Part One: Heirlooms For Everyone! A Guide to Choosing Tomato Seeds

By Kira Hamman

As much as we all love seed catalogs, they can be a touch overwhelming at times.

Seventy-four varieties of heirloom tomatoes? Really? How can anyone ever choose?

Here’s help, in the form of an annotated guide to six fantastic varieties. Grow one, grow them all, ignore this list completely – the choice is up to you. But place your seed order quick, because it’s time to get started!

1. Brandywine: The Platonic ideal of tomato. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michelle Fabio

Here at Tomato Casual, we’ve talked before about when you should start sowing your tomato seeds, and now the time is finally here (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, of course).

As a reminder, the most important date you need to know is the expected date of the last frost in your area.

Your plants should be ready to be planted outside about two to three weeks after that, which means that you’ll want to start your seeds Read the rest of this entry »

By Michelle Fabio

Tomatomania, the world’s largest tomato seedling sale, kicked off the weekend of March 29-30 in Encinitas, California.

What started out as a once-a-year event 18 years ago has now stretched into a 6-week affair with stops in Encino, Sonoma, Beverly Hills, Arcadia, and even an East Coast trip to Litchfield, Connecticut.

This seedling-buying event has consistently offered tomato connoisseurs Read the rest of this entry »

By Michelle Fabio

In an emotional Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, Doug Oster has informed us that the world of tomato gardening has lost one of its best.

Oster had been privileged to know Fred Limbaugh, a gardener who specialized in the “Potato Top” tomato that had been grown in his family for generations, so-named because of its “potato-like foliage.”

Over their eight-year friendship, Oster and Limbaugh walked through Limbaugh’s backyard and talked about his deep love of gardening, the outdoors, and his German shepherds as well as about how life was treating him now that he had reached his eighth decade.

Several years ago, Oster decided to start giving away Potato Top tomato seeds so that Read the rest of this entry »

By Michelle Fabio

Being the avid tomato gardener you are, you probably know exactly which tomatoes will be sprouting up in your garden this year.

But in case you’re still undecided, Mother Earth News has compiled a list of “America’s Favorite Tomatoes” based on the opinions of Seed Savers Exchange members as well as other tomato experts around the country.

The results of the survey talk about the differences between hybrid and open-pollinated varieties and group favorite tomatoes into categories for early growth, tomatoes for making sauce and paste and sandwiches, and for varieties called “great green and zebras” and “oranges, strawberries, and lemons.”

Go to Read the rest of this entry »

By Amelia Tucker

When planting hybrid tomatoes, are you safe from escape plants for the next season? No!

Hybrid tomatoes are a combination of varieties making a third plant with the desired qualities of the first two plants in it.

When you save the seeds from a hybrid tomato, you have no idea what variety will grow the following year.
Read the rest of this entry »