Selection Of Varieties And Hybrids Of Tomatoes For This Season

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

What varieties of tomatoes did we choose this season

Mazarin tomato variety

Every day we listen to the weather forecast with the hope that the autumn slush will finally end and winter will come. He will come and outline at least some snow drifts. But so far our expectations have not come true. According to the calendar, it is already winter, and outside the windows there is autumn weather.

Time flies quickly, and soon we will all go to the seed shops and choose from the huge assortment of seeds on the shelves, those varieties and hybrids of vegetables and flowers that we consider the best for our site.

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Tomato variety Newton

In this article I want to talk about how we were solving this problem in 2008 using the example of our family's favorite vegetable, tomato. My husband and I, Boris Petrovich, believe that the choice of quality seeds is one of the main components of success in the garden business. When growing tomatoes, we naturally formed a division of labor with my husband.

I am in the business of buying seeds and growing seedlings. In the greenhouse, where young tomato plants move afterwards, I have not worked for several years. The reason why I was “freed” from the greenhouse was the case when, at the request of my husband, I removed my stepchildren on tomatoes. I tried, perhaps even too much, because on many plants I did not leave a replacement stepson. Due to this error, we did not get a large crop of tomatoes from these bushes.

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Tomato variety Pink honey

Since then, Boris Petrovich does not trust me with this work, and he has been caring for tomatoes himself all season. Only sometimes I tie plants and their branches to stakes and loosen the soil in the greenhouse: many years of experience have shown my husband that caring for plants in a greenhouse is hard work, and it is harmful to health, especially for women.

So we are going to buy tomato seeds. I realized that a certain system and analysis are needed here, taking into account the experience of past years. To do this, I started a special notebook in which I enter all the necessary information: the year of purchase, the name of the variety or hybrid of tomatoes, it is obligatory - the name of the manufacturer, the number of the batch of seeds, where and when I bought it, the number of seeds, the day of their sowing, germination and what result from this tomato was received at the end of the season. This is the only way to identify low-quality seed material and choose not only the manufacturer, but also the best varieties and hybrids for your site.

Our greenhouse is very large, for tomatoes we usually allocate a central bed with dimensions of 5x1 m, a side bed - 6x1 m, and also on the east or west side of the greenhouse half of the ridge for determinant varieties. We approach the cultivation of tomatoes not only as a future food product, but also as a decorative element of the greenhouse. We select varieties and plants so that the bushes are beautiful and convey the whole flavor of the tomatoes, including the variety of tomato colors.

The first and most important requirement for the central garden bed is that all bushes on it must be indeterminate, i.e. tall, since in this place the height of our greenhouse is maximum - about three meters. This ridge is central, and therefore the composition of tomato plants on it should look impressive. I note that the taste of tomatoes is also of decisive importance when choosing varieties.

In winter, after going through all the purchased seeds, I persuaded my husband to thoroughly change the varieties grown earlier for new ones. He agreed without much enthusiasm. As a result, I planted 20 new varieties and hybrids for seedlings that we have not grown until now. Each variety and hybrid was sown in a separate bowl. Only the Shuntuk Giant variety did not grow here. The rest 19 ascended normally.

Some of them showed 90% germination, others - 50%. In 2008, we used the seeds of the firms "Russian Garden", "Siberian Garden", Biotekhnika, "Aelita", "Hardwick", "Elita". We have noticed that some seeds do not germinate well in the year of purchase, and much better the next year. Our relative, also a gardener with a fairly solid experience, says that if the seeds are of high quality, then they should sprout together, with "bristles", but we have not seen this "bristle" in recent years on seedlings. There are few seeds in bags now, they are expensive, and the quality often leaves much to be desired.

And now about how we grew our tomatoes last season. More than once we re-read the annotations on the seed bags to find the right plants for the central ridge. And yet it was not without mistakes. Two plants, planted on a ridge where everything should be impressive, let us down.

Tomato variety Uncle Stepa, marked on the package as a novelty, and also as "Siberian banana" turned out to be a completely different variety. The husband suspected deception even in the initial period of plant development and was very upset. Both bushes of this variety developed as determinant, they turned out to be about 60 cm in height, we did not find banana-shaped fruits on them. They turned out to be abundantly strewn with small round fruits, the taste of which also left much to be desired.

Their only advantage is that both bushes bore early and amicably. Boris Petrovich immediately after that removed both bushes, and since we rarely plant tomatoes, a gap has formed on the ridge - a large free space between the plants.

To fill it, my husband had to breed lashes of neighboring bushes of the Moulin Rouge F1 and Scarlet Mustang F1 hybrids. Gradually this gap was closed. This was our grossest mistake in choosing plants for the central ridge. But, as it turned out, the "wrong" purchases of seeds did not end there. The Moulin Rouge F1 hybrid turned out to be tall, which was what we needed, but for some reason in its brushes there were only 4-6 fruits weighing 150-200 g, although the annotation to the variety on the bag promised us 10-12 lined fruits with wonderful taste …

Indeed, one cannot complain about the taste. For a long time we have not eaten such tomatoes with a pronounced tomato taste and smell. Despite fewer tomatoes in the clusters, the overall yield of the Moulin Rouge F1 bushes was high.

The Scarlet Mustang F1 hybrid also did not disappoint with its height, the plants were higher than 2 m, but the fruits did not turn out again. The abstract promised fruits long, cigar-shaped, 20-25 cm long, red-crimson. On our bush, the fruits formed 10 cm long, oblong and for some reason yellow. The fruit did not set well, developed slowly, but was fleshy and tasty. The yield per bush was about 4 kg.

Last season we have grown four Dutch hybrids Newton F1, Charleston F1, Ildigo F1, Silhouette F1. What can you say about them? All of them are tall, the brushes are well knitted, their fruits are red, aligned. We reaped a high yield from all the bushes of these hybrids, the fruits were well and long stored and gradually ripened.

But we were not satisfied with the fact that the tomatoes were of a very hard consistency, and the taste did not suit us either. In terms of taste, we gave them a top three. This is where our mistakes in choosing tomato varieties ended.

We were very pleased with the Pink Honey variety last season. We have been growing it for the second year already. This tomato is determinate, undersized, but it grows well with us, we let it bush. The result is voluminous bushes loaded with large fruits, some of which reached a weight of 1 kilogram! The tomatoes are very beautiful, pink, heart-shaped, and most importantly - very tasty.

The Mazarin tomato variety was also a match for him. Its bushes are indeterminate, they are more than two meters high. The fruits are also large - from 300 to 800 grams, and their taste is excellent.

Read part 2. Tomato varieties and hybrids of this season - good luck and misses