Best Tomatoes: Objective Reviews

[PlanterTomato]

HI All:

If you raise chickens, you probably also have a vegetable garden.


I believe we gardeners need an objective source of information on tomato varieties that reflects our actual experience and opinions - not those of the seed companies or the growers who both have a vested interest in selling a particular type of tomato.

To that end, I've developed a survey and will be collecting gardener's tomato reviews on an ongoing basis. I believe this will result in a comprehensive and objective picture of the best, and worst, tomato varieties on the market.

My plan is to publish the ratings to this web site on an ongoing basis as a resource for everyone. Here's the link:

Tomato Reviews


You can rate up to 25 varieties at a time. If you want to rate more, just take the survey a second or more times. You can take the survey as many times as you'd like.

The success of this project depends on getting enough gardeners to contribute reviews to make the sample sizes large enough to be representative. I would ask that you send this link to any gardener friends and ask them to contribute their opinions as well. You can cut and paste the below link into e-mail or just direct them to my blog site where a link is also posted.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TomatoReview

Thanks in advance for helping.

 

[PineappleMama]

I won't mess up your results by giving my (admittedly ignorant) opinion, but I will say supposedly San Marzano are the best EVER for pasta sauce... unfortunately I couldn't get the boogers to grow. Not a large shock given my brownish-black thumb, but a bit of a downer since I REALLY wanted to know what the fuss was about.

 

[speckledhen]

I love fresh tomato sandwiches. My fav is Parks Whopper for flavor and size.

 

[booker81]

I put in my little one, for some "Amish Paste Tomatoes" purchased as started plants from E & R Seeds in OH.

Oh, Em, Gee. They were fabulous. They were like Romas, but 2-3 times bigger, bigger than some standard tomatoes, and almost ALL meat, very minimal seed/water in them. I loved them, fabulous for canning.

Didn't get around to preordering the starts this year, so I just bought some plain jane Roma's. They are doing well, just I miss the size of the Amish behemoths.

ETA: I put a link to the survey and a brief intro on my Facebook as well, as I have other friends who garden

 

[Sonoran Silkies]

I bought an organic heirloom tomato plant at Trader Joes early last spring. Most tastless tomatoes I have ever had. I was almost glad when it died (mostly due to lack of watering

) Unfortunately, I do not recall the variety, if it even listed it.

 

[Love my Critters!]

I can't rate very many, but in my desert climate, the best tasting tomatoe that grows well here is the Celebrity. They are also very pretty.

 

[Sonoran Silkies]

So, If we just want to read the reviews, how do we access that information?

I will say that there are a lot of different types of flavours that tomatoes can have, and a type of flavour that one person enjoys may well not be a type that another does. I personally do not like the heavy flavour of roma-type tomatoes. I want something lighter, more delicate. So if I were reviewing any variety with that heavier type of taste, it would not get nearly as good a rating as a variety that is lighter (assuming that the lighter one is flavourful).

 

[rodriguezpoultry]

Beefmasters...mmmmMMMM.

 

[Catstar68]

I just had some fabulous Mr. Stripey tomatoes ready from the garden. These were about a pound each and soooo good. My Juliets make great sauce but they are about the size of cherry tomatoes so prep takes forever.

 

[Steve_of_sandspoultry]

We planted some Kentucky Beefsteak tomatoes this year. They are like a regular beefsteak but yellow. The flavor is great. We got the seeds from Shumways.

Steve