My top 5 paste tomatoes I grow for Preserving

each year as i begin my garden one of my first and primary goals is to be able to grow enough tomatoes to preserve all of the tomato products that our family will use for the entire year products like salsa spaghetti sauce tomato sauce tomato paste diced tomatoes you name it that's my goal and to do that i grow mostly paste tomatoes and what i wanted to share with you today are five paste tomatoes that i've grown in my garden this year the pros and cons of each and how you can use these in your garden if you're seeking to grow enough tomatoes to preserve to last your family as well first things first if you're new to gardening you may wonder what is a paste tomato and do you have to have paste tomatoes to preserve well the answer to the second question is no you can preserve any tomato that you grow so don't feel like you have to grow a paste tomato but the benefit to a paste tomato is that it actually has thicker walls and more flesh less juice so think of a thick hearty tomato sauce that's usually made with a paste tomato because of the amount of content in the walls the thickness of the tomato itself that's why for me a paste tomato can go a lot further when i'm preserving than a slicing tomato that is just a lot of juice don't get me wrong there's a place for slicing tomatoes but when it comes to preserving the paste is what i want to focus on so let's talk about my number one favorite paste tomato to grow for preserving number one for me is the san marzano now we've had a really tough tomato year this year in arkansas like much of the country we've been dealing with a lot of heat and tomatoes in general have trouble setting fruit when the daytime temperatures exceed 90-95 we've been there for about seven weeks and the nighttime temperatures exceed about 75 they're going to have a hard time producing fruit but i have to tell you that the san marzano's this year have produced all season long not as heavily as in other years but it still did not completely shut down production like other tomatoes did this is about the size of a san marzano although they can get bigger when growing conditions are better just like other paste tomatoes they are full of thick walls and what i like too about this size is that when i'm preserving tomato sauce i use the kitchenaid fruit and vegetable strainer attachment to my kitchenaid mixer i just run this through the strainer and it gives me sauce that i simmer down and one thing too the little things matter when i pick this off the stem stays on the plant so i don't have to worry about usually picking all of that off so all i have to do is half it put it through the strainer and it just makes it good to go san marzano's also even though they're indeterminate tomatoes which means they'll keep growing and growing and they'll keep producing through the season they do give a heavy fruit set early on in the season so if you don't grow as many san marzanos as i do you still have a chance to have enough bulk to be able to make the canning or preserving worth it the one negative i've seen with the san marzano's this year is that because we have not gotten much rain and i've had trouble keeping my irrigation up to speed they have had trouble with blossom end rot more than some of my other varieties but i really do believe if i would have been more on top of watering that wouldn't have been the case because on the times that i was on top of watering the blossom and rot got better but that's something to keep in mind just to keep these watered these are growing in straw bales and they produce really really well for a paste tomato number two on my list is actually a brand new paste tomato the first time i've ever grown it and that is the pink fang this is an heirloom tomato that i got the seeds from baker creek heirloom seeds and i got it because you can see that the shape is very long and it goes through my kitchenaid strainer attachment very easily and i thought let's try this and i have been so impressed okay so for the fruit itself what i love about it is it is extremely meaty hardly any juice and so this makes for very thick product a very thick sauce but that's just the beginning what i've loved about the pink fang tomato this year and i only grew a couple of them because it was a brand new one in my garden and i grew them in my straw bales was that this produced in the heat all summer long and i hardly had any incidents of blossom in rot at all even though it got watered at the same rate as the san marzanos in this same setup with my straw bales and it just kept producing kept producing this is one that i'm saving seeds for for next year because the only drawback is it produces very few seeds and so that would probably explain why i didn't get many seeds in the seed packet but i'm going to be putting this in my garden in the future because this one really stood out to me this year and if you're looking for a workhorse paste tomato that will do well in the heat then pink bang is one i'd recommend you try now i will say that i was really worried at the beginning of the season when it was kind of cool in the spring i wasn't sure that the plants were going to make it they didn't like the cool weather so if you do try to plant pink fang i would make sure that you're well past your average last frost date because it didn't like the cold and it struggled then but in the heat this thing was a star number three is the amish paste the amish paste is a paste tomato that i have grown for many many years and it does have some drawbacks but the reason that i grow it each year is because when it has good conditions when it can grow to be the best it can be it's a pretty large and meaty tomato now i love the amish paste for recipes that i don't put through my kitchenaid strainer because it's so much bigger so anything that i have to blanch to be able to peel or throw it in the freezer and then defrost it to peel or my favorite i love throwing these on the grill to be able to get the skin off and then you have this beautiful roasted tomato taste for salsas and things like that this is just so much easier because it's such a big tomato to be able to do that with and like i said when grown in ideal conditions it can produce a lot of pounds per plant the drawback with the amish paste especially if you live in an area where summers get hot or you have a freak hot summer like we've had this year is that the amish paste does not like the heat in fact when we were getting up into the upper 90s and hundreds it did not produce at all maybe one or two fruit for like eight plants so it doesn't like the heat the flowers will completely fry off but to get around that you may notice that the tomatoes aren't the only thing growing here i've got the amish paste tomatoes here in the tomato cages but i've also got black eyed peas that are growing on either side and i did that strategically because i know amish paste doesn't like the heat and because those fruits can get pretty big if they have too much contact with sun they can get sun scald and so i actually grew these black-eyed peas to be able to help shade the plant now it's too early to tell i'm recording this at the very end of july but my hope is that because amish paste like san marzano and pink fang are indeterminate tomatoes i'm hoping that they will eventually start producing once the temperatures come down a little bit and hopefully the shade just helped the plant itself to be able to live well through the heat that's my goal we'll see another thing about amish paste that can be tricky is that if you have springs or even summers that are really rainy i found that it tends to have a harder time with your fungal diseases like early blight and septoria leaf spot that hasn't been as much of an issue this year because we haven't had a lot of rain but early in the season i have to probably stay on top of trimming those lower leaves that are turning yellow due to those blight conditions i have to stay on top of that more on amish paste than i do on the other tomatoes so those are a couple of the drawbacks with amish paste that's why i don't grow my entire garden with amish paste but i love having several plants because if we do get one of those good seasons where it doesn't get too hot too fast i can get a really great bumper crop of these nice large meaty paste tomatoes so we've talked about three different indeterminate tomatoes these are ones that are going to grow all season long unless it's stopped by disease or some other factors now let's look at two determinate tomatoes that i am depending on with my tomato preserving the next tomato i depend on for my preserving is the roma tomato this is one i've grown from my very first season and it's one that i depend on year after year the benefit of the roma tomato is that because it is a determinate tomato it will produce all of its fruit usually in the course of three to four weeks which means that that's an ideal way to be able to do a lot of canning all at once it also because it's an indeterminate tomato and the fruits don't get all that large it comes to fruiting earlier which means in my hot climate we're able to get typically a really good harvest before the heat sets in and starts to shut down production of the other tomato plants although i have to say these tomatoes these romas have done really well in the heat in general they love lots of compost and the good thing is you don't have to worry about pruning them in fact pruning them unless you're taking off some disease is actually going to hurt your harvest so as long as you get them staked in a way that works out for the supporting of the flowers the fruit the stems all of that you really don't have to do anything else to them they're very low maintenance so for me the romas are the tomato that i'm always going to be putting in my garden because i know i can depend on it year after year but i have to say that as much as i love the roma tomatoes i have found a new paste tomato that is a determinate tomato this year that might actually be rivaling how much i love romas and here's why here we have the end of the season of a new favorite paste tomato of mine and that is the paisano the paisano like the roma is a determinate tomato so it grows to a set height which these were about maybe two feet so they were actually kind of small and then they produce all of their fruit at once similar to the aroma why i was really impressed with the paisano this year is because number one it started fruiting before any of my other tomatoes even before aromas and so it was able to give me a good harvest before the heat set in and number two the fruits were two to three times as large as the roma tomatoes so we've got a really good solid meaty paste tomato in a short amount of time now this is my second year growing paisano last year i put them in the area of my garden which nothing really produced very well we had a late freeze we just had a lot of things that were kind of working against it and i'm so glad that i didn't give up on it last year because this year they have done so well i'm going to continue to test them and maybe grow them even more and maybe fewer of the aromas just to see if they continue to do well again they fruit really quickly they're large they're easy to maintain i only had to do a couple of rows of this florida weave and they didn't overtake the area and so for me paisano is going to be a new one i'm going to be incorporating into my garden next year to see if it continues to perform as well as it did this year i hope you've enjoyed this look into five paced tomatoes i grew this year and why i love them what paste tomatoes do you grow are there any others that you think that i should try in my garden next year i'm always looking for new ones put them in the comments i'd love to hear from you and if you're interested in growing enough tomatoes to be able to last your family in preservation check out my mini course harvest to kitchen tomatoes where i bring you inside of my kitchen and i show you how i harvest and preserve the tomatoes that last our family all year thank you so much for watching and like and subscribe to see more garden content like this in the future [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Beginner's Garden - Journey with Jill

Views: 5,268

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Id: HuLGw_o0jTI

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2022