varieties my friend!
PC
Anijs,
So far, I have not asked to have a light fixture for my plants. I live with my daughter and son-in-law and don't really like to bother them to put in one. There would be a place for them in the basement but since the plants have done so well I think I will keep them upstairs near the window. It is only for eight weeks or less and then I move them out to the garden shed that has a large window and the plants can be moved in and out easily.
Harryshoe,
I usually don't fertilize until they are in the garden because when I pot up I use a mix that has fertilizer in it. Don't know if that is the proper way but it has worked for me.
However, last year was not a good year for my tomatoes because they suffered from too much rain during their first few weeks in the garden. This year I am going to plant them in several places and maybe put in a row with a raised section with a small ditch.
My frriend grew a yellow/orange bicolor which I think she traded for with the man in this video. Youtube tomato video. It looks nothing like the picture on Isaacs, which someone told me was a generic picture because they didn't have one.
.
The man in the video ordered from Isaacs and thinks it is their Southern Belle tomato (which is a manufactured heirloom story attempted by those folks).
This is an attempt to manufacture nonsense heirloom stories by Isaacs combined with the fact that the guy who probably gave her the seeds is not being 100% sure he hasn't mixed up his seeds, but showing the bicolor in the video, which looks a lot like most bicolors, similar to the popular beautiful heirloom Ruby Gold which being the most common may actually be that variety.
Back to the fake stories from Isaacs and heirlooms. Their original site is Seeds for Thee. Go to that site if you want to cringe more. There you will find the seeds packets are from "The Rincon Plant Preservation and Introduction Garden", which is nothing anyone has ever heard of except sounds too much like a knock off marketing name someone got the idea from the Sandhill Preservation Center. Anyway, sounds like these Georgia belles and beaux at Isaac's suffer from a need to manufacture very tall tales and I would question their deceitfulness if they pulled a picture out of the blue from Costoluto Fiorentino and used it for their 1700's heirloom. (Bicolors, anyways are from German selection in the 1800's), not much known from the sovereign States that later became the country of Italy.
On their seeds for thee site we find more BS in the Red Babylonian heirloom tomato (deceptively as if there were tomatoes in the Babylonian Gardens of millenia past). Then we continue onward in more manufactured goat manure on the original site, now it looks like someone really did get the idea from the Thomas Jefferson story as I guessed earlier, as they seem to be fans of him and tomatoes...another heirloom story of their manufacture includes this dig at Virginia and Jefferson, showing these people are big time into making this crap up, because Saul's Grandmama told him about Brer rabbit:
Excerpt:
"Saul: "Grandmama
said Thomas Jefferson
grew Blackeye peas on his farm in Virginia.
'Brer
Rabbit Pinkeye'is Eatonton, Georgia's own
favorite pea- similar to Blackeye,
but has a
brownish eye, so why come it is called Pinkeye
I can't say,
but the important part to know is Pinkeyes
tastes whole lots better than
Blackeye. No insult meant
to the folks in Virginia. Also Brer Rabbit
Pinkeyes have
a purple hull. Fancy! I think you will enjoy these
peas.""
PC
To my understanding, if a tomato has very little juice , then it/plant could not get enough water. As the opposite is also true : when tomato plant watered too much, the fruits will be, well, WATERY.
Another factor not to be overlook here is the variety. That is why some are called PASTE tomato. They have much less water contents : Mealy?
Seysonn
Ok, you've already provided the answer.
I have seed tomato plants growing side by side. One has dark foliage and the other is light green. Amongst pepper plants this is very pronounced.
The other possibility is that a plant might not be quite as healthy and so it looks pale.
garf, growing spermarket tomatoes is a pot shot. Each commercially hi-bred (controlled inbred cross) hybrid is optimized for its characteristics of the original hybrid seed. The saving of seeds from them I'm sure you know, will be a mixed bag of characteristics like pulling the lever in Las Vegas, as each hybrid gives different odds of different combinations of desirable traits.
Your resluts as Seysonn has also pointed out support that they truly are a mixed bag of seeds, Some will be great and others lacking. The odds may be high against getting all the desirable traits, but it certanly can happen, and other interesting and useful combinations can happen too if you selectively breed instead of just getting new fresh tomatoes each season. When you get a good one, if you select them to grow true, you'll have a new heirloom to give to the world.
Cheers
PC
This is an older post so I'm going to comment. The OP sounds like an experienced grower and gives excellent information. Your best bet for this sauce and paste variety is probably (link):
Rosso Sicilian Tomato
though if I were you I'd grow Costoluto Fiorentino instead, a nice ribbed (costoluto) variety grown supposedly in Florence but in many other places. The OP mentions a key point here about the tomatoes he photographed in Sicily. There are many types and no real variety, though a "Costoluto Catanese" was available a few years ago making quite claim on heirlooms (500 years old from Italy), seed from Sicily, I don't confide in that claim but you can email Reimer seeds and see if they still can sell it to you, but it is considered pretty identical to the other Costoluto varieties (see below).
You are dealing with what is called a landrace which means a spectrum of tomato mutts supposedly adapted to Sicilian growing conditions. From a practical perspective it is also a marketing gimmick, since basically any tomato that looks like the ones grown in the pictures above can be called Sicilian tomatoes because of the origin (where grown) and nobody growing elsewhere can have Sicilian tomatoes, because that is the European protectionist rules. If you go into it further though, it gets more beaurocratic and the local government is probably distributing the seeds to their growers making those the only official Sicilian seeds. Considering you are in Wisconsin, Costoluto Genovense or Costoluto Fiorentino might be best to get some authentic Italian ribbed heirlooms, but the Rosso Sicilian one I gave has a direct link to Sicily in the sense it was at one time grown there, but I'm rather sure it would be illegal to sell that seed in Europe due to having the word Sicilian in the name being protected, and that's probably why the Italian seed sites are not selling any "Sicilian" named varieties.
PC
Thank you PupillaCharites! Especially for that link! I was just considering ordering some Costoluto Genovense from a catalog today, it looks both lovely and delicious. :)