All The Tomatoes We Are Growing In This Year's Garden!

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my Gardener Channel it's seed starting season and today we're starting tomatoes so but because I lost a bet over on Facebook I gotta pay up so uh here you go soak it up you guys if you want to join these bets um head over to Facebook and uh I said if if the post got over 500 likes that I would do this so well it did so it's seed starting season it's seed starting season it's seed starting season I wonder what will start okay great now that that's over let's go all right so from the selection of 20 different varieties we have picked here for uh this year's Garden you'll notice kind of a theme we're going for a couple things with this year's Garden in years past we've gone for like biodiversity which was a ton of fun we kind of just grew anything that we thought was pretty and cool just because we wanted to see what was out there and that was great it was fun but we didn't always find that we enjoyed them as much we enjoyed them but we didn't make them a substantial part of our diet right so it might be like a green tomato and we just found that we didn't really eat green tomatoes as much as I thought we would we made a couple salsa Verdes and stuff but it wasn't like we're gonna eat this every day so we're really focusing this year on Foods we're eating a lot more frequently things like paste for making pizza sauce spaghetti sauce different pastes right and then we also have beef steak large Hefty tomatoes because we found that we'll add them to Burgers sandwiches or even just slice them up and use them like you would a normal tomato so really versatile tomatoes and then we also have tomato shows that we've never grown before that we just kind of want to try we've eaten them we've really enjoyed them but we've never actually grown them in our garden and so we will always allocate roughly about 10 percent of our garden to trialing a new variety that we've never grown before and so combining those three things will make up the different 20 varieties that we've chosen all right so the first Friday we just planted here was Paul Robinson I absolutely love this variety because Paul Robeson is a known as kind of a chocolate tomato it's a bi-colored tomato but it's um it's bi-colored in that it's got purple shoulders and a red belly absolutely love this variety it's more of a meaty beef steak and this is a variety that's been around for a long time but it just kind of recently gained popularity in the about the past decade or so and this variety is actually named after the uh the American musician and football player Paul Robison so a really cool backstory to it if you have time go check it out but this is kind of a smoky flavor as well so it adds wonderful flavor to things like Salsas and other dishes but I absolutely love this one and I've grown it many many years the second one is the pink Brandywine now this is a staple in our garden we always add this one to our garden reason being it is very very meaty we really enjoy a good Hefty beef steak tomato the other thing with the the brandywines is that I find that they are a little more resilient when it comes to beefsteak varieties they're a little more resilient to things like blights and other soil-borne diseases powdery mildew and whatnot that that just tend to plague other beefsteak varieties now the other thing that makes them really nice is they don't crack as much these are fairly crack resistant you'll find that in the summertime when they're very dry and you go through period of drought and then water and drought in the water tomatoes will crack and these tend to be a little more crack resistant which I think is awesome but pink flavor really sweet really low acid absolutely love them the next variety is Dr white cheese yellow now this is absolutely I think probably one of the most Grassroots loved tomatoes that exists in like the heirloom gardening Community Dr weichi's has been around for I don't even know quite how long probably since like the 60s maybe even earlier than that but this Variety in my opinion is one of the most low acid sweet yellow tomatoes that exist um it starts out as kind of like a creamy color as it ripens it'll blush to just this deep beautiful yellow almost yellowish orange is absolutely incredible and um and it's just super low acid like I said but it's also a beef steak so they'll commonly get you can get Dr white cheese to be a pound or a pound Plus for tomatoes the other thing I was going to mention too with all these tomatoes that we're growing is they are all indeterminate that means that the height of the tomato will be will basically be determined by the length of the growing season it's never going to stop the amount of fruit that it puts out will be determined by the length of the growing season it's never going to stop we can single stem them up a basically up a steak like we do normally and that's going to continue them basically allow them to continue growing and producing all season long so I love indeterminants for that reason and because uh you know we're growing in kind of our well our garden is a raised bed setting we're going to be growing them high intensity and closely together and if we had one that was determinate which it stops producing at a certain point it stops growing stops producing and it's done the other ones keep growing the problem is is they end up getting shaded out by the taller bigger tomatoes so I like to grow all in determinants and then for containers that's where I'll throw my determinate tomatoes because they're going to be kind of set aside from the rest of the plants next one is opalka the thing I love about opalka tomatoes is that they're kind of regarded as one of the sweetest and the largest paste tomatoes of any of the paste tomato varieties so if you're making like a pizza sauce or something like that sometimes you'll have to add sugar to sweeten it not the case with opalka they're very very sweet now I will say that they are not very disease resistant this is something that is pretty widely known about them so if you're in a place that is more prone to disease you may have to do some things like spraying you may have to do some do some pruning of the lower leaves there's a lot of we've done lots of videos on how to prevent tomato diseases but there's a lot of things you can do to just keep them disease free but I will say if you're looking for a very you know hearty variety that's not going to be diseased opalka may not be for you the next one we're growing is Rio Grande now I absolutely love the Rio Grande we did not grow this for about the past three or four gardening Seasons because it was kind of just being replaced by their varieties but after we went to a farmer's market and picked up some we were in New York and we were trying these Tomatoes there was a guy selling all these heirloom tomatoes we tried the Rio Grande again I said why haven't we been adding these to our garden and so we loved them so much we decided to add them to this year's Garden absolutely incredible it's a really great it's almost like a slicer tomato crossed with a paste tomato it's very very meaty medium sized it's like four to seven ounces I would say upwards of eight on the big end but it's more of like a medium-sized slicer tomato but it's so Hefty and it does not have as much of that gel on the inside of the Tomato the other thing that we really like about it is we say this a lot but I love cultural Foods I'm a very big foodie and Cindy and I we we enjoy um you enjoy trying different foods from different cultures and the thing with Latin culture is Latin culture uh uses a lot of roasted tomatoes and what we found through many many different food experiences is that the Tomato of choice believe it or not for many Latin cultures is the Rio Grande tomato and that's just because it because there's not as much gel and because the skin is thinner it roasts up really really well so if you're making like a salsa or you're roasting tomatoes for you know any dish whatsoever this variety is definitely a go-to so really excited about that it also handles hot weather better so hot humid weather thrives in so love that the next variety here is pineapple now you guys know we grow this every single year this is a must-have this is um not only one of my favorite varieties it's Cindy's number one favorite variety it's also Aiden's favorite variety so Aiden Aiden works with us he's a good friend of ours and he will sometimes help us in the garden and he basically says just just plant me some pineapple tomatoes and I'll be happy so for uh for Cindy and Aiden as well as myself we're throwing some pineapple tomatoes in they're a bi-colored tomato bicolored beef steak they regularly will get two pounds they're huge tomatoes and they're really low acid so because they're a low acid tomato they're extremely sweet very kind of creamy Flash not a lot of gel or water in them very versatile just absolutely love them they can't can't speak highly enough about the pineapple tomato next is the hillbilly tomato now it very similarly to the pineapple is a bi-colored beef steak a yellow red bi-colored beef steak it gets really large as well about two pounds and so the only reason why we're adding this one to our garden is because I find that in certain circumstances if the pineapple does not perform well sometimes the conditions are right for the hillbilly and that's because the pineapple I find can be a little bit finicky with humid weather and in Michigan if you've experienced Michigan Summers they get really muggy and really humid and so depending on the season I don't know because I don't have a crystal ball I don't know how this is how the season is going to go and so I find that this is a really comparable counterpart to the pineapple tomato so we're really just going to grow these basically next to each other because if one does well the other one will kind of lack and when the other one lacks the other one will do well and so I just typically put both of these in my garden because they're basically interchangeable there's not a whole lot of other special things about the hillbilly tomato just because you could basically throw them together and blindfold someone taste them and they taste almost the same and then if you you know if you were to take both of them and say which one is pineapple and which one is Hillbilly I really honestly couldn't tell you by eyesight there's slight nuanced differences with the way the plant grows obviously and that is really the trait that I'm trying to get out of it the flavor and the shape and the color and everything is the same but the disease resistance and the hardiness to humidity is what sets them apart if you have ever grown heirloom tomatoes you probably have heard of the granny cantrells Granny Cantrell's is just a shortened term for the the full name which is Granny Cantrell's German pink tomato and basically the story behind this is that there was a old lady her name was granny Cantrell and she was a German immigrant that moved over to the US from Germany around World War II and she brought with her a bunch of tomatoes now in the community that they were growing them in uh they you know they would basically during the Great Depression they would sell these varieties at market and so many people started uh consuming them in the community and liking them that a bunch of the farmers decided to start saving seeds and grow them and to pay homage to her because they were the tomatoes that she brought over they named it Granny Cantrell's German pink and so uh it's a really really cool story just you know a very unique kind of wartime variety of tomato absolutely love it and it's just one that you know I enjoy it just because it's a beef steak it's Hefty it's meaty but it also is just a wholesome backstory which I think is really cool all right now the next one we grow just because of its novelty Factor this is the Marion tomato now it does taste great and it does meet our criteria of being a very productive kind of slicer slash beef steak tomato it's beautiful all around I mean it's basically a blemish free tomato but the real reason why we grow it is is because it's called the Marion tomato my last name being Marion and so this variety was grown for Marion South Carolina and it was named after uh General Marion and so the whole you know that whole area was named after a civil I believe Civil War General and um and so the last name Marion just had significance down there but I don't have any relation that I'm aware of to this person but my name is the same and so I always grow it to tell people that it's my tomato but that's really honestly the only reason it's just a good conversation starter when people come into the garden it's just you know good way to break the ice so anytime I bring someone that's never been in the garden before that doesn't know who I am and just bring them over just to socialize I always show them this tomato because it's going to start some questions no matter what all right the next variety I absolutely love for the back story it's absolutely incredible it's one of the coolest backstories I think that really exists in heirloom tomatoes nowadays and that is the trophy tomato so very similarly to the Marion tomato it's got great flavor great productivity it's just a amazing tomato all around but the back story is why you guys are gonna love this so in 1870 this variety was submitted to the world fair and it was seen as kind of uh there was a competition to find the next perfect round tomato they were just at the time trying to find a productive variety that they could bring to Market as a market-friendly heirloom tomato and at the time Tomatoes were all craggly misshapen they were just you know they were all random as heirloom tomatoes should be but there was a gentleman that brought this tomato to the world fair and that won the Blue Ribbon quickly word spread that this gentleman had created the perfect tomato it was the sweetest most productive most reliable producing tomato and it quickly became the trophy tomato and that's how I got its name but not just that but back in the day tomato packs just the seeds alone were selling for five dollars a pack which is the equivalent of eighty dollars a pack today and that's because the demand for them were so high that the guy rather than uh sell them you know at a normal price of seeds which was about a penny or two pennies per pack at the time sold them for up to five dollars a pack because he was basically selling this as the world's best tomato and there's only so many of the seeds available so cool backstory interesting you know interesting history on this variety but really really love it all right the next Friday we're going is known as Rosa to burn the Rosa to burn tomato is a Swiss variety of tomato but it's actually become really culturally important in France and the way that the name came about was Rosa to burn basically means so uh Bernay means to toss in the air and so Rose is basically like tossed the rose into the air right it's like just throwing flowers essentially and so uh it really is pretty accurate because it's super productive and the plant when it becomes fully loaded with tomatoes looks like basically a rose bush and it is so productive that I had to add this one it's really beautiful perfectly round super low acid pink tomatoes and can't go wrong with it either way it's just a phenomenal producer then we have the watermelon beef steak this again super big super Hefty beef steak it's more on the pink scale which is really cool a standard beef steak is nice and red this has more of a pinkish Hue to it so it's lower acid I tend to like a lower acid tomato as you guys have probably seen I also do like a really good classic tomato punch to the face but there's a time and a place for it so when it comes to just like a nice mellow eating tomato you cannot go wrong with a watermelon beef steak then we have here the quadro tomato we actually grew this about three years ago fell in love with it the seeds actually became not available for quite a while because of the fact there were several crop failures there's been a disease going around in the South that is actually coming up from Mexico and it's killing a lot of the Tomato varieties and Quadro tomato though it can be grown up here in the states where our farmer was located at the time they were growing it down in New Mexico and the crop failure happened and wiped out their entire crop and so they had to basically let their land rest for two years before they could grow it again and now that they have it we're carrying it again and I'm really excited about it because it's just a beautiful little Plum tomato super unique and the the thing I love about it is just the characteristics the the Leafs on the the fruit are really long the little the little tomato leaves that attach to the stem are like this long it's like it's the most wild haired dude tomato you could possibly grow really really cool beautiful paste tomato um but it's just a unique and really great tasting one all right next Friday is the Valencia tomato this one I'm growing just because it's Geneva's favorite tomato really low acid if you've ever tried a sun sugar or Sun Ray tomato it's like wow sweet super sweet super creamy indeterminate it just grows these beautiful eight to ten ounce Hefty Tomatoes bright brilliant golden Orange it's like it's awesome either way but definitely have to grow it for the little one because she loves that variety and then we also have the ananis Noir this is known as black pineapple it's a green and purple bi-colored tomato whoa cool super amazing absolutely love this one and again it it's a really cool kind of acidic pop with kind of a fruity undertone almost like pineapple it's very cool I can see how it gets the name black pineapple because that's you know that's what it translates to but it has a very fruity undertone with a tomato acidic pop on the top it's really great very productive and very disease resistant I find then we have gilberti gilberti is like we grow it almost every single year because it's just one of the most productive paste tomatoes I find now is it the most flavorful I don't think so I really I would rather have opalka flavor but the product the productivity of the gilberti is like through the roof so when you're looking at a really productive paste tomato I always go for this one it's like right on par with Roma tomatoes only that this is indeterminate so when Aroma stops halfway through the season this is going to keep producing so absolutely love it for that reason then we have the Vintage wine this is actually a it's a bi-colored tomato but it's known as a zebra striped tomato it was one of the first zebra striped tomatoes on the market believe it or not and how it originated was it was crossed with uh there was a a tomato that had blotches on it it was a gold metal tomato it was kind of blotchy yellow and blotchy red you can still find that tomato to this day but it was crossed with just a standard Red Tomato that had some some green striking through it and the Striking rather than stay green translated to Yellow from the gold medal and it's incredible because this tomato is like brilliantly yellow and red perfect zebra striped patterns on it absolutely Sensational and it's really really cool but it's also very sweet and has a great history to it all right and the very final variety that you know the garden could not be complete without is the giant crimson tomato I'm really excited to be adding this one to our garden this year now in the past we've not really grown it outside because it's just how in demand these seeds were and a lot of the threats we had from people around that wanted to steal this tomato because of the significance of the backstory and for those of you that are thinking what the heck is this guy talking about go check out the whole video series we've done on this on this tomato this is a tomato that about six years ago we brought back from Extinction we bought a shadow box off of etsy from an antique dealer and inside this antique shadow box was sealed four different seed packets but inside those seed packets with the original glue and everything was seeds inside and we knew it was a long shot to try to germinate them but I said if anyone's gonna try It's gotta be me so we paid up for this thing we paid a ton of money for this shadow box I think it was like 90 or even close to a hundred dollars to have this shadow box and I just had to have it because the seeds inside were so important in one of those varieties was a now well now not extinct but then was extinct tomato variety called the giant crimson and this was a variety that was basically bred out of existence because there was more important varieties that farmers were growing and so rather than grow this one they grew other varieties and so this one was basically shoved to the Wayside never to be grown again and we saw the we saw basically the importance of this Variety in just biodiversity and having it around and so we tried several hundred seeds with no avail and finally we had two that sprouted of the two that sprouted one survived we were able to get cuttings from that single variety grow it out and cultivate it and now we have it commercially available we're having it grown on a USDA certified organic farm that's growing them for us and every single year now we're going to have a steady supply of the giant crimson tomato and I'm really honored about this because this is the whole mission and the whole Legacy that I want at my Gardener to to carry with with it is the importance of biodiversity there will always be some flashier cool object that's going to distract gardeners and I get distracted sometimes too but you want to come back to the heirlooms because the stories are amazing their their genetics are important and if you lose them who knows what the repercussions are of that so we have to add this one to our garden it's just kind of a staple but the flavor is great as well the story is phenomenal and the fact that this is one that we're continually just growing out um I want to have this one just as kind of a centerpiece of our garden so we added this one to our garden as well so those are all the Tomato varieties we are adding to our 2023 Garden I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you'll try some of them or even all of them but I do want you guys to go check out all the different varieties we have to offer and go find ones that you think are going to be cool in your garden let me know in the comments box below the varieties that you're choosing and as always this is a loop from my garden Channel reminding you to grow bigger take care guys bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 49,395

Keywords: MIgardener, vegetable gardening, organic gardening

Id: SgWABIDlRBw

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 31 2023