The Ultimate Tomato Seed Selection Guide

Author: Marina

Oct. 21, 2024

The Ultimate Tomato Seed Selection Guide

The spring season is just around the corner and now is the best time to start planning your garden. You might be wondering what kind of tomato seeds you&#;d like to grow this year. Well, we have a lot to say about that! Today, we would like to talk about all the latest tomato varieties we have in store and why they&#;re fabulous! Let&#;s take a tour, shall we?

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How to Select the Right Tomatoes Seeds for Your Garden

When choosing which seeds to invest in, it&#;s a good idea to get a variety of different seeds. This is because some tomato plants produce earlier or later than others, and each tomato variety has its own unique qualities. Some tomatoes are great for cheese boards, while others go great on sandwiches, and others still are best used for soups and sauces. No matter what you&#;ve got cooking in the kitchen, there is a unique tomato variety cultivated especially for that purpose. Plus, by having a variety of tomato plants, you will be assured of having a larger harvest throughout much of the growing season.

Before selecting your seeds there are a few things to consider. First things first, you want to know what you&#;re looking for. Here are the variables to think about. You&#;ll want to decide the main uses you intend to utilise your tomatoes for, how early you want them to be fruiting, and the amount of space you have for growing.

Vining Cordon vs Bush Varieties

Vining Cordon tomatoes feature small to large clustering fruits that branch from single stems. They are sprawling and can grow quite large. They often need significant support structures to grow well. Additionally, they may need pruning and the removal of bottom suckers to improve fruit production and airflow. Vining cordon tomatoes are also indeterminate, meaning they will continue to produce fruit well into autumn and possibly even up until the frost comes. Because they can grow quite large, plan to space them at least 3 feet apart.

Bush tomato varieties are more compact and require less maintenance. Pruning and sucker removal is optional with bush varieties. Because they are so compact and relatively maintenance-free, bush varieties are great candidates for patio and container gardening. Additionally, bush tomato varieties are usually determinate, offering only one large harvest. After the harvest, the tomato plant is done fruiting for the season.

Heirloom and Organic Varieties

We are proud to say that many of our tomato seed varieties are either organic or of heirloom quality. The reason this matters is that organic and heirloom varieties are natural. Many people feel that produce from such seeds is healthier and unadulterated.

Heirloom seed varieties are distinctively NON-GMO. The term GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism. In other words, heirloom seed varieties have been used for hundreds of years and have been passed down from generation to generation. They may be specially adapted to certain regions or growing conditions. Heirloom seeds are truly spectacular because they have never undergone genetic manipulation in a corporate lab.

The organic label refers to the use of organic heirloom seeds, which have not been exposed to industrial chemicals like herbicides or pesticides. In other words, &#;organic&#; simply means that the seeds possess another level of purity. In order to qualify for the organic label, growers and farmers alike have to adhere to strict regional certification laws.

Cherry Tomatoes

Cherry tomatoes are smaller, about the size of a cherry, when compared to most other tomatoes. Don&#;t let their small size fool you though, they are packed with flavour! Their petite nature makes them great for salads and cheeseboards, or just to snack on their own! Additionally, they tend to produce very well and are often the first tomatoes to ripen. They are vigorous too, and plans can grow to be quite large. Therefore, be sure to give them plenty of growing room.

Cocktail Crush (aka Crimson Cherry)

This tomato plant features small to medium orange-red fruits (35 to 45 grams) that are sweet to the taste and come with a flavourful tang. The plant itself has a cordon style growth habit and can be grown outdoors or within a greenhouse. For best results, side shoots should be removed. The Cocktail Crush tomato can be grown in place of Mountain Magic and is similar to Ailsa Craig in terms of growth habit and taste.

Of notable importance, Cocktail Crush is blight resistant.

Germination: about 7 days.

Harvest: indeterminant type, July through October.

Black Cherry

These dark maroon tomato fruits feature a unique brown-black colour that makes them look like actual cherries. They have a wonderfully rich flavour to match. They have a cordon style growth habit and may set fruit earlier than some other cherry tomatoes.

Germination: 7 to 14 days.

Harvest about 70 to 75 days from transplanting, August through October. Indeterminate fruiting all summer long and continues to thrive even in cooler weather.

Black Moon

The Black Moon tomato features a unique colour variation wherein the top portion of the fruit is black and fades into red toward the bottom. It is a medium sized (30 g) and plum-shaped cordon that is ideal for salads and sandwiches. It has a somewhat savoury sweet flavour, balanced with just the right amount of tang.

Germination: within 7 &#; 10 days.

Harvest: about 105 days from sowing.

Saucy Tomatoes

These tomatoes have a firm and fleshy texture. Their flavourful fruits are great for soups, stews, pastes, and for making sauces.

San Marzano

Don&#;t let these Italian plum tomatoes fool you. Though they look like bright red peppers, these meaty cordon tomatoes are a sweet treat beloved for their use in traditional Italian recipes. They are sizeable at about 70 to 100 grams each and contain very little juice or seeds. They are great for drying, canning, cooking, and making into pastes. San Marzano is also a world-famous tomato, celebrated as the best tomato for making sauces.

They germinate in about 7 &#; 14 days.

Harvest: about 75 to 80 days, enjoy fruits as early as June and lasting through October. They are an indeterminate type and will continue to fruit all summer until frost.

Golden Sunrise

Bright yellow-orange fruits adorn this heirloom tomato plant. These attractive medium tomatoes (70-90 grams) have a sweet-tart taste and are considered to be one of the most flavourful tomatoes available. This firm-fleshed cordon variety is excellent for sauces and salads alike. Remove the lower side shoots as needed.

Germination: 7 &#; 14 days

Harvest: fruits mature in about 70 &#; 75 days from planting, July through October. This variety is indeterminate and will set fruit all summer long.

Roma

Roma&#;s are medium sized red fruits (about 60 &#; 80g) with an elongated plum shape that fits nicely in the palm of your hand. They are meaty heirloom tomatoes that have a pleasingly mild flavour with a little bit of zest.

They have few seeds and are less juicy than other tomato varieties. Roma&#;s are prolific producers, semi-determinate, and as a bush tomato variety, provide an abundant harvest. They are a fabulous tomato for homemade sauces, pasta, soups, or just to slice and eat. Plants will need an adequate support structure to grow best. Roma tomatoes are versatile and can be grown outside or in a greenhouse. They also need a bit of early pruning, especially the lower leaves and sucker branches.

Germination: 7 &#; 14 days

You can enjoy them in about 70 to 75 days from sowing. They will set fruit anytime between July through October, depending upon when seeds were sown.  

Sungrape

This tomato plant produces cherry sized fruits with a distinctive and elongated plum shape. Fruits are glossy with a bright red colour and are only about 10 grams each. Fruits are meaty, firm, and resistant to cracking. Sungrape tomatoes have a robust sweet flavour with an acidic kick making them a wonderful addition to salads.  

Germination: 7 to 10 days

Harvest: about 105 days. Enjoy their fruit as early as June and lasting into October. This tomato variety is indeterminate and will fruit all summer long.

First in Field

Seeds from this heirloom variety produce medium red fruits. It is an excellent tomato plant for outdoor growing. First In Field is known for its distinctive potato-like leaves. It has a tall and bushy growth habit. Fruit is sweet and juicy. This variety is determinate, meaning that it only has one harvest. Once it sets fruit, the plant is done for the season.

Germinates in about 7 to 10 days.

Harvest: as early as 45 days and can set fruit anytime between June through October, depending upon when it is sown.

Beefsteak

Beefsteak tomatoes are large, juicy, and a bit meaty. They have firm flesh though, which makes them ideal for slicing. They come in a variety of colours and some even grow up to a size of 3 pounds! They can be enjoyed on sandwiches, burgers, or simply grilled. They tend to have a milder flavour that elevates whatever dish they are added to.

Black Krim

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This lovely dark heirloom tomato boasts a sweet flavour as decadently rich as its brownish-red colour and hails from Russia. This beefsteak tomato is very large (about 500 grams) and is ideal for chefs and gourmet food enthusiasts. This plant needs significant staking and support.

Germination occurs in about 7 &#; 14 days.

Harvest: matures in about 80 days and has an indeterminate growth style.

Gigantomo

A meal in and of itself, the Gigantomo tomato variety is sure to impress. Gigantomo may be the largest tomato available, weighing in at about 700g to 1kg, This tomato has a fabulous taste as well and has meaty firm flesh. It can be grown outside or within a greenhouse. Be sure to space plants appropriately. For best results, only grow 4 to 6 tomatoes on each plant and prune off excess fruits. Be sure to provide an adequate support structure as well.

Germination: 8 to 10 days.

Harvest this indeterminate type July through October, or about 80 days from sowing.

Shirley

This beefsteak tomato is a first-generation (F1) hybrid variety that provides reliably robust yields. It features a cordon style of growth with medium-sized red fruit (70 &#; 90 grams). Shirley tomato seeds can be sown both outside and within a greenhouse.

Shirley is resistant to late blight.

Germination: about 7 &#; 10 days.

Harvest: about 105 days from planting and grows all summer long, fruiting as early as July and lasting into October, or up until frost.

Blight Resistant Tomatoes

Late blight can be a major issue here in the UK. These varieties have been developed to help reduce infection or the severity thereof.

Crimson Crush

This tomato was developed right here in the UK and is celebrated as the most blight resistant tomato of its kind. It is a wonderfully delicious large cordon cultivar that provides rounded tomatoes with a bright red colour. The plant is super easy to grow, produces well, and is ideal for small home gardens. It is sure to provide basketfuls of juicy sweet tomatoes (180 to 200 grams) for you and your family to enjoy!

Germination: usually within 7 days, but possibly up to 14.

Harvest: in 100 to 120 days after planting, August through October.

Honey Moon

These delightfully bright pink cordon tomatoes are not only blight resistant but super delicious too. Fruits are fleshy, juicy, and have the perfect balance of sweetness. Each fruit can reach 250 to 300 grams. This tomato plant provides an abundant harvest also. These tomatoes are great for cooking, salads, or slicing fresh. Honey Moon seeds are best sown in a greenhouse.

This variety is especially resistant to late blight.

Germination: about 7 &#; 14 days

Harvest: in about 73 days, intermediate type, August through October.

Buffalosun

This cordon beefsteak tomato is an heirloom seed variety that also comes with late blight resistance. It features a yellow-orangish-red exterior with a subtle variegation of these colours. The sliced interior is just as striking in colour and offers a sweet flavour. Plus, it&#;s big. The Buffalosun tomato is known to grow up to 700 grams (about 24 oz) and resists cracking. Its flesh is firm and void of the mushiness that accompanies some other tomatoes of the same size. It makes a great addition to sandwiches, cheese boards, burgers, or grilled. Buffalosun can be grown outside.

Germination: 7 to 10 days

Harvest: about 105 to 112 days from planting. It is an indeterminate type of tomato that will continue to fruit all season. Enjoy its fruit July through October.

Conclusion

No matter what tomato seeds you decide to grow this year, just having a variety of tomato plants growing in your garden is sure to bring a lot of joy to you and the whole family!

Sometimes, like us, tomatoes need a little help from their friends. There are many plants that grow exceptionally well with tomatoes. In the gardening world, we call this companion planting. For instance, herbs like basil or flowers like marigolds and calendula have special properties that optimise tomato production. If you would like to learn more about companion planting and which plants enable tomatoes to thrive, click here.

3 Ways to Choose the Best Tomato Varieties

Looking for the best tomato variety in a particular category? As noted above, we designed a range of filters and built them into our tomato category listings to help make it easier for you to sort through the varieties to find the ones that match your unique methods, needs, and preferences. If you're just starting out and would like some direction, though, these are a few of our own favorites for flavor, sweetness, meatiness, disease resistance, and for making that simplest validation of summer-garden success, the tomato sandwich. Although the answers aren't quick ones, we hope you'll enjoy our recommendations.

1 &#; Which tomatoes have the best flavor?

A lot goes into the makeup of tomato flavor &#; in fact, one reason it's so difficult to breed better-tasting new varieties of tomatoes is because of the biochemical and genetic complexity of flavor. It is greater than the sum of its parts: a whole matrix of sugars and acids, plus over 400 different volatile compounds (at last count), all working in concert with more subjective qualities like "mouth feel" and visual appearance.

To add layers to that complexity, flavor can vary considerably by where the plant was grown, as well as how and when &#; factors that influence atmospheric, light, and mineral exposure. And while it's beyond the scope of this article to fully discuss the tomato's organoleptic qualities (the taste and aroma properties of a food), it can be said that flavor will vary between plants in the same variety and even between fruits from the same plant. No wonder that flavor, like taste, is largely subjective.

Yet complexity never stopped anyone from playing favorites. For growers who love them, it may be one of the most beautiful things about tomatoes. For a trio of varieties celebrated for their rich, balanced flavor, try:

  • 'Cherokee Purple': Organic heirloom with famously rich flavor and texture.
  • 'Celebrity': Semideterminate long popular for its flavor and adaptability.
  • 'Big Beef': Beefsteak with a nice combination of size, taste, and earliness.

2 &#; What is the sweetest tomato to grow?

To many people's palates, the more sugary the tomato, the higher its likeability. It's not just Westeners who are sugar-crazy, though. In many traditional Chinese night markets, you can sit down to a plate piled high with fresh, thinly sliced tomatoes, heaped higher with sugar. Candy-coated cherry-tomato kebabs are a more recent, portable favorite in China, the nation where the most tomatoes are grown (by far, according to data from the Food & Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database).

Along with containing good amounts of the principal sugars fructose and glucose, tomatoes share another feature in common with many fruiting crops: an increased percentage of sugar will come at the price of smaller fruit. What that means is that most of the sweetest tomatoes are small tomatoes. Luckily, most people don't mind minimally smaller fruits, provided they taste good. The inverse relationship between sugar content and size is a truism in nature that holds well for some of our most popular sweet tomato varieties:

  • 'Supersweet 100': One of our top-selling red cherry varieties, with a name that says it all.
  • 'Sun Gold': Delectably sweet and fruity orange cherry that we introduced to the U.S. in .
  • 'Citrine': Johnny's-bred tangerine cherry with exceptionally sweet flavor. Our classical breeding team worked for years to develop this solution to Sungold's unfortunate tendency to crack.

    To learn more, read the story behind the development of 3 New Johnny's-Bred Varieties, written by Rob Johnston, our founder and an award-winning classical plant breeder.

3 &#; Which are the meatiest tomatoes?

Schematic cross-section through a tomato fruit, showing 5 locules and the various surrounding tissues.

(Adapted from Thomas Rost, UC Davis, .)

This is a good question, because nowadays it seems more the exception than the norm to see a tomato variety not being described as "meaty." Understandably, this can make it difficult for growers to figure out which ones are the meatiest. Measuring meatiness is not an exact science, either. Let's take a closer look at what it is that makes up a tomato's texture (hint&#; it's not meat).

Before we look at the anatomy of a tomato, it helps to define some terms. Botanically, the tomato is a fruit. Most tomato varieties produce fruits with either 4 or 5 seed cavities, known as locules, as shown in the schematic, or 2 locules, as with most cherry tomatoes.

The type of fruit that tomatoes produce is known as a classic berry, and its fleshiness &#; or meatiness &#; results from the tissue within known as the pericarp and the placental tissue surrounding the locules.

As the tomato berry ripens, it undergoes all kinds of metabolic changes influenced by genetics and environment both. Enzymes begin to digest the cell walls, softening the pulp, and the placental tissue around the ovules starts to become gelatinous. Once the fruit reaches maturity, it dehisces, or breaks away from its pedicel, or stem.

When you go to slice and bite into the tomato fruit, the texture you experience at that very moment is a reflection not only of the genetics particular to the variety and the individual plant's growing environment. It also relates to how much time has elapsed between the fruit's peak maturity &#; if it makes it that far &#; and consumption &#; plus everything that may have happened to it in the mean time.

To taste-testers, that textural quality is what is known as mouth feel. As in all things tomato, there is no shortage of opinions about what constitutes the best mouth feel, so establishing data points for "best meatiness" can be a tough call. But in more good news for tomato-tasters, inroads are being made in an obscure field known as acoustic tribology. In their bid to quantify mouth feel, researchers assert, strangely enough, that the way in which we perceive a food's texture relates to how the food sounds on our tongues. Or, as more aptly headlined by Smithsonian Magazine, To Measure the Taste of Food, Listen to Your Taste Buds.

Since that's more than mouthful on mouth feel, let's cut to where we would pin the ribbons for meatiest.

  • Heirloom / Open-Pollinated (OP): 'Blue Beech' is one of our best and newest meaty types. Not only is 'Blue Beech' meaty, with so much that's good to say about it, we devoted an article to this heirloom variety and two of its open-pollinated amicas. Learn more about their history, qualities, and adaptability to short seasons and low-input environments, in Johnny's Open-Pollinated Revival Project: 3 Resurrected Heirloom & Heritage Tomato Varieties.
  • Greenhouse: The prize here for meatiest goes to our French Heritage hylooms. Bred in Provence, these varieties marry the best of the Old World with the New, providing heirloom-like eating in a disease-resistant package. Similar to many a hothouse flower, these varieties can take a little bit of extra care &#; growing best with 14 hours of daylight &#; but we think they're worth it. For the nonpareil, try the French heritage oxheart 'Cauralina' &#; it delivers meatiness in spades.

4 &#; Which are the best disease-resistant tomatoes?

As the disease pressures you will face depend upon where you grow, so, too, will the answer to this question. From the macro down to the micro level, indoors, outdoors, and in-between, environment is one of the three prongs in the host-disease-environment triangle.

To help acquaint tomato growers with the most common disease-related issues, we compiled an overview of Common Tomato Pests, Diseases & Physiological Disorders. It also touches on a few of the developmental mishaps that can affect a tomato's appearance, texture, and flavor, which relate to environmental factors.

We encourage you to get familiar with the pest and disease pressures common or most likely to occur in your locale, and if they're of concern to you, to use the disease resistance filters on our tomato category pages and check the disease resistance codes for each tomato variety you consider. Choose with care and grow with care to reduce disease pressure in your crop.

With that in mind, here are a few tomato varieties that offer broad disease resistance packages.

Disease-Resistant Indeterminates

Disease-Resistant Determinates

5 &#; What is the best sandwich tomato?

For the Sandwich Sine Qua Non of tomatoes, we look once more to the beefsteaks. Here is a triad that truly makes the sandwich cut.

The company is the world’s best indeterminate round tomato seeds supplier. We are your one-stop shop for all needs. Our staff are highly-specialized and will help you find the product you need.

  • Easy-to-grow AAS Winner: 'Big Beef.' This indeterminate variety set a trend for classical plant breeders back in , when it won an All-America Selections award for combining heirloom flavor with the vigor, disease resistance, and yield of modern hybrids. The plants start producing fruit early and keep on going, right through to a killing frost. Plus, it's easy-to-grow, even for beginners.
  • Heirloom: 'Brandywine.' The flavor of this heirloom slicer is so good it suits the minimalist tomato-sandwich purist as well as the condimented burger-lover. We are grateful to Ben T. Quisenberry (&#;) for saving the seed for our exceptional Quisenberry strain of 'Brandywine.'
  • Greenhouse / Hyloom: 'GinFiz' is one of the new French beauties, a flat-round beefsteak with sweetly-acid golden flesh, richly marbled with red. It's loaded, with an exceptional disease resistance package for greenhouse and tunnel performance, early fruit set and maturity, and shoulders with crack resistance. Perfect for an open-faced crostini.

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