You Bet Your Garden Guide to Growing Great Tomatoes, Second Edition. Mike McGrath
your first ripe tomato—no matter how much you encourage and/or threaten the plant.
Oh well, DTMs are very useful numbers, especially if you live in a frequently frozen latitude. A short growing season means you should stick with tomatoes with the lowest DTMs, even if you intend to start them early, protect them with special warming things like cloches, row covers, or Wall-O-Waters early in the season, and so forth. And yes, the corollary is also true; if you have a long season, do look for big numbers. Take advantage of what some of us don’t have—lots of growing days—and enjoy the rarest and best-tasting heirlooms, some of which can take what seems like forever to produce their first ripe fruit.
Obligatory Cheech and Chong joke:
Q: “Hey man—how good is it?”
A: “It’s here; that makes it great.”
Otherwise, plant as many different kinds of tomatoes as you can fit into your garden space: beefsteaks, slicers, oxhearts, heirlooms, patios, plums, pears, cherries…!
Before we move on, though, let’s get into DTMs in a bit more detail. Really short DTMers like Early Girl and Stupice (named after me) can produce ripe love apples in 50 or so days. They ain’t the best tasting, but they’re there. (Insert Cheech and Chong joke here. Or right there on the side of this page works too.)
On the other end of the scale, some big honking heirlooms can take up to 90 or 100 days. Do the math. Oh, OK, I’ll do it: The math says you better have enough time in the growing season where you live.
DTMs under 70 will almost always be determinate varieties that produce most of their fruits within a tight span of a few days and then maybe a few more over the course of the season, but not enough to justify their garden footprint. Farmers love this. They can circle a date 55 days from planting big, healthy starts, schedule the picking, and then be ready to plant the follow-up crop, like string beans or garlic. Most home gardeners with a single plant in the ground, though, were not hoping for twenty pounds of fruit on Thursday.
Your options if you have an avalanche of tomatoes on the aforementioned Thursday:
Otherwise, you will wait until mid-August (in the Mid-Atlantic and North) for the big heirloom beefsteaks to ripen up. (Actually, they’ll still be green; just wanted you to feel better/worse). Do the math, Kookie—add 90 days to June 1st (it was a cold spring) and whaddya get? At least those brats of yours are back in school.
Super Sweet 100
Super Sweet 100 is an improved (more disease-resistant) variety of the classic Sweet 100 cherry tomato. There is also a further improved (and downright inflationary!) version known as Sweet Million, bred to produce larger fruit.
Bottom line: Nobody wants 20 pounds of tamatas on the 10th of July. And nobody wants to wait until the heat comes back on in the house for their first tamata. So what do you do?
You play the DTM game with 1960s rock ’n’ roll tomato planting! Let’s say you have room for eight tomato plants. Make two of them the earliest varieties possible—like Fourth of July, Stupice, Early Girl… These are the opening acts. Think Aztec Two-Step, Brewer & Shipley, Tommy James & the Shondells.
The next two are rated around 70 days; they’re bigger and tastier. We’re talking Joan Jett, Genya Ravan, Mason Willmans, and John Prine.
Next up splits the difference. With DTMs of 80 to 90, you’re in a better zone than most home gardeners can imagine. This is Deep Purple (which should be a real tomato name), Ultimate Spinach (a real band name; look it up), Strawberry Alarm Clock (ibid.) and/or the Cowsills (the name of your favorite song by them is not “The Flower Girl,” it’s “The Rain, the Park, and Everything” [don’t blame me; I would have voted for “The Flower Girl”…]).
And then, ladies and gentlemen, our featured performers—The Rolling Stonies, The Who, Paul McWhereami?, Pink Floyd (which really should be a variety name!). That’s right—the headliners! The best-tasting and most gifted guitar-playing tomatoes of them all! Who cares that the back-to-school stuff is now on closeout at Wally World—you are now enjoying the best tomatoes in all of whatever-dom, after enjoying the opening acts for the previous two months.
Give it up for DTMs!
“Thank you; thank you very much.”
“Brandywine has now left the building. If you’re driving home tonight, be sure you have a car.”
TYPES
You’ve got your huge beefsteaks, your tidy little pasters, your sweet, invasive little cherries (a.k.a. weeds), your romantic (kind of) looking oxhearts, and your regular round slicing/salad tomatoes. If you’ve got the room, grow at least one of each type you can come up with—and don’t be didactic about how you use them. Beefsteak types can be great for processing; they add a lot of distinctive tomato flavor to the finished sauce. And many folks prefer to use meaty paste tomatoes on sandwiches—there’s a lot less messy juice to make the bread all soggy.
However, don’t grow cherry tomatoes unless you:
a) have lots of room (they can make pumpkin vines look tentative);
b) grow for fresh eating (how many cherry tomatoes would it take to make a pint of sauce? You stand a better chance of guessing the number of pennies in those water-tower-sized jars at county fairs);
c) don’t mind bazillions of volunteer cherry tomato plants coming up in your garden for decades to come; and
d) have lots of room.
OK—if you love popping the little treats in your mouth, but are short on space, try to find one of the determinate varieties of cherry tomatoes—they’re not such terrible space hogs. But their reseeding habit is still as invasive as kudzu.
Perhaps the best way to grow cherry tomatoes is in big hanging baskets. That way, they’re not taking up valuable garden space, and they’re not crawling on the ground where slugs and mice will wreak havoc on them and where they’ll drop that endless seed we just spoke of. And if you hang them properly, you can just stagger outside, pop as many into your mouth as you want—without bending over (YBYG rule #3: “Bending is for chumps”)—and then run back into the air conditioning.
The bigger the container, the better. It should be made of solid plastic; otherwise the watering will become more tedious than riding in an elevator where a child too small for you to slap has pressed all the buttons while the parents stare blankly into space. The bigger the container, the less often you will need to water. The more inert the container (e.g., hard plastic), the less often you will need to water. Really cool-looking containers made of terra cotta will need to be watered daily. Really really cool-looking containers made of peat moss or coir (shredded coconut husks) will need to be watered hourly. Unless it’s extremely hot out, and then you’re just screwed.
Hybridizing is not genetic engineering, by the way,